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Hidden City New York has more homeless than it has in decades. What should the next mayor do? by I

10-22-2013 • http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/28/1310

Mary Brosnahan, the president of the Coalition for the Homeless, has worked for that organization for twenty-five years. She grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, and got her undergraduate degree at Notre Dame. Dark-haired and soft-spoken, she seems to enjoy the complications of public policy as much as Gibbs does. Patrick Markee, the C.F.H.’s senior policy analyst, is a graduate of St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, and of Harvard. He has a high forehead, a short ginger-and-gray beard (sometimes), and a voice that jumps into its upper registers when he is outraged. That two such earnest, unassuming people can get our multibillionaire mayor so upset seems a remarkable thing. Gibbs generally refers to them and to others in advocacy groups as “the litigants.” The term applies, because the C.F.H. and others have been bringing suits against the city, with the help of the Legal Aid Society, in an ongoing sequence ever since Callahan. She pronounces the word “litigants” with an air of careful n