Where Homeless New Yorkers Slept in the 1800s
On a winter night in nineteenth-century New York, the difference between having a home and having nowhere to sleep could […]
How Immigration Created New York’s First Slums: The Origins of Urban Poverty in Nineteenth-Century New York City
Introduction: A City of Opportunity and Overcrowding In the spring of 1847, thousands of exhausted Irish immigrants stepped off crowded
How COVID-19 Changed Poverty and Housing Insecurity in New York City
Introduction: The Silence That Fell Over the City On the morning of March 22, 2020, New York City awoke to
From Child Labor to the New Deal: A Timeline of Poverty and Homelessness in New York City
How New York City’s Poor Survived an Era That Changed America Forever Imagine standing on a Lower East Side street
The History of Poverty and Homelessness in Nineteenth-Century New York City (1800–1900)
A City Built on Extremes In 1850, on a single block in Manhattan’s Sixth Ward, more than three hundred people
How the Progressive Era Changed Poverty and Homelessness in New York City
A City of Stark Numbers In 1890, a Danish immigrant turned police reporter named Jacob Riis calculated that more than
When the Streets Became Home: Why Homelessness Rose Dramatically in the 1980s
The Morning of January 22, 1982. At 5:47 in the morning, a sanitation worker named Ruben Torres arrived for his
When the Towers Fell, the Safety Net Frayed: Poverty in New York City After 9/11
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a man named Raymond Brown was sorting through a bin of donated clothes