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. And that? A faucet that doesn’t work. And that green stuff? Mold!” (60). These anecdotal details are designed to suggest that the policy is an inadequate response to a complex problem.

When Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, became mayor of New York City in 2014, he returned to the policy of giving unhoused people priority access to federal resources, but New York City still continues to struggle with an expanding unhoused population. The Coalition for the Homeless is an organization that advocates for unhoused people and keeps statistics on the unhoused population in New York City, and A Duet for Home is designed to highlight the plight of the numerous unhoused young people in the area. The Coalition estimates that 119,320 New York City schoolchildren were unhoused at some point during 2022 and 2023, just over 10% of all public school students (“Basic Facts About Homelessness: New York City.” Coalition for the Homeless).

In her novel, Glaser brings the issues surrounding HSP into a present-day context. Instead of focusing on the money that the city gives to negligent landlords, Glaser emphasizes that the city only gives money to the shelters to incentivize them to move unhoused people out of the system. This practice creates the false impression that there are fewer unhoused people. Glaser also indicates the lackluster conditions of the shelters themselves when June notices the unclean mattresses and is forced to eat stale bread rolls and questionable vegetables. However, Huey House is portrayed as being downright sanitary compared to some of the other shelters in New York City, where mold, rodents, and abuse are rampant.

While New York City’s policies have not been effective in decreasing the unhoused population or notably helping them, the city does have laws that make it difficult for landlords to evict tenants. In New York City, it is illegal for a landlord to summarily expel residents from a property. Instead, the landlord must go through a legal process and get a warrant from a court. Because Glaser presents the eviction of June’s family as a surprise, it is implied that June and her family experience an illegal eviction.