Marvin Olasky | Page 2 | Discovery Institute

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

^{Marvin Olasky
December 27, 2024
Homelessness

4}

Sentimentality vs. Compassion

_{Marvin Olasky
December 27, 2024
Homelessness

4}

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

5}

In the Life of a Homeless Man

_{Marvin Olasky
December 20, 2024
Homelessness

5}

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

5}

Eighty Years of Homelessness Realism, 1914-1994

_{Marvin Olasky
December 13, 2024
Homelessness

5}

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

4}

The Rarity of Homelessness in Judaism

_{Marvin Olasky
December 6, 2024
Homelessness

4}

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

5}

Gurteen and Lowell: Nineteenth Century Views on True Charity

_{Marvin Olasky
November 29, 2024
Homelessness

5}

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

5}

Jerry McAuley’s Nineteenth Century Homelessness Ministry

_{Marvin Olasky
November 22, 2024
Homelessness

5}

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

4}

The War on Homelessness 150 Years Ago

_{Marvin Olasky
November 15, 2024
Homelessness

4}

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

^{Marvin Olasky
November 8, 2024
Homelessness

5}

The Winding Path of Homeless Youth

_{Marvin Olasky
November 8, 2024
Homelessness

5}

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 ›

Magic lamp glowing in the dark with mysterious aura, magic, lamp, dark, glowing, mysterious, aura, genie, wish, mystery

^{Marvin Olasky
November 1, 2024
Homelessness

5}

The Aladdin Factor: Why Troubled Kids Fare Better Than Foster Kids

_{Marvin Olasky
November 1, 2024
Homelessness

5}

Aladdin, you may remember from the Disney movie, calls himself a "street rat" and knows how to survive amid homelessness. He is competent. He has "agency," the belief that he can act to improve his circumstances. That mindset is different from what former foster child Rob Henderson describes in his good memoir, Troubled. Read More ›

Male isolated homeless wearing a brown hat sitting on the pedestrian.

^{Marvin Olasky
October 25, 2024
Homelessness

5}

“Homelessness in America”: Stephen Eide’s Eye on Reality

_{Marvin Olasky
October 25, 2024
Homelessness

5}

My third and last book to recommend this month is Stephen Eide’s Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). Read More ›

^{Marvin Olasky
October 18, 2024
Homelessness

5}

Inequity and Iniquity in Manhattan Housing

_{Marvin Olasky
October 18, 2024
Homelessness

5}

In 2015, the May 15 cover of New York Magazine ran this headline: “New York Real Estate Is the New Swiss Bank Account: Foreigners are flooding the market to stash, hide, and sometimes launder their money.” That intrigued me, because I had done some research into Manhattan condos selling for $20 million and up. Read More ›

Young depressed homeless girl or woman standing alone under the bridge on the street on the cold weather feeling anxious abandoned and freezing selective focus

^{Marvin Olasky
October 11, 2024
Homelessness

4}

The Homeless Mascots of “the Anointed”

_{Marvin Olasky
October 11, 2024
Homelessness

4}

Sowell wrote that homeless individuals often became "mascots of the anointed." Sleeping-on-the-streets miseries "enable the anointed to score points against a benighted society." Sowell wrote about requests that homeless advocates receive: "We need a witness for a hearing. Can you get us a homeless family: mother, father — father out of work in the past four months from an industrial plant — white?" Read More ›