David Remnick: By one measure something like 1.4 million people end up in homeless shelters every year, and many thousands more are living on the street. You could nearly fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused in this country. The problem seems gigantic and tragic and absolutely intractable, but homelessness, in fact, is not intractable. There are solutions. No one solution is going to work for every person or every city, but we could greatly reduce the scale of this tragedy. That's the good news and the bad news, according to Jennifer Egan, and she's been reporting on the issue for The New Yorker.

Jennifer Egan: Hey, how are you?

David Remnick: I'm Good. What an amazing piece.

Jennifer Egan: Good.

David Remnick: What an amazing piece.

Jennifer Egan: Thank you so much.

David Remnick: Jennifer Egan is best known for her many novels. She's the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Jen, I have to make an admission. When I started out as an editor, I had this fantasy, maybe from my childhood of reading Esquire in the '70s or Rolling Stone that I would get these novelists to write nonfiction, that they'd go out into the world like Norman Mailer covering a march on the Pentagon or things like that. In fact, very few novelists seem to want to do that very often these days, but you have been writing about homelessness on and off for a couple of decades, at least. How did you get interested in this and why did you want to pursue it as a writer?

Jennifer Egan: I think my long-standing interest in homelessness is partly because I'm old enough to remember a time before modern homelessness. I grew up in San Francisco, I wandered around the city all night as a teen and I had never, by the time I left for college, seen a person sleeping outside. That might be incredible to someone who lives in San Francisco now, but that is the city I grew up in. I know that this is relatively new. In 2002, I wrote a piece about homeless families in New York and I just wanted to understand why this problem still existed.

What was interesting about that era, was that enough data had emerged, and people had come to conclusions that seemed like they might be able to solve the problem. We had learned how to deal with this, it seemed. Yet, here we are, 20 years later, and the problem is clearly not solved.

David Remnick: Well, how 20 years ago did people think we could solve it and why did that fail?

Jennifer Egan: Well, I don't think it has failed, I should just say that. It may look that way but in fact, the number of homeless people really did decline. There have been improvements. The revelations that I think came along in the early 21st century were an understanding of how to analyze the homeless population and how to deal with the different parts of it. A lot of this comes from one researcher named Dennis Culhane, who teaches at Penn, he's a sociologist. What he basically discovered was that there are two kinds of homeless people. Of course, there are many, many more, but two categories.

One is homeless people who are homeless for a relatively short period of time, basically have fallen through the cracks financially, and just need some short-term help to get back into housing. Then there are people who are what are known as chronically homeless, who tend to be homeless for long periods. What distinguishes the two groups is that the chronically homeless tend to have some sort of disability, either addiction or mental health problems, or most often both.

What was learned at that point was that by giving short-term homeless people money for rent, for up to two years, that short-term homelessness could be alleviated and usually solved. For the chronically homeless, something known as supportive housing was also incredibly effective. What that meant was rent subsidies plus on-site services to help people deal with the problems that were causing them to be unable to stay housed.

David Remnick: If the numbers went down, as you say, what happened that made them shoot back up, because I think any resident of San Francisco where you're from, Los Angeles, New York, to some degree, Philadelphia and go on and on and on and not just big cities, has to recognize in all kinds of neighborhoods, that there are more people on the street?

Jennifer Egan: Well, there are a few things to say there. One is the cities in which this is true tend to be pretty affluent cities. With the exception of Philadelphia, all of the cities you mentioned fit that description. It really comes down to rent. When median rents reach a certain point that is beyond the reach of the average person, you start to see a rise in homelessness.

The other thing is mental health care. It's egregiously inadequate in this country. The Times just reported recently that only 20% of people with opioid use disorder who are trying to get medication-assisted treatment have gotten it. We know that we have an epidemic of opioid use in this country that feeds directly into homelessness. In fact, many of the subjects that I worked with over the past year had that as really the cause of their homelessness.

David Remnick: Jen, talk to me a little bit about how you go about a project of writing something as large and sprawling and complicated as homelessness, whether in New York or anywhere else. Usually, you're spending your days glued to the desk, and glued to your own imagination and the problem in front of you on the page. Now, you're going out into the street. How do you begin? Where do you go? What are you looking for?

Jennifer Egan: Tackling homelessness is so broad and amorphous as to be impossible, so I needed to find a focus. For me, I began researching in July of 2022 and I quickly learned that a new supportive housing development, meaning a building where people live, and whose rents are subsidized, and they have services on-site, so chronically homeless people being housed, I learned that such a building was opening in Brooklyn in September. It was empty and would need to be filled, and I thought that sounds perfect. I talked to a lot of people who were moving into this supportive housing building, which is called 90 Sands. I followed a number of them over many, many months and one of them is a man who is nicknamed Speedy.

Speedy: This is my first time being in a journal like The New Yorker. That's my first time--

Jennifer Egan: Who is striking really in part for his youth. He turned 30 right before he moved into 90 Sands last September, so he's younger than a lot of the people who live in the building.

Speedy: The first time I was homeless, I was 23 going on to 24. I suffer from bipolar disorder and PTSD disorder.

Jennifer Egan: Speedy has spent most of his young adulthood cycling in and out of shelters, jails, street homelessness and psychiatric hospitals. How has it been moving in here? How is it different? Talk a little bit-- you've been here about two months.

Speedy: The view is nice. They give free Wi-Fi. They give you a large amount that's $1.30. They give you on-site therapists, psychiatrists. They give you the [unintelligible 00:08:05] . They take care of everything for you here. All you've got to do is, pardon my language, don't mess it up. Just don't mess it up for yourself.

Jennifer Egan: He's now been there a year and he just signed a new two-year lease. His life is getting going. He loves to deliver things, hence his nickname. He's been working a lot. He's planning to go back to school. He's working on all kinds of things like dental hygiene, which is a massive problem for people who have lived on the street.

Speedy: I feel like crying right now but I can't cry right now because I'm happy at the same time.

Jennifer Egan: Sometimes you cry when you're happy. I cry a lot.

Speedy: It just that I'm happy because it just hurt sometimes when you be around people and they don't know what type of situation going through sometimes, so I just--

Jennifer Egan: Of course.

Speedy: I'm just thankful that I have a home. I have a home now. I'm thankful that I got people that's watching me still.

Jennifer Egan: Is it easy to bring people with these kinds of difficult histories into one place within the span of eight months? No. Does it work? From what I have seen, the answer is yes. A year later, not one unit has been surrendered. Now, I'm not saying everything is going great. People have passed away. There have been a number of drug overdoses, but the statistics on supportive housing are excellent. In fact, the most recent study showed that almost 90% of chronically homeless people who are placed in supportive housing remain housed two years later.

The problem is, it's expensive, and yet it's much more expensive to leave these people on the street. I do think, yes, this is a solution to chronic homelessness.

David Remnick: When you say it's more expensive to leave people on the street, you mean that financially or humanly?

Jennifer Egan: Well, humanly, there's no question, but I also mean it financially. A single mentally ill person living on the street costs an estimated $70,000 a year. I saw this vividly. Many subjects I worked with had spent during their street years, sometimes over a year in the hospital dealing with flesh-eating diseases, heart problems. These are people who are in ambulances sometimes multiple times a month. This is incredibly costly to a municipality, but even in New York City, an expensive place, at the high end, supportive housing tends to cost about $36,000 per person per year.

David Remnick: It's practically half. It's half as much to house somebody at 90 Sands than for them to be sleeping on the street and the cost of hospitalization and emergency rooms and ambulances and all the many other things. It's double. That's incredible. That is incredible.

Jennifer Egan: Yes, and that doesn't get into the human costs that you just mentioned.

David Remnick: Without doubt.

Jennifer Egan: This is a miserable situation for everyone.

David Remnick: How much would it cost to scale up this program so that we would see a really visible difference on our streets and, above all, for the homeless themselves, for the unhoused themselves?

Jennifer Egan: There's no clear answer to that, but I think for a back-of-the-envelope estimate, there's really only one person I would trust to give me that, and that is Dennis Culhane, the sociologist at Penn. Dennis estimates that $10 billion a year, meaning $5 billion for rapid rehousing for short-term homelessness, $5 billion to up the amount of supportive housing for chronic homelessness would do it.

That's a lot of money, $10 billion a year, but you have to put it in context. We are hemorrhaging money at this problem, but we're doing it piecemeal, publicly, privately, this funding stream, that funding stream. The good news is there's a solution, and we know what it is. The bad news is it requires unity at the federal level to enact it. Unity, of course, is what we lack.

David Remnick: I think in fact, in Build Back Better, which was the initial Biden administration plan, there was significant new investment sketched in for housing to the tune of, I think, hundreds of billions of dollars. That collapsed.

Jennifer Egan: Exactly.

David Remnick: What impact would that have made? It sounds like it would've made an enormous difference.

Jennifer Egan: Everyone I've talked to said that it absolutely would've made an enormous difference, and we're incredibly sorry to see it go. As you say, it didn't make it to the finish line because of an unwillingness to spend money, but I think the problem is that no one wants to see that line item in a budget, but we are already spending it in all of these diffuse ways.

David Remnick: I know you live in New York, so there's the convenience of that. You have proximity going forward, but also you chose to write about New York as opposed to Los Angeles, San Francisco, or the rest. How is New York in particular different or not from those other cities?

Jennifer Egan: New York has a number of interesting features. The chief among them, the fact that it is the only city in America that guarantees shelter to every homeless person who requests it, whether an individual or in a family. It's the only place like that in America. While it may seem that we have a lot of visible homelessness here, it is really nothing compared to what you see in a place like California. To give you a statistic, fewer than 6% of homeless people in New York are living outdoors, and more than 70% of those in California are.

David Remnick: That's incredible. Now, how do you rate someone like Mayor Eric Adams in New York, who has proposed various fixes, involuntary confinement of homeless people with mental illnesses, for example, or at one point, he wanted to use an abandoned airfield to house migrants, which is an acute problem. All of these seem to be shot down by advocates for the homeless.

Jennifer Egan: First of all, the asylum-seeking situation in New York right now is very specific. Because what I'm writing about is chronic homelessness, meaning people with disabilities whose problems have kept them on the street for years, in a way, the asylum-seeking situation doesn't overlap very much with what I'm doing. I will say that in terms of the involuntary commitment, to some degree that already exists. If you see a person who is a danger to themselves or others, they can be treated involuntarily and I think always were, to some degree.

I'm not sure how new some of that was. My sense is that the big change in New York in the time I've been working on this story is definitely the migrant crisis and literally, now I think something like 100,000 asylum seekers in the City. That is a crisis that is going to have to be managed separately, because one interesting thing is that a person who is undocumented cannot get supportive housing. None of those people will be in the population that I was working with. In fact, my sense is that these are not people with disabilities. These are people seeking a better life.

David Remnick: Jen, in a way, I hate to ask this question, but I can't help it. You, my understanding is, have a brother who has had mental illness challenges, and I'm guessing that this might have been some impetus for your deep, deep interest in this problem.

Jennifer Egan: Absolutely. Not only I'm not alienated by obvious psychosis in people around me, I am actually drawn to it because my brother committed suicide in 2016. He's not here, but I feel an affinity for people who are struggling mentally, because I feel like I have some sense of what they might be going through because he was so open with me and we were very close. I also know that if he hadn't had a family that worked tirelessly to try to help him and keep him stable, he absolutely would've been on the street.

I guess it's just a way of trying to work against what I think happens very easily, which is that we just feel a kind of alienation from people whose lives seem to be so far from our own, not just living outdoors, but seeming to be responding to stimuli that aren't there, whatever it may be. I don't like that feeling of alienation. I want to cross that distance, and it's deeply satisfying to me to do that.

David Remnick: Jennifer, again, I'm so grateful to you for revisiting this deep problem and for the piece that you just published in The New Yorker. Thanks so much.

Jennifer Egan: Thank you, David.

David Remnick: A Journey from Homelessness to a Room of One's Own is the title of Jennifer Egan's new report in The New Yorker, and you can find it at newyorker.com. You can also read some of her fiction and essays there as well.

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