Placeless

“Eye-opening . . . This empathetic and common-sense account underscores that homelessness is an affordability issue, not a moral failing.” — Publishers Weekly

“At a moment when the National Guard is being mobilized to ‘clean up’ cities, Placeless offers a nuanced, compassionate, and meticulously researched counterpoint for a relentlessly demonized population. Advocates like Patrick Markee have lived and breathed the suffering of others and understand policy from the perspective of the streets, tunnels, jails and darkness of the displaced. Using New York City and his work with displaced persons as a microcosm for the nation, Markee gives a fascinating history lesson and offers concrete hope while also eloquently eulogizing those gone too soon.” —Jonathan Mulligan Sepulveda, author of No Human Is Illegal


“To refresh an oft-told story, Markee resorts to montage. In a series of thirteen separately staged but overlapping chapters, he takes readers through a story they thought they knew, reconstructing the past with an eye toward place, time, issue, reportage and counterpoint. Nor does he shortchange the occasional win. His is an advocate’s stance, and the scars sometimes show. But so does the intelligence, grit, heart, and soul it takes to do this work.

“Homelessness is typically discussed as a question about our values. Markee argues otherwise: it’s not about outcasts. It’s about a widening gyre of precarity, predation, disenfranchisement, and privilege, of which homelessness is only the raw ragged edge.” —Kim Hopper, author of Reckoning with Homelessness