A Duet For Home

The story takes place in contemporary New York City, where the unhoused population is particularly large, and much of the novel’s broader conflict focuses on the controversy surrounding the Housing Stability Plus (HSP) policy, which was instituted by New York City’s Republican former mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2004. Ostensibly designed to address the surging numbers of unhoused people in the city, this program removed families from shelters within 90 days and placed them in apartments regardless of their ability to live on their own. The administration also stopped giving unhoused people priority access to federal funds (money from the United States government). Instead, it paid landlords to provide apartments for unhoused people, but such apartments were often in terrible shape. In April 2005, the public advocate for New York City, Betsy Gotbaum, published a scathing report about the program titled “Subsidy Shame: City Pays Landlords for Hazardous Housing.” In the novel, Jeremiah and his mother avoid this program altogether by finding an apartment through Ms. Gonzalez. However, the author uses other characters in the novel to illustrate the fundamental issues with the HSP policy, as when Abuela shows Jeremiah and Tyrell pictures of a precarious apartment and states, “See there? That’s a broken pipe.