The story of homelessness

Uncheerful interior, and an air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the corners. Bent window blinds; tragic, drooping, bright-green shower curtain; dark hallway opening onto two bare bedrooms. 

The above is a description of the inside of a homeless shelter in South East Bronx of New York City. 

Ian Frazier writes a heart-stopping story on the homeless of this city and as is characteristic of a New Yorker narrative, there are no discernible heroes or villains held responsible for either exacerbation or amelioration of the malaise of homelessness in what is considered to be the nation's most obscenely wealthy and consumerist cities. 

The homeless themselves become characters in a strange landscape that looks and feels like the landscape of the underworld that has no intersection whatsoever, except in the form of paternalism and policies, with the over world. 

Mayor Bloomberg is a frieze-like figure with a pair of blue eyes" that "twinkle" like those of Santa Clause's in the Coca Cola ads from the 1950s, yet says Frazier, Bloomberg is the contra-Claus person, whose eyes turn "icy" when the homeless look into them.

The best parts of the story are the scenes themselves; while on a warm Saturday night, the city itself is "hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-like laughter," the shelters pose a starkly contrasting picture:

More families came out, accompanied by a woman with a clipboard. People got sorted out into the right vehicles. Kids slept on people’s shoulders, except for a toddler named Jared, who was stagger-walking to and fro. He bumped against the legs of the man who was sweeping and a woman watching him picked him up and said to the sweeper, “Sorry—my bad.” Soon all the passengers were aboard, the vehicles’ doors closed, and the red tail-lights came on. Slowly the buses drove off, followed by the van. Nighttime departures and arrivals occupy the subbasement of childhood memory. The guy sweeping and the muttering man and the woman with the clipboard and the reporter taking notes existed in a strange, half-unreal state of being part of someone else’s deepest memories a lifetime from now. An orange had fallen from a bag lunch and lay beside the curb. The muttering man picked it up and looked at it and rubbed it and put it in his pocket.

The homeless according to Frazier suffer the kind of instability that exiles experience especially when they acquire the status of the fugitive and the unwanted. Yet homelessness has also morphed into an eerie form of institutionalized city-living as well:

Homelessness is a kind of internal exile that distributes people among the two hundred and thirty-six shelters around the city and keeps them moving. In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed could capture only a person’s blurry passing. Of all the homeless people who gave me their cell-phone numbers, only two—Marcus (Country) Springs and a woman I talked to briefly named Rebeca Gonzzales—could still be reached after a few weeks had passed. That their cell phones continued to work made them also photographable, and Springs’s portrait accompanies this article.