Patrick Markee’s launch at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo. (Pardon my view—I was in the back with a rolling suitcase, fresh from the airport.)

Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age is out from Melville House, and has already been excerpted in The Nation, and Patrick was featured on “Fresh Air”!

This may be a difficult subject, but Markee has been working as an advocate for more than twenty years, and his glimpse both into the families sleeping on the floor in government buildings, and meetings with the mayors of New York, are moving and well-supported by statistics. “This empathetic and common-sense account underscores that homelessness is an affordability issue, not a moral failing,” says Publishers Weekly.

There are more than 3 million people experiencing homelessness, and 3.5 experiencing hidden homelessness (living in places other than shelters); it affects families, especially the 35,000 children unhoused in New York. “At the root, it’s about structural economic changes, right-wing economic policies, and the systemic racism that has shaped mass homelessness as we’re experiencing it now,” Markee writes.

“We know what works to solve this problem. There was period after WWII and before the 1970s when we weren’t experiencing mass homelessness,” Patrick Markee said on Democracy Now. “The budget of New York City is greater than thirty-five state budgets. We have the resources in New York to make a serious reduction in our homeless population, even as we see deep cuts from the federal government.” He suggests that Zohran Mamdani “target resources toward real affordable housing. Preserve and protect the right to shelter [especially in the cold]. We need to change the way we deal with rents,” and he noted that Mamdani has mentioned an interest in freezing rents. “We’re spending a billion a year on homeless shelters, and we should be spending that money on affordable housing instead.”