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> If a person is not present enough to maintain perhaps the most basic condition of livability — don’t shit where you eat — it is unreasonable to expect them to do anything else at all, either for themselves, or for others.

> Like a balding man choosing a combover to a decent haircut, the American response to homelessness is rooted in denial of the very possibility of true slums in this greatest of nations.

> The across-the-board denialism results in a perverse search for pathologizing diagnoses and interventions that are framed in terms of blight and disease that must be aggressively stamped out, regardless of the human cost.

> In America, it is politically easier to let humans suffer dehumanizing degradation, than to let them reach for economic and social agency in ways that don’t conform to the aesthetics and optics of middle-class respectability.

> Growing up in India, strangely enough, I was used to seeing more homelessness in less degraded conditions. ... Not much is done by anybody to help, but there is also not much by way of perverse interventionism that prevents the homeless from helping themselves.

> In what ways are we, perhaps, “not there,” despite being physically present within a trail of garbage leading from some equivalent of an overturned trash can to a mess of stuff that pass for “possessions?

> As a more complex example, to be jobless in a milieu that expects you to be employed is like being homeless in some ways. People interact awkwardly with you, and tiptoe around your sensitivities in particular conversations.

> in milieus where having a job is not a necessity for everybody, such as [housewife] it is possible to be “unemployed” but not have to suffer any associated metaphoric homelessness. There is a way for you to be present, visible, and seen, even when the [convo] turns to jobs.