We interviewed Patrick on February 11th and we mostly asked him about the causes of homelessness and homelessness stereotypes. Patrick Markee worked as the former deputy executive director at Coalition for the Homeless for 20 years. He said that one of the main causes of homelessness is the affordable housing gap. The affordable housing gap is the money difference between someone’s salary and their rent. Patrick told us that rent is growing higher and higher each year while the average salary in New York is barely increasing. Patrick also told us about how when he was a child in New York City he never saw any homeless people living on the street, making him believe there were none. It was only till he moved to Boston to college when he noticed mass amounts of homeless people on the streets, making him believe that all of a sudden homelessness had become a big problem. Even though Patrick has dedicated 20 years of his life to working with Coalition for the Homeless before he obtained proper knowledge he believed certain stereotypes about homelessness that almost everyone believes. Patrick has spent his career educating people on the real meaning of homelessness and we are very lucky that we were able to obtain a small amount of his expertise.

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Franklin Spurbeck works as a senior research assistant at Portland Universities Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. Franklin’s job is to turn data into a clear and efficient analysis. For example, if 10 people are interviewed about how expensive their rent is Franklin will take their answers and turn them into statistics and graphs regarding past information and future prediction. After Franklin has created new statistics and compared them to other versions of data figuring out the causes and effects of homelessness becomes a lot easier. We asked Franklin some questions about homelessness and its main cause. The three main answers we got were, housing costs, income, and substance abuse. All of these things Franklin believes are the main causes/contributors to the homelessness epidemic. Another big takeaway that we took from our interview was how mental health affects an unhoused person. Specifically how negative stereotypes affect an unhoused person’s mental health. There are certain stereotypes that all homeless people are drug addicts, and that every homeless person wants to kill you and those things are just not true. Even though, yes there are some crazy people out there, they are less than ⅓ of NYCs unhoused population. It’s because of these fake ideas people have been so unempathetic towards the unhoused community. Franklin proved our thesis that New York City’s homeless community is often stereotyped and standardized as a crazy group of individuals all living on the street due to mental institutions closing almost 100 years ago by explaining to us that due to people’s fear and unwillingness to trust, homelessness has become a norm due to no one wanting to disrupt the century long tradition of normalizing the unhoused. If people were able to see past the stereotypes and minority of mentally unstable individuals they would understand that being unhosued is not a self brought curse. It is something you cannot control. If the public opened their hearts up, maybe landlords wouldn’t raise their rent a crazy high amount or an employer would look past the fact that someone didn’t have a home a couple of years ago. If people were able to do that the world would truly be a better place and we know this because of Franklin Spurbeck.

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On Friday the 17th me and my group interviewed Marcia Flores. Marcia Flores works for AFC (Advocates for Children of New York) and for Project LIT. At AFC she focuses on educational rights for children as well as partnering with homeless shelters and doing press interviews regarding her knowledge and expertise in her field. Our interview with her was over zoom and it took 31 minutes and 46 seconds.
We mainly asked Marcia about the causes/effects of homelessness and what NYC government should do to help decrease homelessness. She said that one of the main reasons people are living on the streets is because they cannot afford housing, especially with young children. She also said that a lot of homeless children that she works with are immigrants or migrants who do not speak English, therefore making the process of trying to find affordable housing ten times harder. She said that, yes mental health can cause homelessness but not as much as you think. Most homeless people suffering from mental illness are the people you see walking to school or on the train, the people making themselves known, who people like Eva Pinkley, who we did an earlier interview on, are trying to get out of the streets and into shelters with good mental health services. But the people Marcia works with are the people you don’t see. People couch surfing and living in shelters. Those people make up the majority of NYCS homeless community. Marcia also told us that being homeless as a child is almost a lifelong sentence of struggle. If you were homeless as a child but have just rented an apartment with your savings it seems like you will not have to worry about not having a home anymore, right? However, no one will hire you if you were homeless, even if that was 10+ years ago, therefore you cannot get a job, will not be able to pay rent, and will end up homeless once more. Marcia believes that NYCS government should hire more bilingual teachers as well as assigning children to schools that are close to their shelters or living location. She thinks that if that gets done New York’s 146,000 homeless children will have a better chance at a successful education, and hopefully future.

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I interviewed Eva Pinkley in order to learn more about homelessness in NYC. Eva Pinkley works for a non profit organization who help homeless people over the course of many years. The organization focuses on building trust with the homeless community and mostly helps people with addiction or mental/physical trauma.

Eva does field work every single day across all the boroughs and she believes that racial discrimination definitely plays a large role in who lives on the streets. She believes that 99% of New York City’s homeless are non white (not a backed up fact.) She also believes that the main cause for homelessness is mental and physical trauma, and the fact that most communities do not have access to good mental health care. She thinks that if New York City’s government made mental healthcare free and advertised it more New York’s homeless population would decrease rapidly.

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