Street Fight Part I: Hobos, Bums, and the Homeless

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1:42to solve problems. And that's an aspect of human nature that I think we're already seeing and are only going to see more of as we move towards a creation of something like superintelligence. So if you like our work, if you like our stories, I think you're going to love this series. And so now, without further ado, this is Street Fight.

2:04Right now, in cities across the country, there is a quintessentially American fight underway. Because on either side of this fight, there are compelling and yet competing visions of freedom. And at the center of that fight is what we've come to call homelessness. And over the course of the next few episodes, we're going to unpack the surprising story of just how new this problem in the form it exists in today really is. We're going to talk about how at its core, it is the product of choices that we as a society have made and keep making. And then finally, we're going to hear from different sides in the debate about how once and for all we might end homelessness.

2:54Story, we're going to go back to. Hold on, hold on. I just. I got to hit record. Whoops. And here to guide us through that story is reporter Emma Pettit. All right, we're good now. Start it off. So the story I have starts in the 1980s in New York City with a mayor named Ed Koch. Let's have a nice welcome for our mayor, please, Edward Koch, if you will. New York City, the greatest city in the world. So Ed Koch, he's tall, he's Jewish, a Democrat but a centrist, and he called himself a liberal with sanity. Crime is appreciably down. But nevertheless, it still exists and exists in a way that gets people upset.

3:39He's funny. Mm-hmm. I talk like a New Yorker, I walk like a New Yorker, and I eat like a New Yorker. He's feisty. Did I lose my First Amendment rights because I became the mayor? The difference between you and I is if I disagree with someone, it doesn't go into the papers. So what? It's not heard by thousands of people. So what? And he had this famous catchphrase that he'd shout at people. How am I doing? how am I doing? Right. He was seen as this eccentric guy who really loved the city. Yeah. But in the late 1980s, the city that he cared about so much, it was facing this brand new type of crisis.

4:16The homeless have become part of the landscape of New York, a legion of lost souls, some completely unhinged. Right now, the city is providing shelter for 12 ,000 homeless people. 30 ,000 people call the streets and park benches their home. A crisis of people, men and women, young and old, black, white, living and occasionally dying on the street. And it's weird to describe this phenomenon as new, right? Because it can feel like what I'm describing is just this brutal fact of life. Right. And so we'll get into this more in a little bit because, like, obviously there are aspects of this that have existed for a very long time.

5:00But this, like, type of desperation and this label that was gaining in popularity at the time among the public, homelessness, that was new starting in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. It is terrible to see these people who are lying in their own feces, who are clearly gross mental cases, who if they were your mother or your sister or a family relative, you would want to pick up and take to a hospital right away, even if they resisted because they're mentally incompetent to make such a judgment. And Ed Koch, as the city's mayor, he felt that it was, you know, inhumane. and cruel to let this become normal.

5:48And so what is his plan to not let homelessness become normal in New York City? Well, Tkach, who's, again, the self-described liberal with sanity, the sane approach was for the city to find people who clearly were deteriorating, who were defecating outside, who were hearing voices, who just totally lost touch with reality, and make them get help, right? Take them to a hospital and make them stay there. All right, so the mayor is saying, in addition to, you know, the shelters and everything else that we do to help people who are down and out, the city is going to take it as their responsibility to go out and find people who are especially vulnerable, who aren't doing well, and whether they like it or not, force them to go someplace and get help.

6:39Yes, but pretty immediately, his plan got messy. Because as it turns out, the very first person picked up when his program goes into effect, that person would fight back. And that fight would throw the entire city into this debate over whether or not someone has the right to be homeless and to sleep out on the street. And the woman who caused this firestorm, her name was Joyce Brown. You get wildly conflicting versions of Joyce Brown's life on the streets. Some people say she was deranged and abusive and would even attack people. So in 1987, Joyce Brown is 40 years old. And for about a year, she had been sleeping at a hot air vent near the corner of 2nd Avenue and 65th Street, which is in Manhattan.

7:32And according to the people who lived and worked around there, and, you know, according to eventually some doctors, she acted erratically and in ways that were, like, just very unpredictable. She would talk to herself out loud. She would run in front of traffic. So you might walk by her and have a really nice talk about the news. Some of the waiters in Swenson said she was a perfectly rational woman, and they would often buy her a cup of coffee and talk about television shows. But she also might shout at you to suck her dick. When I saw her, she had been there for maybe 15 months in the winter and the summer, defecating in her clothing, or if she were maybe more lucid, on the sidewalk, not in her clothing, but on the sidewalk, refusing help.

8:19She'd lift her skirt and flash her butt. She muttered to herself. And when someone would give her dollar bills, sometimes she would tear it up into pieces and burn it or pee on it. So essentially, she's exactly the kind of person that Ed Koch had created this program to try to help. Exactly. And he knew of her. He would even, like, describe her specifically whenever he was talking about this program. You mentioned to her, won't you come to a shelter? She would become enraged, and therefore you must never use that word. and a woman clearly in need of help. And so on an October day in 1987, Koch, his office, sends a van out where they find Joyce Brown on the pavement at her usual spot.

9:11And the team there, it includes a psychiatrist, and they make the call that, yeah, she's in distress. She's showing clear signs of paranoid schizophrenia. She needs to be committed. it. And Joyce, according to one account, she didn't want to go, but police officers who were there helped force her into a van. She's then driven to a hospital, Bellevue, where they inspect her and then they inject her with this antipsychotic drug and also with Ativan, which is a sedative, and she falls asleep. And the story goes that the next afternoon when she wakes up, She's still in the hospital. And she finds a payphone.

9:57And she dials the number for the New York branch of the ACLU. I was incarcerated against my will in prison, a political prisoner. The only thing that was wrong with me was that I was homeless. And the fight that starts from that phone call is the fight that we've been having ever since. Such a person requires help. That's what we're trying to do. That's my job. It's a fight that pits two different values against one another. Citizens have to be concerned about the prospect of government vans roaming the streets of the city. That's not what this country is supposed to be all about. Because on the one hand, you have this idea that we need to help these people even when they can't help themselves.

10:52And we've also got to enforce our laws to keep our streets and our sidewalks safe and public. What is compassionate, humane, or progressive about people living in their poop? About people getting beat up at night and stabbed? There is nothing progressive about that. And on the other side, there is a right for people to be poor without being harassed or locked up for it. The homeless don't have any rights left anymore. that basically we've taken away their right to survival. And there's this tricky question of how do you balance an individual's rights against the collective's right for safety and order?

11:38After a short break, we'll be back with more on that conflict, including how America ended up having a homelessness problem in the first place and how Joyce Brown became an unexpected symbol of freedom. I was definitely the wrong one that they did pick on. Stay with us.

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15:42It was built by MIT and Harvard scientists who made it for themselves first. Rune recently sent me a sample in the mail, and I've been using it on long edit days in that late afternoon stretch. Head to T-A-K-E-R-O-O-N dot com backslash Longview and use code Longview at checkout for up to 64 % off. That's takebrune.com backslash Longview. Welcome back. Here again is reporter Emma Pettit. All right. So I feel like because I've made this somewhat bold claim that what we think of today and what we call homelessness was like a new thing in the 1980s, I want to start off by putting that into some broader context.

16:29Because, of course, homelessness is a newer expression of a very, very old problem. Right? Right. I mean, you could say that since the dawn of cities, since the very first cities began, there were always some people who lived there or who moved there, who fell on hard times and who ended up on the fringes of society. Yes. And over the years, those people have gone by a series of like different names. In some ways, you can look at the name and understand something about how we saw that group of people in the midst of our society. So if you go all the way back, you know, to the 1400s, the 1500s, and like up through the Victorian era, and even in like the colonial United States, those people were often known as vagrants.

17:16And being a vagrant, it was illegal. Like a vagrant is essentially like a stranger, a wanderer, right? Like someone who you do not want in your area. and we had a number of ways of keeping those people out of polite society. So give me a sense of what that looked like. What was the sort of punishment if you were labeled a vagrant? So if you were convicted for vagrancy, you could be branded, you could be whipped, you could have your ear cropped off to denote the kind of person you are. I know, it's really horrible. We were pretty horrible for like a long time. But for the purposes of our story, and really to understand the American expression of all this, it makes sense to start in the later part of the 19th century after the Civil War.

18:11Because around then, we began using other names to describe this population. Tramps and hobos. Hobo-bobo-billies. And when I say tramp and hobo, what do you think of? Well, I think about how I dressed up as a hobo for Halloween when I was a kid. I see the little can of beans, the red bandana on a stick, you know, tossed over the shoulder.

18:46Okay, you're not totally far off. Tramps and hobos, they're men, you know, mostly white. and they're moving across the country in search of either work or they're just looking for a new life or they're just looking for adventure.

19:09Very important to that is the railroad system. One of the researchers that I ended up talking to in the course of my reporting about this was a guy named Stephen Eide. he's at the Manhattan Institute. It's a right of center think tank where he focuses on social policy questions about homelessness and mental health. The railroad system changes America profoundly because it opens up new opportunities, particularly with regard to agriculture in Western regions. And Stephen told me there was work to be had for these guys. Like there's timber to cut, there's ditches to dig, there's wheat and sugar beets to harvest.

19:51And thanks to the railroad, there's now this huge mass of poor mobile men who start migrating around the country to do that work. That is how you get a lot of guys moving around. And it's an unsettling thing for a lot of communities because these guys are strange. And okay, you need them to pick their crops, but like, who are they? They're not part of a family. They're drinking a lot. And they brought with them some problems. You know, alcoholism was like really common among these men. Drinking brings with it a lot of problems that people don't want to deal with. Also, like, imagine that you're in a town and all of a sudden there's just this like pack of strange, like dirty.

20:39Unshaven. Unshaven. How dare they? Men who've, like, rejected these societal bonds that we think of as, like, normal. They're descending on your town unannounced. And so there's a lot of fear initially that comes with these men traveling across the country. Because of their sometimes disorderly ways of living, they are subjected to containment strategies. And what did it look like for, you know, society to punish hobos and tramps? Were we still cutting off ears? So earcropping by that point had fallen out of fashion. Thank God. Okay. But, you know, you could be thrown in jail at the time for being a vagrant.

21:25You know, you could get like 30 days or more for being a vagabond, a rogue, for being just like the wrong type of guy in a town. And just as an example, the writer Jack London of White Fang. Love White Fang. Love White Fang. Great book. So back in like 1894, Jack London was one of those guys who traveled around. Riding the rails. Riding the rails, exactly. And he arrived in a town, I think it was Niagara Falls in New York. And immediately he's confronted by a local cop who asks, where are you staying? And whatever answer he gave, the cop did not like it. So they just arrested him and put him in jail for 30 days on the charge of vagrancy.

22:10Wow. So you're saying that vagrancy, even in the tramp era, was still an arrestable offense. It's something that could get you thrown in jail. Yes. And like generally, the public liked it that way. Like we wanted order. But gradually, we as a society, we started to soften towards these guys.

22:38I am a man of constant sorrow. Our culture actually begins to romanticize aspects of this lifestyle. I bid farewell to old Kentucky, the place where I... There was something essentially and proudly American about their individualistic desire to live apart from society and make their own way. It's a little weird, right? Like to valorize what is essentially like a pre-modern homeless person. And we get to a point where you, as a kid, are going to dress up like a hobo for Halloween, right? Right. I was a lovable hobo. I wasn't like a scary hobo. Right. But by the 1940s and 1950s, like, no one was really laughing at these guys anymore.

23:37Because the tramp and the hobo, they had started to disappear by then. And we were entering this new era, and it was defined by a different term. These were the bums. The bum. The guys singing songs, riding the rails, that all goes away. And what's left is just the very bottom rung. The demand for itinerant labor, that really dried up, and it left behind these guys who were elderly, who were chronic drinkers, who were sometimes severely disabled, and maybe can't work that much for a bunch of reasons. And unlike the hobo and the tramp who traveled around the country and are kind of defined by the railroad, the bum stayed put.

24:20As distinct from tramp and hobo, these were people who really didn't move around a lot. And they eked out existences in neighborhoods that were on the seedier side of town, neighborhoods that were known by then as skid rows. Nowadays, there is skid row capitalized in Los Angeles, but most cities had a skid row, meaning neighborhoods without families, neighborhoods without women, actually, without children, just these guys. So these types of neighborhoods, they existed all over, and they were dominated by cheap housing. And when I say cheap, it was like really, really cheap, even if they were also really, really, especially by our standards today, terrible.

25:04As in these places could be disgusting. Exactly. And maybe you've heard of the term flap house or SRO, like a single room occupancy hotel. they ranged from the best version was like a small like cleanish dorm style room where you know you shared a bathroom down the hall with a bunch of other guys and a step down from that you know maybe you're sleeping in what people called a cage hotel where your room is just some plywood walls or maybe they're made of tin you know it's four feet by six feet and then you've just got chicken wire over the top of it. Oh, my God. As someone who is a bit claustrophobic, I don't think I'm staying at that hotel.

25:47No. It's not for me. No, no. And, you know, anything that's called like a cage hotel, it's like, all right, you're kind of telling me a lot right there in the name. And in some cases, there were rooms where there was actually not a lot separating you from the guy next to you. You know, you're just in a room, bodies all cramped together. And, you know, we're talking potentially fleas and bugs and disease. Like, it was not— And the smells and everything, yeah. Right. And, you know, it was housing of last resort. But these places might cost you less than a dollar a night. Right. And so this is, like, maybe one of the reasons that they weren't seen as homeless the way we think of homeless today, right?

26:30They might be destitute. They might be in a really difficult situation, but they are not sleeping out in public sites, sleeping out on the sidewalks, in the parks. They have these places in Skid Row to put a roof over their head at night. They were also considered to be kind of disorder zones. These guys, they're fighting a lot. They are causing disturbance. And some of them have these, like, unbelievable records of arrests that they rack up, similar to kind of repeat offenders in the homeless population today. In terms of how we police these neighborhoods, when I spoke with Stephen Ide. So there was a way in which police would allow people to be like slightly more disorderly in the boundaries of these Skid Row neighborhoods than outside of them.

27:16He said that there was this strategy of geographic tolerance. Like this is your place. Like if you want to live like this, okay, just make sure you do it here and not outside these boundaries. It was kind of this idea of like, you guys don't do anything crazy, but so long as you stay here and know your place, we will look the other way. Right. This idea of like out of sight, out of mind for the usual person. Right. And according to Stephen, there was also just this assumption that because these guys were elderly, that this is a population that's just going away anyway. Like, we kind of thought that this problem was going to go away.