No Place Like Home(lessness)

The sight of a homeless man sprawled across a subway bench is not uncommon for the average New Yorker. We all encounter a person fast asleep or glaring at us with red crossed-eyes, forcing a cardboard sign in our faces, their inadequate, ratting clothing imprinted with dirt and residue from the litter-strewn streets of the city. Or there’s someone pleading for you to spare one penny, one dime—money you know will be applied towards drugs and alcohol anyway.

This seems to be the perspective of many New Yorkers, and it has been imposed upon me as well. I felt distressed at every encounter with a homeless person on the train, seeing them relinquish their sense of dignity to beg stone-faced commuters self-absorbed on their devices, only to be met with no avail. This distress is amplified with the sight of the elderly or a child. While mentioning this to a friend of mine, she expressed her similar despair but cautioned me against endowing these panhandlers with even a penny for fear of elderly women and children panhandlers being used in human trafficking. A rabbit hole of Reddit posts later corroborated this sentiment, with even formerly homeless people advising against giving panhandlers money. Satisfied, the burden suffocating my heart lightened; I returned to my daily subway rides, content with my decision to ignore the unfortunate in front of me, albeit still with a slight twinge of guilt.

One morning, as a friend and I walked by Zuckers, she asked me to wait as she pulled a Ziploc-ed sandwich out of her bag. She handed it to the homeless man who stayed in a cardboard box under Zuckers. We continued walking, and I looked at her with renewed admiration for this selfless act. My friend had been packing an extra sandwich for this man every day, while the plight of this man never even crossed the minds of the rest of us. 

Homelessness is a stain on the beautiful city of New York. A problem most of us would rather ignore than correct at its roots. “Please, just remove this eyesore from our streets!” cries a New Yorker. “I feel unsafe.” Yet the lack of a sense of security and safety of the homeless person is not taken into account. Rather than criminalizing a group of people who often are the unfortunate byproduct of systematic inequality, we need to educate ourselves on the systemic roots of poverty: the proliferation of misinformation that dictates policy, representing the wave of anti-homeless public opinion. 

The lack of effective assessment of the homelessness crisis is a direct threat to our democracy. Although it is impossible to eradicate homelessness, measures can certainly be taken to mitigate the problem, as seen by the relative success of Houston’s Housing First strategy. The visible suffering and systematic dehumanization of homeless individuals treated less as citizens and more as obstructions pose the most significant threat to our democracy. A democracy cannot thrive when entire populations are stripped of their dignity, excluded from public space, and rendered politically invisible. The normalization of policies and urban designs that conceal or criminalize the homeless population reveals a society increasingly willing to sacrifice empathy and equality for the comfort of the few, threatening the foundational democratic principle that all people are created equal.

Modern mass homelessness—a “routine, persistent, visible feature of urban life”—emerged in New York in the late 1970s, reduced single-room housing, and the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals from upstate facilities. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan cut federal housing assistance, exacerbating the lack of available and affordable housing and prompting Mayor Ed Koch’s “Housing New York Plan” which created thousands of affordable units, some reserved for the homeless. The early 1990s recession pushed more families into homelessness, partially mitigated by the NY/NY Supportive Housing Agreement, but later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani challenged the right to shelter by enacting a policy criminalizing those on the streets. In the early 2000s, Mayor Mike Bloomberg continued Giuliani’s stance, proposing new shelter eligibility that would effectively deny shelter to thousands of homeless New Yorkers. In the last 10 to 15 years, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, followed by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s, eventually committed to expanding supportive housing. More recently, Mayor Eric Adams introduced plans to curb homelessness. Despite these policy shifts, progress has been too slow, and the root causes of the crisis remain largely unaddressed. 

The most significant threat to our democracy is the disenfranchisement of homeless persons. Unquestionably, a healthy democracy requires the political representation of the majority of the population; one group’s vote being structurally prioritized over others leads to imbalance, and thus, the will of “we the people” is not reflected in policy but rather the will of a section of the people. Given that many state election laws require voter registrants to provide a mailing address, this extraordinarily burdens or disenfranchises homeless American citizens.

The public is certainly at fault for treating the homeless as second-class citizens. On top of struggling to meet the basic necessities, the homeless population is ignored by the public on a daily basis, creating a sense of inferiority and unimportance. While giving money or food might not always be an option, sometimes, all that matters is simply an acknowledgment. For a homeless person, something like a simple “Hello!,” a smile, a wave, and being treated like a human once more is a step away from being shunned by society. 

Tyrannical political leaders take advantage of the public’s treatment of the homeless. It’s a polarizing topic that draws the attention of a majority of the population living in cities grappling with the homelessness crisis. In a poll conducted in Los Angeles County in 2021, 94 percent of respondents considered homelessness a serious or very serious problem—a candidate’s stance on this issue can heavily sway election results. 

In New York City, despite consistently having the nation’s highest homelessness rate, the issue garners less political urgency because most unhoused people are hidden in shelters. This contributes to the idea that simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes ‘success.’ However, this isn’t true. The city spends three billion dollars a year to combat homelessness, yet the city-funded voucher program is losing funding, meaning that policies are only scraping by. 

The criminalization of the homeless isn’t merely a prediction or fear of how policy may progress in the future; it is ever-present. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Johnson vs. Grants Pass that local governments can ban sleeping outdoors with the protection of a tent or blanket. Policies that criminalize the homeless to comfort other constituents, portraying homelessness as an individual failure rather than a systemic one, proliferate polarization. This divide is easily exploited by leaders to consolidate power within their ideological base and accelerates the erosion of democracy, allowing one side to encroach on the other.

While individual choices can affect a person’s path to homelessness, ED Sclar’s “musical chairs” framing highlights the structural root of the issue. Although the persons who end up not having a chair each round of the game may be those who are smaller, slower, or weaker—individual faults—inevitably, only one person will end up with a chair. The person who does end up with a chair may be dictated by individual characteristics and circumstances, but the reason behind the chairlessness of the other participants is a lack of adequate chairs. Simply put, although the “who” may be influenced by the individual, the “why” and “what” are inherently structural.

Beyond structural causes, physical barriers deter the homeless from existing in public spaces. Hostile architecture, like bike racks or planter boxes, is a restrictive urban design strategy aimed at preventing the homeless from sheltering in urban areas. This removal of the homeless from public spaces so that the rich do not have to confront their presence calls for a more democratic and equitable urban space.

In addition to the physical removal of the homeless from urban spaces, the homeless are also removed from the social contract of our democracy. John Locke’s ideas of life and liberty, in addition to Thomas Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness, are legitimized by Thomas Hobbes’s social contract. The contract explains that the people shall willingly concede some of their freedoms in exchange for order and the guarantee of natural rights. So, what happens if the government fails to ensure these natural rights?

Of course, ensuring equal rights and opportunities could be an infeasible notion, given the size and diversity of the United States. However, the social contract is an ideal that the government must constantly strive to achieve, even though the contract’s stipulations may never be fulfilled. The moment the government fails to attempt to reach this ideal, then its legitimacy erodes since the people feel the contract is one-sided. When homelessness is criminalized with no solution, the homeless may effectively be removed from the social contract. The homeless man has thus been reduced to Giorgio Agamben’s state of bare life, barely acknowledged to be biologically living and with fundamentally no social or political life. If the homeless are barred from existence as bare life, then full citizenship—civil, political, and social—is not ensured. 

Addressing homelessness requires reevaluating the economic system; confronting the historical inequalities in housing policy; and embracing a collective duty to treat everyone with dignity. However, we must individually attempt to contribute to addressing this issue; to “contribute to good causes”; and to “make eye contact and small talk” with our homeless brothers and sisters to recognize their humanity. In that spirit, my friends and I volunteered at St. Paul’s Food Pantry to learn more about the stories behind these faces.

We signed up for this event through ARISTA, expecting to engage directly with homeless persons; however, given the younger ages of the volunteers, our role was limited to packaging food for later distribution. Although we were unable to directly engage with homeless persons, contributing to good causes and defending—in our case, non-governmental—institutions that are currently being attacked by the federal government was a step in the right direction. Furthermore, it is necessary to volunteer our time at places like food pantries in order to remember the needs of our homeless. The homeless are not a blemish on our streets to be brushed away; rather, these are our brothers and sisters whose needs we must be attentive to; who we must take care of; and take care to humanize.