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THE TUNNEL HOME: A STORY OF HOUSING FIRST  
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Patrick Markee
December 3, 2025
The Nation
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_ In the 1990s, a group of New Yorkers helped prove the effectiveness
of a bold but simple approach to homelessness. Now Trump wants to end
it. _

Margaret Morton, Bernard Under Shaft, The Tunnel, 1995.(, © 2025
Margaret Morton Archive / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)

 

The train tunnel ran for 50 city blocks, nearly three miles, under
Manhattan streets and parkland. It stretched along the island’s far
west side, near the Hudson River, from West 72nd Street, underneath
Riverside Park, all the way to West Harlem. It was one of those rare
places that made you feel both inside and utterly outside the
city—as if, for a few moments, you could convince yourself that
you’d fled the chaos and noise of New York without ever leaving.

The first time I walked deep into the tunnel, I felt myself steadily,
step by step, becoming wrapped in darkness. It was autumn, 1995, and
as the sunlight from the southern entrance faded, I could feel my
pupils dilating to capture the available light, allowing me to glimpse
the grime-streaked walls, the graffiti, and the tracks with their
battered wooden ties. I was suddenly aware of the descending silence,
the background thrum and clatter of New York City fading away as if
the volume knob on an old stereo were being turned down. But
gradually, other sounds intruded: rats skittering on the gravel and
rails, water dripping from the two-story-high ceiling or a ventilation
grate—and then the echo of someone shouting from the tunnel mouth
behind me. This dark, muted place, I was reminded, was also a living
space, a home of last resort for dozens of desperate New Yorkers
seeking refuge.

These men and women were about to be expelled from the tunnel. I was
working with the Coalition for the Homeless, the nation’s oldest
homeless advocacy organization, just starting what would become a
20-year career defending the rights of vulnerable New Yorkers. My role
was to help with a multi-organization effort to find safe and
affordable homes for these tunnel dwellers. But it was anything but
simple.

During the chilly months I spent visiting the tunnel, Rudy Giuliani
was finishing his second year as mayor of New York. It was a grim
moment. In the face of rising homelessness and immiseration, he had
chosen to ramp up a set of harsh and overtly punitive policies, which
some of the city’s elites were already hailing as “saving” New
York. Far better to arrest homeless people, the theory went, or erect
bureaucratic barriers to aid, or even kick them out of municipal
shelters and back onto the streets, than to find them stable places to
live.

But inside the tunnel, working alongside some remarkable people
who’d managed to survive some unimaginably trying circumstances, I
saw what was possible when both their needs and their hopes were met.
Even more, I learned some crucial lessons about the enduring, and
pernicious, myths surrounding homelessness, and the way those myths
not only warped New York’s response to the crisis but shaped the
approach adopted by scores of other cities.

Now, all these decades later, I have been horrified to watch as the
most extreme versions of these policies make a comeback, this time at
the hands of Donald Trump.

The backlash era: Police evict a homeless man from Tompkins Square
Park in 1991.(David A. Cantor / AP)

No one knows precisely when the first homeless people began sleeping
in the Riverside Park tunnel. Once, during an earlier part of the 20th
century, the tracks of the West Side Line had served the
slaughterhouses of downtown Manhattan and, later, the manufacturing
zones in Chelsea and the Garment District. But as competing rail yards
popped up in New Jersey and the Bronx, and as manufacturing evaporated
from the city, train traffic on the West Side Line slowed and then
halted. By the late 1970s, both the tracks and the tunnel had
essentially been abandoned—at the same moment that a new form of
mass homelessness had emerged citywide.

New York was the original epicenter of the modern homelessness crisis,
the place where it exploded into visibility. By 1989, some 25,000
people were sleeping each night in municipal shelters, and thousands
more were sleeping rough on the streets. As homelessness worsened,
some desperate people sought makeshift shelter in increasingly remote
places, including the subway network, bridge abutments, and train
tunnels. By the early 1990s, dozens of homeless people were sleeping
each night in the Riverside Park tunnel, and many had built shanties
and other ramshackle dwellings there, most of them crowded near the
southern entrance.

Though many people felt safer in the tunnel than on the streets, it
was still a treacherous place. Rats roamed free, garbage accumulated,
there was no running water, and the winter cold and damp threatened
death or severe injury by hypothermia or frostbite. But with train
traffic virtually halted, many struggling people chose the hazards of
the tunnel over those of the subways or of the vast, warehouse-like
shelters that the city had hastily created in the first decade of the
crisis.

Some folks ended up living in the tunnel for years. Joe, a Vietnam War
veteran, called it home for more than two decades; during much of that
time, he lived with his partner, Cathy, in a sturdy plywood shack with
a mattress propped on plastic milk crates. José, who had lost the
last of a series of low-wage jobs when a garment factory closed,
stayed for 13 years. Bernard, dubbed the “mayor” of the tunnel,
lived there for more than a decade in a ramshackle camp he’d
fashioned deep underground.

Homeless New Yorkers protest Giuliani’s punitive policies on
homelessness.(Bud Williams / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

For a brief period in the 1990s, the Riverside Park tunnel dwellers
captured the imagination of New Yorkers and even those beyond the
city. Tales of the homeless people in the train tunnel were recounted
in numerous news articles and nonfiction books, as well as at least
one film and one novel. Perhaps the best accounts came from the
photographer Margaret Morton’s 1995 book _The Tunnel_, which
included direct recollections of the tunnel dwellers she knew so well,
alongside her austere and luminous photographs. Marc Singer’s
documentary _Dark Days_, shot over several years on black-and-white
16-millimeter film and memorably set to the music of the hip-hop
artist and turntablist DJ Shadow, was a moving and gritty chronicle of
life in the tunnel.

But alongside these sympathetic portraits—and far more common—was
a harsh, distorted image of homeless New Yorkers, one born of a
creeping “compassion fatigue” and the mean-spirited politics of
what came to be known as the “backlash era.” Among the news media,
the rise in homelessness was rarely discussed in terms of actual
causes and real solutions. It was seldom recognized as the structural
problem it has always been—the consequence of an acute and worsening
housing affordability crisis, which was itself the result of broad
economic shifts, neoliberal policies, an ascendant right-wing
politics, and systemic racism.

Instead, the tabloids spilled thousands of gallons of ink about the
“squeegee men” gathering near the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel
and other commuter corridors, or people like Larry Hogue, a homeless
veteran dubbed “the Wild Man,” who’d suffered a traumatic brain
injury during his military service and was prone to erratic, sometimes
aggressive behavior. In the ranting world of the tabloids, these few
individuals came to stand in for all homeless and poor New Yorkers,
creating a cartoonish, menacing picture of homelessness that congealed
into a cultivated narrative about New York City’s decline and
crisis.

In similar fashion, some of the stories and accounts of the people
living in the tunnel morphed into urban folklore, or even something
worse. Jennifer Toth’s 1993 book _The Mole People_ became perhaps
the best-known account and remained in print for years, unlike similar
ethnographic studies. But its stigmatizing title would outlive the
book itself, and the term _mole people_—indeed, the idea of some
alien species of homeless tunnel dwellers—came to permeate the
popular culture of the era.

During my decades of work as an advocate, I fielded countless
inquiries about “mole people”: news reporters looking to interview
or film the “underground homeless”; policymakers convinced that
vast numbers of homeless people dwelled under the city’s streets;
students and others entranced by the absurd idea of tribal
communities, with their own exotic rituals, living in near isolation
amid a sprawling metropolis. The name conjured up the image of a
separate race of beings, like H.G. Wells’s Morlocks or the
villainous Mole Man’s blind minions from the _Fantastic Four_ comic
books—a race far removed from regular New Yorkers.

These ideas were buttressed by a cruel rhetorical scaffolding built up
by Giuliani and his right-wing allies. Homeless New Yorkers were
routinely depicted as pathological, crazy, drug-addicted, or violent,
even though homeless people were far more likely to be the victims of
violence than to commit it and were victimized at a far higher rate
than non-homeless people. Likewise, Giuliani and his followers would
effectively blame homeless people for their homelessness. They’d
portray them as lazy, resistant to work, and lacking “personal
responsibility,” and would then craft policies supposedly intended
to help them address these alleged failings, but that were really
designed to deny or cut off safety-net benefits for them. The fact
that the vast majority of homeless New Yorkers were Black or Latino
only made these stereotypes more pernicious, demonstrating how rooted
they were in the wider American legacy of racism and the specific
white-backlash politics that Giuliani and his ilk practiced.

Cruelty first: Rudy Giuliani, who pushed a relentlessly harsh
anti-homeless agenda during his time as mayor, alongside his pal
Donald Trump.(Evy Mages / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

It was amid this anti-homeless fervor that my colleagues and I began
our work in the Riverside Park train tunnel. In 1991, a rail extension
was built to allow non-diesel cars, like Amtrak’s passenger trains,
to travel to Pennsylvania Station. Amtrak announced that it would
begin passenger train service through the tunnel, and in 1995, after
the trains had started to run again, the agency prepared to expel the
homeless people from the tunnel for good.

Hearing from tunnel residents about the impending eviction, a group of
neighbors and activists on Manhattan’s Upper West Side raised a
ruckus and contacted the Coalition for the Homeless. Coalition staff
investigated and, among other things, discovered that during the
previous year, in November 1994, the secretary of the US Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Henry Cisneros, had quietly set
aside some 250 federal housing vouchers for homeless people living in
train tunnels. He had taken this unprecedented action after witnessing
firsthand, on a visit to New York, dozens of homeless people sleeping
rough in the subway system. However, many months later, only two of
those vouchers had actually been issued. The Coalition urged federal
officials to halt the tunnel evictions while it worked with another
local nonprofit organization to use the vouchers to help move the
tunnel dwellers into their own homes.

This plan was considered audacious. At the time, a widespread myth
existed that there was a group of “hardcore” homeless people who
simply could not live in homes of their own—that these folks were
somehow too sick, too unready, too broken—and the people of the
tunnels were seen as prime examples of that mythical group. But to
anyone who’d talked with the Riverside Park tunnel dwellers, it was
clear that merely offering them a worse alternative—a cot in the
shelter system or some other cold public space—would never succeed.
What they needed and wanted was real housing.

When I first visited in late 1995, the work of relocating the tunnel
dwellers to their own homes was underway. A young caseworker from our
partner organization, Project Renewal, had done an incredible job
navigating the byzantine bureaucracy involved in dispensing IDs and
other necessary documents for people who’d long lost them or never
had them at all, and then completing the paperwork for the federal
housing vouchers. My Coalition colleagues had begun rounding up the
last holdouts—a handful of tunnel residents who feared leaving the
only home they’d known for years or didn’t believe Amtrak’s
expulsion order was real.

At the same time, folks like José, Bernard, Joe, and Cathy, who were
all in the process of moving to apartments, had been joined—and in
some cases replaced—by a group of recent immigrants from Mexico,
Central America, and the Caribbean, many of them day laborers who had
fallen on hard times. My focus, as a speaker of passable Spanish, was
to work with the Latino immigrants to obtain the required paperwork
and ease their fears about moving from the familiar tunnel to an
unfamiliar home. But I was also lucky enough to get to know, even if
only briefly, Bernard and the other longtime tunnel residents and
learn some vital lessons.

The way home: A formerly homeless man stands in his new apartment at
Huston Commons, a Housing First program in Portland, Maine.(Brianna
Soukup / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

The most crucial lesson involved the meaning of genuine, enduring
solutions to the problem of homelessness. Since the early days of the
modern crisis, advocates and homeless people themselves had argued
that subsidized housing combined with support services could create
stable homes, even for people with long-term or repeated episodes of
homelessness, including those struggling with severe mental illness
and addiction disorders. This combination had become known as
“supportive housing.”

In the 1990s, this supposedly utopian approach to homelessness came to
be buttressed by a growing body of empirical evidence. Academic
researchers found that the “success rate” of supportive
housing—the share of formerly homeless people living with
disabilities who remained in their homes—was extraordinarily high.
And by the early part of the following decade, the first of many
studies on the costs to taxpayers of supportive housing had also found
that supportive housing was in fact cheaper for taxpayers than leaving
homeless people with health problems to cycle between costly shelters,
hospitals, and jails.

The other breakthrough in the 1990s came from the pioneering work of a
community psychologist named Sam Tsemberis. In talking to homeless men
on New York City’s streets, he found that although many refused to
go to the large municipal shelters, they would be willing to move into
an apartment immediately, contrary to the prevalent myth of the
“housing-resistant” homeless person. So he tried exactly that, and
through his nonprofit organization, Pathways to Housing, he marshaled
support services—visits from social workers, access to medication
and treatment, and more—to help the men keep their homes. The logic
behind this approach was blindingly obvious, confirming what homeless
people themselves had long experienced: that it was far more difficult
to engage in mental health treatment or recover from addiction while
homeless (whether sleeping in a shelter or on the streets) than to do
so while living in a real home. Tsemberis called this approach
“Housing First,” and over time, it was replicated by other groups
in New York and across the country.

But in its earliest years, Housing First was met with skepticism. A
growing number of politicians—including many, like future governor
Andrew Cuomo, from the right flank of the Democratic Party—pushed
the notion that “hardcore” homeless people were simply not
“housing-ready” and needed to undergo therapeutic programs of one
type or another before they could be provided with housing aid. This
idea came to be formalized as the “continuum-of-care approach,”
and it would first take hold at the local and then the national level.
It was designed to force desperate people to jump through bureaucratic
hoops and wait long periods in order—maybe—to secure housing aid.
It reflected, at its root, the poisonous notion that homeless people
were somehow different, incomplete as individuals, and not yet ready
for a home.

But during my months visiting the Riverside Park tunnel, it became
ever more clear that this “treatment-first” philosophy was absurd;
all I could see were people who could make a home literally anywhere.

The most crucial lesson involved the meaning of genuine, enduring
solutions to the problem of homelessness. Since the early days of the
modern crisis, advocates and homeless people themselves had argued
that subsidized housing combined with support services could create
stable homes, even for people with long-term or repeated episodes of
homelessness, including those struggling with severe mental illness
and addiction disorders. This combination had become known as
“supportive housing.”

In the 1990s, this supposedly utopian approach to homelessness came to
be buttressed by a growing body of empirical evidence. Academic
researchers found that the “success rate” of supportive
housing—the share of formerly homeless people living with
disabilities who remained in their homes—was extraordinarily high.
And by the early part of the following decade, the first of many
studies on the costs to taxpayers of supportive housing had also found
that supportive housing was in fact cheaper for taxpayers than leaving
homeless people with health problems to cycle between costly shelters,
hospitals, and jails.

The other breakthrough in the 1990s came from the pioneering work of a
community psychologist named Sam Tsemberis. In talking to homeless men
on New York City’s streets, he found that although many refused to
go to the large municipal shelters, they would be willing to move into
an apartment immediately, contrary to the prevalent myth of the
“housing-resistant” homeless person. So he tried exactly that, and
through his nonprofit organization, Pathways to Housing, he marshaled
support services—visits from social workers, access to medication
and treatment, and more—to help the men keep their homes. The logic
behind this approach was blindingly obvious, confirming what homeless
people themselves had long experienced: that it was far more difficult
to engage in mental health treatment or recover from addiction while
homeless (whether sleeping in a shelter or on the streets) than to do
so while living in a real home. Tsemberis called this approach
“Housing First,” and over time, it was replicated by other groups
in New York and across the country.

But in its earliest years, Housing First was met with skepticism. A
growing number of politicians—including many, like future governor
Andrew Cuomo, from the right flank of the Democratic Party—pushed
the notion that “hardcore” homeless people were simply not
“housing-ready” and needed to undergo therapeutic programs of one
type or another before they could be provided with housing aid. This
idea came to be formalized as the “continuum-of-care approach,”
and it would first take hold at the local and then the national level.
It was designed to force desperate people to jump through bureaucratic
hoops and wait long periods in order—maybe—to secure housing aid.
It reflected, at its root, the poisonous notion that homeless people
were somehow different, incomplete as individuals, and not yet ready
for a home.

But during my months visiting the Riverside Park tunnel, it became
ever more clear that this “treatment-first” philosophy was absurd;
all I could see were people who could make a home literally anywhere.

Even as the continuum-of-care approach was becoming local gospel, our
work with the Riverside Park tunnel dwellers was proving to be one of
the early Housing First–style success stories. By the time Amtrak
fully fenced off the tunnel in 1996, we had helped some 40 homeless
people who’d lived underground move into permanent housing. Almost
none of them ever returned to homelessness.

Many tunnel dwellers were helped by the federal rental vouchers that
advocates had managed to pry loose from HUD. Others ended up in
supportive housing, where they were assisted by social workers and
received mental health treatment, sometimes for a brief, transitional
period and sometimes for years afterward. These residents included
Bob, a longtime denizen of the tunnel who stopped using drugs after
moving into a former single-room-occupancy hotel in Manhattan’s
Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood that had been converted into supportive
housing with on-site social services. Others, like Joe and Cathy, who
lived in an East Harlem walk-up apartment, and Bernard, who moved in
with his father in Harlem, were finally able to afford their own homes
and avoid returning to the streets.

I saw some of the former tunnel folks in 1999 at the funeral for one
of the original tunnel dwellers. José had lived for four years in an
apartment in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx with the help of
a federal housing voucher, staying there until his death. Seeing the
old faces from the tunnel at the memorial—and over the years, from
time to time, at the Coalition’s offices—I remembered thinking
they looked different: calmer, healthier, less gaunt and desperate.
But still, and I may have been imagining this, they also looked
haunted, as if the years in the tunnel would never leave them.

Housing last: A rendering of Utah’s planned homeless “campus,”
where people will be required to engage in treatment and
work.(Courtesy of the Utah Office of Homeless Services)

In the 21st century, the Housing First approach finally began to break
through the wall of myth and bias that had blocked its adoption.
Several US cities embraced it, with resounding success. Houston
managed to reduce its homeless population by more than half using
Housing First programs. Utah cut
[[link removed]]
its population of long-term homeless people by more than 90 percent
with Housing First assistance. And since 2010, Housing First programs
have helped to reduce homelessness among military veterans nationwide
by 55 percent
[[link removed]].
In New York City, where homelessness has spiked under the Eric Adams
administration, Zohran Mamdani has pledged to address street
homelessness with supportive housing and community mental health
programs.

Research bears out the wisdom of this approach. A systematic review
[[link removed]] of 26 such studies
found that participants in Housing First programs spent 88 percent
fewer days homeless than participants in “treatment-first”
programs.

But despite the manifest success of Housing First and supportive
housing more broadly, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have set
their sights on dismantling these programs and demonizing homeless
people. Echoing the invective wielded by Giuliani and his sidekicks in
the “backlash era,” Fox News and other right-wing outlets now
regularly depict homeless people as criminals and addicts. The popular
Fox News host Jesse Watters has called homeless people “zombies”
and “an invasive species.” In September, the _Fox and Friends_
host Brian Kilmeade called for the execution by “involuntary lethal
injection” of homeless people living with mental illness. Trump
himself has embraced this language: In a 2023 campaign video, unsubtly
titled “Ending the Nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicted, and
Dangerously Deranged,” Trump promised to arrest all homeless people
and remove them to “tent cities” on the outskirts of urban
centers.

Now Republicans are making this pledge a reality. Despite Salt Lake
City’s record of success with Housing First, Utah officials are
building a facility on vacant tracts of land outside the city to
create a complex where more than 1,000 homeless people will be
forcibly locked away. An advocate from the National Homelessness Law
Center compared the planned facility to the Japanese internment camps
during World War II.

Back in Washington, the administration has stuck closely to the
Project 2025 instruction manual that candidate Trump so vociferously
claimed to disavow. In July, Trump issued an executive order, crudely
titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” that
called for eliminating federal “support for ‘housing first’
policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote
treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.” In their stead, the
order pushed the punitive and far less effective approach of hinging
housing on treatment or counseling, all the while making it easier to
arrest and even institutionalize people. In November, the
administration went further, pulling federal funding for Housing First
programs and redirecting it toward the “treatment-first” model.
Advocates say that the new policy risks sending 170,000 formerly
homeless people back to the streets.

Even more dangerous, Trump has proposed drastic cuts to federal
housing programs—which are already so underfunded that they assist
only one in four eligible low-income households nationwide—along
with two-year time limits on rental assistance. Such policies will not
only harm people who are currently homeless but will inevitably uproot
and displace countless low-income families. Indeed, policy experts who
reviewed the administration’s plans estimate
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that some 4 million people could lose federal housing aid—at a
moment when estimates of the US homeless population (more than 770,000
people per night) are the highest ever recorded.

All of this is dangerous, but none of it is wholly new. Undergirding
these political and policy attacks is the same pernicious and racist
philosophy that reigned during the “backlash era.” It’s a
worldview that sees homeless people as “broken,” dysfunctional,
and even pathological—just as the Riverside Park tunnel dwellers
were often portrayed decades ago.

It has always been difficult to describe the tunnel without making it
seem either too grim or, strange to say, too beautiful—and it could,
indeed, be very beautiful. Often it was both at once.

At the southern end, where most of the shanties were gathered, the
scene was chaotic, and the smell—of food, of refuse, of urine, and
what I came to think of as a mixture of masculine sweat and
despair—was overwhelming. Garbage and rubble, railroad ties and
rusted metal, and the usual urban detritus—plastic bags, fast-food
wrappers, and soda bottles—were strewn amid the shacks. But heading
north, into the darkness, all that changed. There, the most
unforgettable part of the tunnel was the unexpected light—diffuse,
hazy, and breathtaking.

One early-winter day, around the time he left the tunnel for good,
“Mayor” Bernard took me on a walk northward into its depths. We
continued past the sprawling settlement, complete with a campfire and
makeshift benches, that Bernard had built for himself on the west side
of the tracks at a spot where the tunnel’s edge widened away from
the rails. We talked as we walked, with me asking a dozen undoubtedly
naïve questions about daily survival underground, and Bernard
answering in his laconic, patient fashion, until we gradually lapsed
into silence.

But most remarkable of all were the enormous, slanting shafts of
light, descending slowly (if one can say that about beams of light)
from the checkerboard grates in the tunnel ceiling. Perhaps sensing my
wonder, Bernard paused alongside me and said something like, “I
really will miss this place. Sometimes, it’s just so beautiful.”

Thinking back on that moment, as I have many times in the years since,
it struck me that one of the truths about the people in the tunnel was
not that they were broken or lost, but rather that they had lost.
They’d lost jobs and money; they’d lost family; they’d lost
countless belongings; they’d certainly lost homes. And then, being
expelled from the tunnel, albeit to safer and more secure dwellings,
they lost something again.

_PATRICK MARKEE is the former deputy executive director for advocacy
at Coalition for the Homeless in New York City, where he worked for 20
years. His first book, __Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded
Age, _
[[link removed]]_was
recently published by Melville House._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
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Distributed by__ PARS International Corp_
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