After reading Tom Angotti’s chapter “The Real Estate Capital of the World” and Michael Greenberg’s article “Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis,” the theme of dislocation became crystal clear. Unfortunately, gentrification is one of the main reasons behind New York City’s large homeless population. And this population cannot be ignored. Just a few months ago, in October of 2018, I read an article by Daniel Brown that was entitled: “I Spent the Weekend with a Homeless Community in New York to See What It’s Really Like to Live on the Streets.” For me, this article directly connected to the dislocation described by Angotti and Greenberg. It also reminded me of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. What can this mean?
On page sixty-six, Angotti writes, “The photographs of Jacob Riis document extreme urban poverty and were used to attract sympathy from the reform agenda and philanthropy from the wealthy. They are also a testimony to the class bias of this famous reporter.” Then, Angotti goes on to makes a very sharp and on-point remark. He says, “The very title of Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives, speaks in the voice of the privileged half” (Angotti 66). Growing up, I always learned about Jacob Riis “the hero.” Riis was this “great guy” who helped improve the conditions of families living in tenements. For most of us students sitting in my elementary school classroom, those conditions were a thing of the past. But are they really?
In “I Spent the Weekend with a Homeless Community in New York to See What It’s Really Like to Live on the Streets,” Brown attempts to be objective when he offers readers a picture of what it is like to be homeless. No, he, thankfully, does not title his piece: How the Other Half Lives, although I cannot say that I am a great fan of his title. Nor does he try to pretend that he is a hero-reformer. I appreciate that. I also appreciate the fact that Brown’s content gets right to the point. Essentially, Brown’s piece revolves around an interview he did with a homeless man named Moustafa. Readers get to hear a firsthand account of what life is like for those who have suffered from raised rents and the other negative effects of NYC’s gentrification.
And for those who thought that tenement living was over, read what Moustafa has to say about NYC’s homeless shelters. Apparently, “The shelter rooms are about as big as the rectangular slab of concrete…They treat you like an animal.” Moustafa also says that the shelters do not check the health of the people they welcome in. This means, at least for people like Moustafa, that the streets provide better living conditions than homeless shelters do. And even if other people disagree with this last statement, what sort of image does Moustafa’s description conjure? For me, they are pretty reminiscent of Riis. It appears that living conditions have not improved for New Yorkers of lower socioeconomic standing in over a century. What can we do about this?
Questions:
- What do you make of Brown’s article? Do you find it surprising?
- Did your teachers also describe Riis as a hero when you were in grade school?
- What do you think we can do to improve the conditions in NYC’s homeless shelters?
