Marvin Olasky

cheerful boy play game or closeup of playing cards in kid hand indoor

^{Marvin Olasky
January 10, 2025
Homelessness}

A Fistful of ACEs

_{Marvin Olasky
January 10, 2025
Homelessness}

An ideological war about homelessness is raging. Many on the right say substance abuse and mental illness cause homelessness. Many on the left emphasize the cost of housing. Those factors are real, but while living among and interviewing 80 men and women who had suffered long-term homelessness in Missouri, California, and Colorado, I learned more about what both sides underestimate: the impact of ACEs (“adverse childhood experiences”). Read More ›

^{Marvin Olasky
January 3, 2025
Homelessness}

Boats Against the Current

_{Marvin Olasky
January 3, 2025
Homelessness}

After writing weekly columns about homelessness for two-and-a-half years, I'm ready to put what I've learned into book form. It will be my 30th book and maybe my last, although (as chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes states) "of making many books there is no end." But since I have written a lot, I'll paraphrase the opening of the Declaration of Independence: "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires" that I declare the reason for writing a book on homelessness when a bunch already exist. Read More ›

Top down view at group of volunteers giving out simple meals to people in need at soup kitchen

^{Marvin Olasky
December 27, 2024
Homelessness}

Sentimentality vs. Compassion

_{Marvin Olasky
December 27, 2024
Homelessness}

I almost let 2024 slip away without a column about the 30th anniversary of The Homeless, an important book by scholar Christopher Jencks published in 1994. It included these sentences: "The homeless are indeed just like you and me in most respects. . . . But important as such similarities are, our differences are also important. To ignore them when we talk about the homeless is to substitute sentimentality for compassion." Read More ›

Homeless people sleeping in sleeping bag and cardboard in a street, concept of financial crisis, unemployment, lose job, vulnerable groups.

^{Marvin Olasky
December 20, 2024
Homelessness}

In the Life of a Homeless Man

_{Marvin Olasky
December 20, 2024
Homelessness}

With Christmas coming, I'm taking a timeout from my usual columnizing to send greetings to Tony, a homeless man in Colorado. He is 67 years old and may be sleeping in a North Face sleeping bag within an abandoned 144-square-foot wooden structure adjacent to a cemetery. (His summer bed has been a picnic bench about a third of a mile from a Safeway/Starbucks.) Read More ›

Poor homeless or refugee barefoot man sleeps on the street in the shadow of the building

^{Marvin Olasky
December 13, 2024
Homelessness}

Eighty Years of Homelessness Realism, 1914-1994

_{Marvin Olasky
December 13, 2024
Homelessness}

I've written in recent weeks about the non-sentimental view of homelessness that was common in the late nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, that realism carried over into academic work as well. Read More ›

jewish holiday Chanukah/Hanukkah family selebration. Jewish festival of lights. Children lighting candles on traditional menorah over glitter shiny background

^{Marvin Olasky
December 6, 2024
Homelessness}

The Rarity of Homelessness in Judaism

_{Marvin Olasky
December 6, 2024
Homelessness}

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? Read More ›

Unrecognizable woman hand helping man to stand up

^{Marvin Olasky
November 29, 2024
Homelessness}

Gurteen and Lowell: Nineteenth Century Views on True Charity

_{Marvin Olasky
November 29, 2024
Homelessness}

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 to assist, they will inevitably sink lower and lower, ’til perchance they end their course in suicide or felony.” Read More ›

^{Marvin Olasky
November 22, 2024
Homelessness}

Jerry McAuley’s Nineteenth Century Homelessness Ministry

_{Marvin Olasky
November 22, 2024
Homelessness}

In 1872, McAuley rented a small Water Street room with funds provided by church leaders who admitted the failure of their plan to import middle-class ecclesiastical style into the Rat Pit. McAuley's services were different than anything Water Street, or other mean streets, had seen. He invited in homeless men and others for cheap but hot food, and lots of hot stories. Read More ›

Family disaster, father goes bankrupt, vintage engraving

^{Marvin Olasky
November 15, 2024
Homelessness}

The War on Homelessness 150 Years Ago

_{Marvin Olasky
November 15, 2024
Homelessness}

a teenage boy who ran away from home, scared, stands alone on the platform,

^{Marvin Olasky
November 8, 2024
Homelessness}

The Winding Path of Homeless Youth

_{Marvin Olasky
November 8, 2024
Homelessness}

In the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Tyler quoted homeless individuals about family influences: "My dad and my mom both drank really hard. . . . My grandfather died from alcohol abuse. . . . My dad's three brothers are all alcoholics and do drugs. . . . my cousins, they're all drug dealers. . . . Dad gets abusive . . ." Read More ›