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Homeless in America

February 01 2026

An interview with the author of a new book on homelessness in America. By Sheryle Thomas

US-based writer and activist Patrick Markee has written a book on homelessness. Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, was published by Melville House UK in early December last year and draws on Markee’s experience volunteering in New York. In January, Markee spoke to the Pavement about himself, his book and homelessness in the US. 

Who is Patrick Markee and what prompted your book?

Having been born into a solidly middle-class family, I have been fortunate enough never to have experienced homelessness or poverty. What’s more, during my childhood in the 1970s, I never saw people sleeping on the streets or other signs of homelessness. This was even though I grew up in an economically depressed city – Cleveland, Ohio, one of the cities of the so-called “Rustbelt” that had suffered deindustrialisation, job losses and economic hardship, much like the former manufacturing cities in the north of England or in parts of central Europe.

That all changed in the early 1980s, as a result of right-wing policies implemented by President Ronald Reagan that sharply cut funding for federal housing programmes, all in the midst of wider structural economic shifts that fueled a nationwide housing affordability crisis. When I began attending university in Boston in 1983, I saw lots of people sleeping in the streets and in subway stations, some of the first evidence of the mass homelessness crisis that has persisted to the present day in the US.

My book Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age is an attempt to describe those wider structural forces behind the crisis of modern mass homelessness – the widening housing affordability gap, shifts in the capitalist economy, neoliberal policies and systemic racism. And while the book focuses on New York City, the origin of the modern crisis, it also discusses other American cities and how homelessness is merely one symptom of wider forms of displacement.


The book title references the “New Glided Age”. Can you briefly describe what that is?

I describe the period from the 1970s to the present – during which the modern homelessness crisis emerged – as the New Gilded Age because it shares so many characteristics with the first Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the US. Specifically, these eras were marked by radical economic and social inequality, concentrations of wealth and power among elites, structural economic changes and rampant anti-immigrant xenophobia and racism.


Is there an experience or trend that inspired you to write this book?

There was really no single event that inspired the book. Instead, it drew from more than two decades of my work as a homeless advocate and my first-hand experiences on the streets, in municipal shelters, in train tunnels and in other places. I was also so incredibly lucky during that time to work alongside some remarkable homeless and formerly-homeless New Yorkers as we organised and struggled to defend the rights of vulnerable people and create more affordable housing.


Is there a statistic that particularly shocked you during your work on this book?

So many of the statistics on homelessness are shocking. In New York City, there are more than 100,000 people sleeping each night in homeless shelters, including 35,000 children and thousands more sleeping rough on the streets. Very few people realise that there are so many homeless families and children – around two-thirds of our shelter population.


What is America doing wrong in its approach to homelessness? 

Fundamentally, the US has never accepted that the government needs to play a central role in creating and providing decent, affordable housing for poor and working class households. Currently, only one of every five low-income Americans who qualify for federal housing aid actually receives it, a result of decades of chronic underfunding and cutbacks by right-wing political leaders.

The interview will continue in the next issue of the Pavement. Read more about Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age on the Melville House website: mhpbooks.com/books/placeless

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