Kelly Writers House hosted author and journalist Jennifer Egan and Penn social science researcher Dennis Culhane for a discussion titled “Investigating Homelessness” on April 16.
The event, which was co-hosted by Penn’s English Department, focused on how journalistic and research approaches can provide insight into the topic of homelessness. Egan and Culhane discussed a wide array of topics including social policy, investigative journalism, and supportive housing projects before an audience of approximately 30 Penn and Philadelphia community members.
Egan, who graduated from Penn with an English degree in 1985, is the author of several award-winning novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad." She is also a journalist who has written about homelessness for decades, including a 2002 cover story for The New York Times entitled “To Be Young and Homeless."
Most recently, Egan spent a year reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing for a piece published in The New Yorker in September 2023. For the long-form piece, which was titled “A Journey from Homelessness to a Room of One's Own,” Egan spoke to several residents of the supportive housing facility 90 Sands, which provides 185 affordable housing units and 305 units for formerly homeless individuals in Brooklyn.
Egan's piece incorporated research from Culhane, who is the Dana and Andrew Stone Chair of Social Policy at SP2 and former director of research for the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. Culhane’s research, which focuses on homelessness and assisted housing policy, has contributed to efforts to address the needs of populations experiencing housing emergencies and long-term homelessness.
Egan and Culhane began the event by discussing the history of homelessness. Culhane noted that economic and social struggles during the 1980s — including back-to-back recessions, the crowded housing market, and the crack cocaine epidemic — led to a significant rise in homelessness in the young adult population at that time. He said that many of these individuals remained chronically homeless.
“If you look at the adult homeless population, they are dominated by people born between 1955 and 1965, and that’s always been the case,” Culhane said.
Culhane asked Egan about the process of speaking with the residents of 90 Sands and writing about their lives. She said that she developed friendships with some of the residents that continued after the publication of the piece, while also noting the realities of doing so.
“I had never written about any topic in which multiple people I was working with passed away in the course of my research,” Egan said. “It was possible at moments to feel like the world was going to hell.”
From a policy perspective, Culhane highlighted two interventions in the field that he said are highly effective for homeless individuals. The first method is a rapid rehousing program that provides rent security deposits for up to 24 months. The other intervention — supportive housing — is targeted toward chronically homeless individuals. Supportive housing is a form of long-term subsidized housing that includes individualized services for residents, such as a social worker, case manager, or psychiatric nurse.
90 Sands opened as a supportive housing facility in 2022 under the direction of the nonprofit Breaking Ground, which operates nearly 4,000 units across New York City. Egan said that one takeaway from reporting on 90 Sands over the span of a year is that “supportive housing really works.”
“In the course of time that I worked on the story, everyone remained housed, and that is a triumph,” she said.
Egan and Culhane then discussed the intersection between journalism and research and how these forms of investigation can work in tandem to create policy change. Specifically, Culhane pointed to how chronic homelessness stories in the early 2000s led to Bush administration initiatives and how stories on veteran homelessness led to Obama administration initiatives.
“We need all of that storytelling, it’s really crucial,” Culhane said.
Culhane also emphasized that long-form journalism, such as the work Egan engaged in for her piece, can be effective in providing an accurate narrative and minimizing the effects of standalone anecdotes that may misrepresent the realities of homelessness.
“You can live and die by an anecdote,” Culhane said. “People get lost and they can’t see past the anecdote to see this is a social problem.”
Similarly, Egan emphasized the importance of objectivity in reporting on complex issues such as homelessness.
“I’m a bleeding heart liberal, and I totally think the problem comes from mismanaged and malfunctioning systems," she said. "But if I feel like that’s the reporter’s attitude going in, I’m not that interested in reading the story."
College sophomore Eric Lee said that the event with Egan exposed him to a new way of approaching the topic of homelessness.
“I never considered tackling homelessness from a writer’s perspective,” Lee said. “It’s very fascinating.”
Egan is currently the Artist-in-Residence in Penn's English Department, where she teaches a course on "Art of Fiction."
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