Marvin Olasky

After two years of learning about homelessness, next month I’ll start writing a book, with columns week by week showing chapter-by-chapter development. But before leaving my week-by-week miscellaneous approach, I want to mention that Christmas Eve this year is also the beginning of Hanukkah, an eight-day Jewish festival — and Jews are less likely to be homeless than non-Jewish Americans. That’s not a new phenomenon. Between 1880 and 1914, about 1.5 million Jews (including my grandparents) emigrated from czarist Russia to North America. They lived apart from the mainly Christian charity networks, yet observers at the time noted very little Jewish homelessness. Why? One reason: The deeply engrained work ethic within Jewish culture made a big difference. Another: Men needed Read More ›

Earlier this month I reported on Rebecca Gomez’s dissertation critique of “learned helplessness,” when young people — often with foster care backgrounds — feel like puppets who move only when others move them. When we go back 150 years, to the 1870s, we find similar concerns that led poverty-fighters then to distinguish between two other “p” words: “poor” and “pauper.” One Buffalo pastor, S. Humphreys Gurteen, said poverty was a problem, but an underlying cause was not material. He worried about the “concentrated and systematized pauperism which exists in our larger cities.” Gurteen wrote regarding “paupers” — those among the poor who had given up on working — that, “If left to themselves and no kind hand is held out Read More ›

I mentioned last week the infamous Rat Pit in New York’s slums. Several Manhattan clergymen in 1868 rented it for two hours and tried to preach to the fans of battling rats. The New York Herald reported that the professionals preached over the heads of potential Water Street listeners: “What is wanted is a man of enthusiasm . . . rough language and homely bits of philosophy, who intuitively knows exactly the emotions which governs his hearers.” Answering that call was Jerry McAuley, the son of a counterfeiter who abandoned his family. McAuley’s mother, unable to control her son, sent him off to other relatives. At age 19 the riotous drunkard and local bandit went to the state penitentiary for Read More ›

The advent of Thanksgiving brings more stories about homelessness and more debate about its causes. Some advocates emphasize housing costs, as New York’s Charles Brace did during the Civil War era (see my May 3, 2024 column.) Others emphasize substance abuse and mental illness. That also is nothing new: New York City suffered not only through draft and racist riots in 1863 but homelessness in the 1870s, often among Civil War veterans suffering from what today we call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. The debate, even then, was not new. Starting early in the century, the street-level analysis was that some poor people became paupers — not just poor, but distraught and defeated — by getting drunk and staying drunk. What Read More ›

Last week I wrote about Rebecca Gomez’s criticism of foster care. She accurately notes that “a large proportion of foster children will find themselves homeless upon exiting care. The majority do not attend college; do not have stable housing; do not obtain employment that provides a living wage; do not own a car; have never managed money.” Even if they’re not yanked from house to house, Gomez writes that foster children are “surrounded by treatment professionals including foster parents, case managers, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and special education departments. . . . They must gain the[ir] approval . . . to drive a car; take a trip out of state with their foster family; visit a sibling; participate in a contact Read More ›