Fresh Air - Homelessness In The New Gilded Age

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

In New York City, 100,000 people sleep in shelters every night. Patrick Markee has spent decades fighting for them with the Coalition for the Homeless. He’s written a new book that gives an on-the-ground view of what he’s learned. It’s called ‘Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age.’ He asks, what if homelessness isn't a personal failing, but the result of policy choices? Also, Maureen Corrigan shares her picks for the 10 best books of the year. You can see her list here. Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, Patrick Marquis, has spent more. than two decades advocating for the homeless, going to places that most people avoid, tunnels, parks, abandoned buildings, and makeshift encampments where unhoused people live. In his new book, Placeless, Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, he argues the surge in people living on the streets didn't happen overnight. It has been shaped through policy choices, economic shifts, and a profound erosion of our social fabric. Centering on New York City to tell the larger story, Marquis takes us from the abandoned rail tunnels under Riverside Park where

residents carved out entire communities in the 90s to the streets of the Lower East Side, shelter armories, psychiatric wards, and family intake centers. He describes the housing crisis as a game of musical chairs and argues that New York City doesn't just tell us the story of homelessness, but about America itself, its values, and its inequities. Patrick Marquisites. Patrick Marquis is the former deputy executive director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City and a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He's authored several research studies on homelessness and housing policy and has written for the nation and the New York Times book review.

Patrick Marquis, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much for having me on the program. Yes, I think it's great for us to actually start with the title of this. book, because you didn't call it homelessness in the gilded age. You specifically use this term that many of us have never heard before, placeless. Can you say more about that word? Yes, because I think when I started to really think deeply about the modern homelessness crisis, what we're really looking at is a crisis of displacement. I think so many of us have come to think of homelessness as kind of a special form of urban poverty.

kind of almost like subspecies of urban poverty. Too often it gets discussed really as a social work problem or as a problem of individual dysfunction when in fact it has systemic causes. And the problem of homelessness as bad as it is, kind of the scale of the problem being as huge as it is, is really only the tip of the iceberg of a larger wave of displacement that we've seen in American society in this period that I call the New Guilded Age that were like sort of extends from the 1980s to now, this kind of 50-year period where what we've seen is economic dislocation, neighborhood dislocation via gentrification and other forms of kind of

sort of home displacement. We've seen mass migration. And we've seen, frankly, homelessness as being, I think, in many ways, the kind of the worst symptom of this age, of this age of displacement. And you use the term homeless throughout the book. You make a point to say, you're sticking with that, even though through time we've used different terms to describe people who are living out on the street. Is there a particular reason to use other terms that aren't derogatory, like homeless or unhoused? What is your take on on the word usage? Well, the word homeless itself actually dates back to around the first gilded age of the late 19th century, early 20th century. But obviously, there have been some unfortunately very

derogatory terms used to describe homeless people over the years, you know, hobos, bums, you know, vagrants. These are, you know, some of these terms have come in and out of fashion. Many of them have always been, you know, offensive and derogatory. The term homelessness, you know, I think describes kind of the state of the crisis that we're talking about. I mean, you know, whether we use the term homeless or unhoused, we're really talking about people who lack a permanent residence. And it can be everything from people sleeping out on the streets to people sleeping in shelters to often what we see and what I describe in the book is kind of a hidden homeless population, people living in doubled up or severely overcrowded housing. And that's increasingly

a bigger and bigger share of the problem of homelessness that we're seeing across the country. This idea that we are in the new Gilded Age, what is the most striking parallel you see between that time period and this one? Well, you know, the first Gilded Age was marked by more than anything by just radical inequality. We just had incredible concentrations of sort of wealth and then economic and political power kind of among the sort of the plutocrats, the sort of oligarchs, the sort of oligarchs. the sort of oligarchy of that age, the kind of industrial elite of what was then a sort of urbanizing and industrializing United States and, you know, a sort of urban elite of industrialists and capitalists who had sort of, you know, controlled city governments, controlled the economy. And then this incredible population of poor people. Many of them

immigrants, and I think there's a parallel there to the current age that we're in now of just waves of immigration, people crowding into cities. And then really also, I think, radical changes in the structure of the economy. At that time, it was industrialization. What we've seen over the last several decades right now is deindustrialization and kind of a move towards a more precarious services-based economy. And that sort of mixture of structural economic change, you know, changes in our city, demographic, and frankly, you know, the reaction to that in the terms of systemic racism

and xenophobia, all of those things are kind of a recipe for this age that we're seeing now. And then on top of that, and I think you spoke about this earlier, we're seeing political and policy choices made the rise of sort of neoliberal and right-wing economic policies over the last several decades that have contributed to and shaped and, frankly, sustained the crisis of homelessness that we're experiencing now. Let's slow down and go back a bit because I find it really fascinating the way you chart that time from the Gilded Age to then a period where, actually, we didn't experience the level of

homelessness that we see now. And then towards the 70s, we start to see that rise again. But 1874, that is really at the heart of the Gilded Age. You write about how thousands of unemployed workers gathered in Tompkins Square Park in New York City. Police charged them on horseback in clubs. The mayor celebrated it. You write that the elites blame the poor for their poverty. They called them lazy and immoral.

They cut off aid. It really does sound very similar to what we see today. But take me to that time period after the Gilded Age. There was a bit of improvement that we saw. We saw less folks out on the street. There was a decline in homelessness. What was happening during that time period before we get to the 1970s? Well, I think there are really two key historical moments there that we're talking about.

Beginning in the early part of the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s and then even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were extraordinary housing movements alongside sort of labor and community movements that pushed for a direct. not only the crisis of inequality and poverty and sort of issues around labor, but also housing problems. In New York City, on the Lower East Side, we saw extraordinary movements that addressed the incredibly unhealthy conditions in tenement housing. The Lower East Side at that time was one of the most densely populated places on the planet. There were enormous problems with just incredibly hazardous and unsafe housing.

There were movements led by Yacobrice and other immigrants who actually came and said, you know, we need to be improving the health conditions in this housing. So they improved those housing conditions in terms of health and safety. Then they started to fight increases in rents, which were being imposed by landlords in the 1920s and then in the Great Depression as well. So that led to the policies of rent regulation and rent control in New York City, which at one point actually went national. So we actually saw a control on the affordability of rents, which I think is going to resonate, you know, very much with what's going on right now. And then a sort of third important movement was the creation of public housing. It wasn't perfect. You know, I'm not trying to sort of romanticize what was going on, but we actually had a system in place where through public housing and other federal housing programs like the housing voucher programs, which were created in the early 1970s, ironically under the Nix administration.

So this was a sort of a bipartisan project for many decades. We have federal housing programs, which were aiming to ensure that the poorest Americans could actually, you know, have decent safe housing. And that, you know, people, working class people, low-income folks, were going to be sort of buffeted from, you know, the worst excesses of rent increases and the worst, you know, the worst threats of eviction. Okay, so the 70s arrive. Everything accelerates. New York loses a significant amount of jobs. I think you write about 600,000. The population drops significantly. Whole blocks are abandoned. You described this as the birth of modern mass homelessness. What was happening economically that made this moment the breaking point? Well, there was, you know, there was an economic crisis in the early 1970s, which triggered in New York City an extraordinary loss of employment and of population, but particularly of manufacturing employment. And, you know, New York City had actually already begun to lose some manufacturing jobs from the 1950s and accelerating through the 60s, but there was just a sharp drop off of it in the 1970s. And New York City, which had been in many ways whose economy had been fairly balanced in many ways. I mean, you had manufacturing.

You had, you know, the sort of more traditional industries of, you know, sort of finance and banking, which we're familiar with from the sort of Wall Street. You had service sector jobs. We really lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs in those years and just an enormous number of jobs in total. So that created economic shifts, which then put real pressure. on the city government, there was a fiscal crisis in the 1970s. New York City came close to going bankrupt, frankly, and under pressure from creditor banks and from conservative politicians and with zero help coming from Washington, D.C., there were enormous cutbacks in government programs which had been helping working class in low-income New Yorkers. And we saw just huge cuts in

health care programs and education programs, but also, in public assistance, income assistance programs, and in housing programs. New York City in that period also lost an enormous amount of housing. So there was just, you know, incredible abandonment of housing as the population dropped so significantly. And that contributed to a housing affordability crisis, which would only grow worse in the 1980s. One of the things you really point out is the approach. The approach really changes and shifts based on party lines. I mean, there's nuance there, but by and large, when you look at the big picture, that seems to be the case.

You point out how, if we fast forward to 99, when Rudy Giuliani was then mayor, there started to be sort of this idea of criminalizing homelessness. He ordered police to arrest people sleeping on the streets. Bloomberg continued those kinds of sweeps. And then last year, as you note in the book, the Supreme Court ruled cities can criminalize sleeping outdoors. How prevalent is that particular approach when we think about the ways that New York City and then other cities throughout the country began to try to deal with this growing problem? Well, sadly, in the early days of the modern mass homelessness crisis, you know, this is in the sort of late 1970s, early 1980s, the city government of New York did choose to have one of its primary responses be the police. And we saw this, you know, under the administration of Ed Koch, who was the mayor through most of the 80s, we saw it a little bit continuing under David Dinkins, his successor in the late 80s, early 90s.

But it was really the Giuliani administration that sort of like intensified and perfected this sort of like wholesale criminalization of street homelessness. You know, Giuliani had sort of run for mayor on this campaign of cleaning, up New York City, and it became very clear early on that among the kind of things that he thought needed to be cleaned up were homeless people. So there were just mass arrests of homeless people in parks and city streets and transportation terminals throughout the subway system. Giuliani's first police commissioner sort of had actually been the head of the unit of the police department that police is the subway system, and he had talked about flushing homeless people out of the subway system and talked to sort of proud

about this. Giuliani himself used some just really inflammatory and offensive language to describe homeless people sleeping out on the streets. And there was just a real period of kind of demonization and then wholesale criminalization of the problem of homelessness, which of course was incredibly counterproductive. You know, I worked very closely with a group of homeless people sleeping in the Madison Square Park neighborhood, which is an area of kind of downtown Manhattan, which, you know, in the 19 80s and 90s had fallen a little bit on hard times. I mean, it was still sort of a, you know, middle class type neighborhood, but, you know, was beginning to gentrify. And Giuliani made that sort of one of the epicenters of his homelessness crackdown, his police crack down on homelessness. You know, I worked with these, you know, these poor folks who, you know, were just trying to find a place to sleep at night. You know, Madison Square Park was considered kind of one of the less dangerous kind of places to sleep outdoors if you didn't have a place to stay. And the police would just come in and just, you know, take people's belongings, throw them into dump trucks, just throw them away, you know, arrest people, threaten them with the rest.

The neighborhood ended up gentrifying and then hyper-gentrifying in a couple of decades after that. I want to delve into some of the ways that cities like New York have tried to solve or combat or lessen the homelessness population. Let's stay with the 90s for a minute because this was an important. important moment in which some of the modern day approaches we have come to know were implemented. There was this idea championed by Andrew Cuomo, among others, that many homeless people weren't housing ready, that they needed to go through treatment, rehabilitation, training programs before they could be trusted with a home. What was the thinking behind that? And from your view, what's wrong with it? Well, this was an approach in a philosophy, actually, that

you know, was unfortunately incredibly prevalent and also really had its roots going back to the earliest days of homelessness in New York in the gilded age of the late 19th century. I described this as an attempt to kind of pathologize the problem of homelessness, to sort of describe homeless people as kind of broken people as not ready for housing or sort of dysfunctional. And actually, some of the people that, you know, kind of tried to describe the homeless people of that period as somehow, you know, really dysfunctional, as really disordered were actually some of the architects of the eugenics movement in the United States as well. So there's just a very deep and unsettling kind of history. We started to see that reemerge in the 1990s. Coming out of the 1980s when, you know, mass homelessness was kind of a new problem in the United States. and in New York. And, you know, people had kind of were sort of shocked, especially in the early 1980s

when you started to see homelessness appear throughout the country. Going into the 1990s, there was what I call a backlash era. There was a sort of movement of compassion fatigue, unfortunately. And, you know, some, you know, unfortunately some politicians like Rudy Giuliani and others kind of took advantage of that period to kind of demonize and once again pathologize homeless people. Andrew Cuomo and others of that period tried to kind of create a model of homelessness services, which really relied on that image of homeless people as being sort of broken and unready and needed to be trained, needed to go through therapeutic programs. And then Cuomo, who, you know, at the time was elevated by Bill Clinton to be the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, you know, really codified that into a system called the continuum of care, which really just sort of mapped out a model where, you know, homeless people had to first go through therapeutic programs or training programs before they would ever be able to get housing if there was any, you know, housing assistance that was available to them. Because keep in mind, remember that this was at a time when there were cutbacks in the federal housing budget.

So this treatment first approach was really kind of like developed in the 1990s and, you know, just proved to be, frankly, a mistake proved to be absolutely counterproductive because it really just cut against everything that homeless people themselves had been telling us that advocates working on the ground had seen and everything that we started to learn as the models of supportive housing and housing first were really starting to be implemented. We started to see that you don't need to do treatment first. you actually need to do housing first. If this approach doesn't work, why does the idea keep coming back? You've been fighting this argument for 30 years. Exactly. And it's just the most frustrating thing in the world. I mean, we're really starting to see it come back with a vengeance now.

You know, Donald Trump and the sort of MAGA movement have really been pushing this idea of treatment first again and waging some just incredible attacks on the housing first approach. Once again, it's this idea of trying to sort of demonize and pathologize homeless people to try and claim that the problem is a problem of personal dysfunction or, you know, homeless people are either lazy or they're dysfunctional or they're pathological, that the problem is you've got to fix those people first and that's how you solve the problem of homelessness instead of looking at it as a systemic problem. And what we really learned through the housing first approach, you know, is that, you know, if your goal, your end goal is to help somebody who's, say, living with mental illness to kind of get stability, to get treatment for their mental illness, or somebody who's recovering from addiction, to be able to, you know, recover from drugs or alcohol, that you need that person to be in a home. It's so much easier to engage in that kind of treatment, to take medication, to get into recovery programs. so much easier to do that when you have a home, to instead say, well, we want that person to do that while they're sleeping rough on the streets or while they're sleeping in a shelter, you know, crowded with hundreds of other people, is just counterproductive. It just doesn't make sense.

My guest today is Patrick Marquis, author of Placeless, Homelessness in the New Gilded Age. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for this podcast comes from Dignity Memorial. For many families, remembering loved ones means honoring the details that made them unique. Dignity Memorial is dedicated to professionalism and compassion in every detail of a life celebration. Find a provider near you at DignityMemorial.com. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew.

Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. I want to talk a little bit more about housing first and how it worked in practical terms, but I want to go back to something that you mentioned around the eugenics movement because I think it's important to talk about race because we can't really separate race from this crisis. Today, black and Latino New Yorkers make up nearly 90s. 90% of the homeless population? Yes, it's just stunning.

I mean, they make up 90% of the homeless population. Black New Yorkers make up nearly 60% of the homeless population. Latinos make up around 30%. You know, when you look at their, in comparison, you know, black New Yorkers now are, I think, less than a quarter of New York City's total population. Latinos are about a quarter of the population. It's just stunning, the sort of disproportionate impact that homelessness has had on black and Latino communities across the United States, but in New York City in particular. I did an analysis when I was at Coalition for the Homeless, looking at some data we were able to get from the municipal government. And I found remarkably, in the most stunning statistic, I found, was that one out of every 17 black children in New York City had spent some time in a homeless shelter over the course of a year.

I mean, one out of every 17. I mean, for black and Latino kids in New York City and on other large cities, and particularly for low-income kids, you know, homelessness is like a common experience. It's not even like a bizarre thing. It's not even something that's just kind of out of the imagination. It's absolutely like a part of almost an expected experience for a significant percentage of our black and Latino kids. And for you, Patrick, I just wonder how you untangle. everything with this because if if you know if administrations are really pushing that homelessness is a moral failing it's a moral defect there's a reason why you're out on the

streets that you have done something wrong in your life and then the majority you layer on that race and the majority of those people are black and brown you can't really separate some of the systemic issues that go along with that but then there are so many challenges on whether those systemic issues even exist Well, I think there's just no mistake that these problems result from some clear policy choices and acts of sort of government and politics that were made throughout this period. The really signature moment comes in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. Reagan instituted the most draconian cutbacks in federal housing programs that have been seen in U.S. history, and a nearly 80 percent cut in the budget of the budget of the state. authority of the Department of Housing and Urban Development occurred under the eight years

of the Reagan administration. Just a devastating cutback that have really never been, we've never sort of recovered from them ever since. In many ways, the federal government sort of got out of the business of significantly providing, creating affordable housing and providing affordable housing assistance beginning in the 80s and then continuing to now. I mean, right now, only one out of five eligible low-income households. in the United States is receiving federal housing assistance.

That means four out of five that need that housing assistance and qualify for it are actually not getting federal housing aid. The number of homeless kids of color was really staggering, but overall, there are thousands of children you note who sleep in New York City shelters every night. It's about one in eight public school students experiencing homelessness last year. Has the system assistance programs the way shelters operate caught up with that reality?

I mean, the short answer is no, because the problem has gotten so much worse. I mean, right now in New York City, we have more than 100,000 people sleeping each night in our shelter system. Two-thirds of that is families. Of that 100,000 people in shelter each night, 35,000 of them are children. And half of those kids are really young kids, like five years of age. on that because sometimes when we throw out numbers, they can just almost become abstract. I mean, 35,000, that is significant. That's astounding. No, it's stunning. I mean, it's stunning to think that we've got 35,000 kids sleeping in shelters each night. And then, as I think you mentioned, the Federal Department of Education uses a broader definition of homelessness, which doesn't include just homeless kids sleeping in shelter, but also includes homeless kids who. who are living doubled up, right?

So who are, you know, sleeping maybe on the sofa, on the living room floor of, you know, of a relative or a friend. So that broader definition then accounts for 150,000 homeless students in our public school system. So that's, again, one of every eight kids in the New York City public school system is homeless. There's a, you know, there's an elementary school in my neighborhood in East Village where half of the kids in that school, are homeless. And there are other schools around the city that, you know, that are in sort of the same boat where you've just got an extraordinary number of homeless kids. At the same time, we also know that homelessness just creates incredible negative impacts on kids. A study after study has shown that homeless kids, even compared to other low-income kids, have much higher rates of physical health problems, particularly respiratory health problems, much higher rates of emotional and

mental health problems. They do much more poorly in school. They miss school at a much higher rate. And I used to see this firsthand in working with, you know, kids who are in the shelter system, you know, who would sometimes, particularly at the point when they were, their families who were applying for shelter and trying to kind of enter the shelter system would get bounced sometimes night to night from one shelter to another or from one sort of grim intake office, you know, to another or to a single night placement, you know, in a hotel or in a shelter. And then back to the intake office the next day, kids would miss just incredible amounts of school, their parents would miss work, you know, all of these families, adults and the kids, you know,

would suffer, you know, all sorts of health problems, you know, contagious diseases, all of this stuff. And it just, you know, again, there's an extraordinary cost to homelessness for children. So having such an, you know, just an enormous number of kids who are homeless each night is really setting those kids back in an incredible way. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with homelessness advocate Patrick Marquis about his new book, Placeless, Homelessness in the New Gilded Age. It's a sweeping look at how inequality, policy, and displacement have shaped modern homelessness. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air.

In the book, you take us to this train tunnel that ran for nearly three miles under Manhattan's west side. beneath Riverside Park. Dozens of homeless people live there, some for over a decade. There have been documentaries about it. They built plywood shacks and slept on mattresses and propped on milk crates-made communities in that space. When they were finally able to move out in the mid-90s, you were part of this effort to help them go directly into apartments.

So no shelter stay, no rehab program, first, at the time that was considered radical. What did that experience teach you? Well, I learned so many things from working with those folks sleeping in the Riverside Park tunnel. I mean, first of all, one of the things I learned is that these were people who were just incredible survivors, you know, who could really live under the most kind of like grim and difficult conditions. I mean, the conditions in that tunnel, and I started working there in the sort of late autumn through the winter, the last winter before the tunnel was, was completely shut off by Amtrak, which was going to sort of restart train service through the

tunnel. You know, it was cold, obviously filthy, you know, it was dangerous. There were rats in the tunnel, all of these things. And yet these people had managed to persist and survive and endure in some just really, really difficult conditions. And so what I really learned, and I write this in the book, is I learned that these are people who could make a home anywhere. And we were able to move some of these folks directly into apartments in the community, almost none of them ever experienced homelessness again after that. I mean, it's just, it was an incredible, incredible experience to see these folks be able to move from such grim conditions into their own homes. That's pretty remarkable. I mean, I know there's so many, as you've laid out, I mean, the issue of

actual places, affordable places, though, is a real issue in this housing first idea, this approach. I mean, those who are against this idea believe that the Housing First experiment is a failed experiment. What is the success rate? Like, that sounds like a very successful endeavor that you all were able to do. But, like, is that replicable? Have you seen that on scale across the country where Housing First has really worked? Absolutely. I mean, if anything, what we did was to sort of one, you know, one very small example of an incredibly successful approach that's worked all across the

country. And when I'm saying that this is an approach that, you know, has worked everywhere, I really mean everywhere. It's worked in Salt Lake City. It's worked in Houston, Texas. It's worked in, you know, New York City. And it has been incredibly successful in reducing homelessness, street homelessness in many of those cities, because this is a model that really, really works for some of our most vulnerable folks, our unsheltered homeless population, folks sleeping on the streets or in parks or in subways. This folks, this approach gets them out of, you know, out of street homelessness into housing and keeps them in housing. The other thing is that we've seen now multiple studies of this approach over decades

that have shown that the sort of incidence of homelessness among this group. So after they've been providing with housing first, very few, if any, end up going back into homelessness. Their physical and mental health improves dramatically, especially when you compare all of these sorts of outcomes with the treatment first approach, you see how successful Housing First is. Housing First leads to better health outcomes, leads to better housing stability, leads to lower rates of homelessness. All of that is true when you compare it to the Treatment First approach. And then to make matters, you know, it's almost like, you know, the exclamation point is that it turns out that it's actually cheaper. So one of the remarkable things that we learned about supportive housing and the Housing First approach is that if you analyze the

total cost sort of to taxpayers of providing this subsidized housing apartment with support services. And then you compare it to the cost of leaving the person homeless. It's actually cheaper to provide supportive housing and a housing first apartment. Talk to me about the people that you met, that you've helped out on the street. I'm thinking back to the folks beneath Riverside Park that you were able to find housing for. none of them went back to homelessness. Can you share a story of one of them? Well, actually, I'll just tell the story of the memorial service for one of them. There was a guy Jose that had lived in the tunnel. I got to know him only briefly because he had just started

to move out of the tunnel when I was beginning my work there. And then he, you know, he had been somebody who had worked in a factory in Manhattan and then the factory closed down. I think actually, they moved a few of their jobs over to New Jersey. So he, you know, lost his work, just, you know, ended up on hard times, ended up on the streets, ended up, found his way to the tunnel and was in the tunnel for a long period of time. And then he was able to obtain one of these federal housing vouchers that allowed him to rent an apartment in the Bronx. And then, you know, he lived in that apartment until he passed away in the late 1990s. And I remember going to the memorial service with him, and there were some other

folks in the tunnel who were there. There was a remarkable woman named Margaret Morton, who was a photographer who did a book of photos of the people living in the tunnel. She had gotten to know the folks there really well. And the photos are just really stunning, just something black and white photos, but you actually really see the kind of the incredible light in the tunnel. I mean, it's kind of a strange thing to say, but the tunnel was actually a very beautiful place in many ways. Really? Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, the train tunnel was actually sort of a human made creation. It wasn't like excavated under the park. It was actually the park was built over the rail line by Robert Moses. And so there were these ventilation shafts and sometimes you

would just see shafts of light coming through in the middle of the tunnel. And it was just kind of in some ways a beautiful place, although a grim place and obviously not a place where anybody should be living. So when I was at that memorial service, you know, I got to talking to some of these folks. And, you know, they remembered their time, you know, in the tunnel is something that they had survived. And obviously, you know, it was a place that they had lived. So in some ways, they missed it because they had sort of been displaced from it. They were forced to leave it when Amtrak ended up closing down the tunnel. But they were just also so much sort of healthy. You know, when I was at that memorial service, you know, I got to talking to some of these folks. And, you know,

they, I think they, you know, they remembered their time, you know, in the tunnel is something that they had survived and obviously, you know, it was a place that they had lived. So in some ways, they missed it because they had sort of been displaced from it. They were forced to leave it when Amtrak ended up closing down the tunnel. But they were just also so much sort of healthier and more settled, you know, being in homes. I mean, it was just so clear. I mean, they just looked, you know, some of them had looked so kind of gaunt and unhealthy when they were living in the tunnel for obvious reasons because it was just such a difficult place to live. But, you know, by the time, you know, by the time they've been, you know, living in their

own homes for such a, for so many years afterwards, I mean, they were just in such a sort of healthier and sort of calmer place. You know, I'm thinking about with all of your experience when you walk down the street and you see a homeless person and unhoused person, what are you seeing that maybe the rest of us might be missing? I mean, I think what I try and do, And I think really everybody can do this is try and just kind of see that person for who they are at that moment, you know, and try and just kind of, you know, it's a little bit of a cliche statement, but just sort of meet them where they're at and appreciate, you know, that what they're going through in that moment is, you know, it's just incredibly difficult. And then try and have some compassion and empathy. I mean, again, it's just sometimes these encounters are momentary encounters, right? You might just go up and talk to them for a moment, just kind of see how they're doing.

You know, maybe they need some money to get some food. You know, maybe just offer them a few dollars to, you don't kind of help them out in that moment. But try and do it in a way that's, you know, just almost, you know, again, just be a human being about it. I mean, I think that's what I try and do as much as possible. I mean, there's no, I don't think there's any, like, one answer or any sort of magic answer. but just kind of try and actually be there on a human-to-human level with people. I mean, one of the things that I learned, you know, over more than 20 years of working with homeless people is they're just people. Like, people like the rest of us, you know, like they're everybody's, you know, they're just going through some terrible times.

And they've kind of been dropped out of the bottom of systems that are broken and are not working. And, you know, they've been kind of left there. But they're just people like the rest of us. and it's not up to us to be like judging them. You know, we should be just offering compassion and helping them out. Patrick Marquis, thank you so much for this book and thank you for talking with us. Oh, thank you, Tonya. It's been such a pleasure to be here. Patrick Marquis' new book is Placeless, Homelessness in the New Gilded Age.

Coming up, our book critic, Marine Corrigan, shares her top 10 books of the year. This is Fresh Air. Do you need a book for holiday gift giving? While Maureen Corrigan can recommend at least 10, here's her annual Best Books list. My picks for this year's best books tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Karen Russell's long-awaited second novel, The Antidote, is my pick for novel of the year. An epic story of immigration, land grabs, and aspiration. The antidote is set in Nebraska and framed by two actual weather catastrophes,

the Black Sunday dust storm on April 14, 1935, in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust, and a month later, the Republican River flood. The central character here is a so-called prairie witch, who heals her customers by holding whatever they can't stand to know. Russell herself is America's own prairie witch of a writer, exhuming memories out of our national unconscious and inviting us through her spell-binding writing to see our history in full.

Patrick Ryan's Buckeye is a more straightforward historical novel, set as its title indicates in Ohio. Stretching from pre-World War II to the close of the 20th century, the story focuses on two married couples. When we first meet her, Margaret Salt, a red-headed looker, walks into the hardware store where Cal Jenkins works and demands that he turn on the radio. There's commotion in the streets, and because Margaret's husband is in the Navy, she wants to know what's happening. It turns out Germany has surrendered. Overwhelmed, Margaret kisses Cal, and Married Man Cal likes it. Throughout the novel, Ryan's narrator underscores how chance moments shape our lives. Like Karen Russell, Kieran Desai has kept readers waiting for her second novel, but the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny makes the wait worthwhile.

At the outset, Sonia, a college student in Vermont, is homesick for her native India. Her depression makes her vulnerable to a visiting painter, an art monster. Meanwhile, Sonny has left India to work in New York, but distance can't shield him from his fearsome mother. Desai's near 700-page novel ruminates on exile and displacement and tells a tantal. tangled love story with enough coincidences to make Dickens blush. My last fiction pick is more in the Jane Austen miniaturist mode. Hart the Lover is a companion novel to Lily King's 2020 novel, Writers and Lovers.

But the structure of this follow-up is so ingenious that you don't have to have read the earlier book. This is an emotionally charged story about a young woman with literary ambitions, screwing up, wising up, finding herself, and realizing what she may have lost in the process. On to nonfiction, Gertrude Stein's writing, as the critic Wyndham Lewis put it, sometimes has the consistency of a cold black suet pudding, the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through. And yet, maddening as she can be, many of us sense. that when it comes to Stein's literary genius, there really was a there there. Francesca Wade's lively, unconventional biography, called Gertrude Stein and Afterlife,

doesn't end at Stein's death in 1946, but also tells the story of the obsessive admirers who help Stein achieve serious, posthumous recognition. Mother Mary comes to me by Arundati, Roy is one of the most vivid and exquisitely written memoirs of a mother-daughter relationship I've ever read. Roy's single mother was a beloved teacher who founded a school in India. Roy and her brother, however, endured their erratic mother's rage. And yet, Roy writes of her mother, I truly believed she would outlive me. When she didn't, I was wrecked, heart smashed. Like Gertrude Stein and Roy's mother, Patty Smith defies easy characterization. Her latest memoir, Bread of Angels, expands upon Just Kids, her 2010 memoir that's since become a classic.

Smith delves into more intimate material here, like the secret of her paternity, her sense of her own sexuality, and her 14-year marriage to the late musician Fred Sussie. Sonic Smith. If Patty Smith's title references Angels, Stephen Greenblatt's Dark Renaissance invokes the somewhat devilish figure of playwright Christopher Marlowe. I can think of nobody who brings the world of the English Renaissance to life with the verb and erudition of Greenblatt. Here, he explores the mysteries of Marlowe's originality and his murder at age 29. In 2017, historian Judith Geisberg and her team of grad student researchers launched a website called Last Scene, Finding Family After Slavery. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by once enslaved people hoping to find loved ones. Geisberg's arresting book, also called Last Scene, closely reads 10 of those ads.

giving readers a deeper sense of the lived experience of slavery and its aftermath. My final best book pick is a Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst, which is part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on marriage. In 1972, Morris and Marilyn Bailey spent four months adrift in the middle of the Pacific after a whale knocked a hole in their wooden sloop. They held themselves together mentally by focusing on small things, like the card games that Marilyn devised. Not bad advice, perhaps, for all of us in challenging times ahead. Happy holidays, everyone.

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University, and you can find all of her year-in recommendations on our website at fresh air.npr.org. And to browse more than 360 titles recommended by NPR staff and critics, visit Books we love at npr.org slash best books. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, Ray Seahorn, the star of the new series Pluribus. You may know her as the co-star of Better Call Saul, which was both the sequel and prequel to Breaking Bad. Pluribus has a sci-fi premise, but asks larger questions about happiness, anger, conformity, and I hope you can join us. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.