Name: Leo Shachtman

Social Justice Group: 2023-2024, Homelessness in NYC

Date of Fieldwork: January 26, 2024

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Patrick Markee, former director of advocacy for the Coalition for the Homeless

Type of Fieldwork: [69]

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?:

On January twenty-sixth my group and I met with Patrick Markee, the former director of advocacy for the Coalition for the Homeless. We had an interview that lasted about one hour, in which we talked about several things. The first of which is what Patrick Markee did as director of advocacy for the Coalition for the Homeless. We learned he would do things like go to many different homeless shelters and see if they were following the regulations set upon them properly. Those regulations were seemingly simple things such as having beds three feet apart, we also learned most homeless shelters don’t follow these regulations.

We talked about several more things such as the disproportionately high rate of black children experiencing homelessness as opposed to white children, the stereotypes against homeless people, and something called hostile architecture. The concept of hostile architecture was interesting to me as it essentially makes things like public benches harder to sleep on for fear that homeless people will sleep on them. Learning about this was interesting to me because it honestly doesn’t seem to make sense, as you would think that New York City would want to help homeless people in whatever way they could. Overall, this interview was both enjoyable and enlightening.