Wednesday Dec 03, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, a longtime housing activist presents a vivid and myth-breaking account of why homelessness endures in contemporary America…
Millions of people are affected by homelessness, but media pundits and politicians see homelessness as a social work problem, or a matter of personal pathology, or some peculiar subspecies of urban poverty.
Informed by the author’s own front-line experiences from more than two decades working as an advocate for homeless people in New York City and his work with housing activists across the country. Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age presents an alternative and innovative, wide-angle view of homelessness and displacement in New York and elsewhere.
A tour of the geography of homelessness in New York City, where some 100,000 people a night sleep in the city’s shelter system, Markee visits certain city landmarks where homeless New Yorkers struggle to survive:
- armories once built to quarter militias who put down worker uprisings
- a train tunnel underneath Riverside Park
- a grim intake center where infants, children, and families were forced to sleep on office floors
- a former psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital now sheltering hundreds of homeless men each night
- a Manhattan park surrounded by luxury condos where the police routinely harassed homeless street-dwellers
Blending historical analysis, urban theory, and the latest policy research, Markee considers homelessness in America as a tragic yet inevitable consequence of economic shifts inaugurated in the Reagan era, worsening inequality and housing affordability, systemic racism, and neoliberal government policies.
At a moment where tabloids and politicians use homelessness as an excuse to whip up fear, Placeless is a powerful and moving account of a social problem whose solution is entirely possible.
About the Author.
About the Moderator.
Samuel Stein is a geographer and urban planner who studies and writes about the politics of planning in New York City, with an emphasis on housing, real estate, labor and gentrification. He is a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, and has previously worked for such New York City housing and labor institutions as Tenants & Neighbors, the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, and the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ. He has taught geography and urban studies at Hunter College, Parsons the New School for Design, Sarah Lawrence College, the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and John Jay College. He is a member of the steering committee for the Planners Network, the organization of progressive planning.