There is a strange, little-noticed bipartisan agreement taking shape in American politics. The Trump administration has issued an executive order calling for a crackdown on “endemic vagrancy.” Meanwhile, Democratic mayors in big cities are clearing encampments, and California and New York have made it easier to hospitalize people against their will. Underlying these actions is an acknowledgment that whatever we’ve done so far to address homelessness, it hasn’t worked.
Street Fight is a series about how we got to this broken place and the ongoing argument over how to fix it. In the first episode, we go back to what’s thought of as the premodern era of homelessness, when hordes of rootless men rode the rails across the country in search of work or a new life. Those men grew old, the work dried up, and they settled into neighborhoods on the bad side of town where housing and alcohol were cheap and abundant. Then, over the next few decades, the people on the sidewalk changed — no longer old white men, but women, families, and people who seemed much sicker than before.
That brings us to Joyce Brown, a former secretary who slept on a New York City heating grate until she was committed to a hospital in the 1980s. She fought the city in court, and her case forced the public to grapple with competing visions of freedom that still collide on the sidewalk: the right to be left alone versus the right to safe and orderly public spaces.
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