Bennett Reinhardt

Major: Urban Studies

Biography: Bennett Reinhardt (he/him/his) is a homelessness advocate studying Urban Studies at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. He is also a student leader at the Office of Campus Ministry. For the last year, he has been a community organizing intern at the Open Hearts Initiative, a neighborhood non-profit where neighbors build relationships and networks of support across housing status. He hopes to continue the work of supporting homeless New Yorkers after graduation from Fordham.

Research Title: Placing Homeless Bodies: Homelessness in New York City in Sociospatial Perspective

Faculty Mentor: Greta Gilbertson, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Abstract: By spring 2023, the New York City department of Homeless Services was regularly reporting a nightly shelter census higher than 70,000 individuals; and, in the most recently available data, gathered in January 2022, the City reported in its HOPE (Homeless Outreach Population Estimate) that there are approximately 3,439 homeless New Yorkers who sleep in public. This population, the size of a small city, has a unique experience of the physical spaces in New York, owing in part to foreclosures of access brought about by anti-homeless architecture, targeted policing and enforcement, and widespread stigmatization. This study attempts to understand how the built and social environments of the city are constructed in ways that include and exclude homeless individuals (sometimes simultaneously), and how this group creatively and continuously responds to such designs. The study includes multiple qualitative methodologies, including an in-depth ethnography at a respite shelter (an overnight facility for a small group of homeless men and in the basement of a Manhattan church) and formal interviews with New Yorkers who have experienced homelessness. I argue that we must understand the phenomenon of homelessness in space as a particularized form of poverty and marginalization that has engendered distinct behaviors, practices, and worldviews in homeless people themselves.