Analysis of: Danger for homeless New Yorkers as cold-related deaths spike in bitter storm
The Guardian | January 31, 2026
TL;DR
Ten homeless New Yorkers froze to death in one week while over 100,000 sleep in shelters nightly—a 47% increase since 2020. Capitalism treats housing as a commodity rather than a right, making death by exposure a systemic feature, not a policy failure.
Analytical Focus:Material Conditions Contradictions Class Analysis
The death of ten homeless New Yorkers during a single week of bitter cold exposes a fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalist urban development: housing exists as a commodity for profit extraction rather than as a basic human necessity. While New York City technically maintains enough shelter beds to fulfill its 'right to shelter' mandate, the shelter system's violence, instability, and dehumanizing conditions drive people like 'Uncle' to risk death on the streets rather than enter facilities designed more for warehousing surplus labor than for human flourishing. The material conditions underlying this crisis are stark: homelessness has exploded 47% since January 2020, with over 100,000 people now sleeping in shelters nightly and thousands more on the streets. This surge coincides with decades of neoliberal housing policy that prioritized real estate speculation over affordable housing construction. The article identifies 'lack of affordable housing' as the root cause, but this framing obscures how housing scarcity is actively produced by landlord interests, private equity acquisition of housing stock, and zoning laws that protect property values over human life. The unsheltered population—4,500 on a single January night—represents those whom the capitalist housing market has rendered completely disposable. The state's response reveals its class character clearly: rather than addressing the housing commodity system, police conduct sweeps that temporarily relocate homeless individuals before they return to the streets 'because there is no place for them to sleep.' This punitive cycle serves to manage and contain the contradictions of capitalist urbanization without resolving them. The Coalition for the Homeless performs the reproductive labor that the state and market refuse to provide, distributing blankets and food while the system that produces homelessness remains intact. That six of the ten deceased had been 'connected to' homeless services demonstrates that bureaucratic contact with the system offers no protection when the system itself is designed to manage rather than end housing precarity.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Homeless population (surplus labor, often disabled/elderly), Real estate capital and landlords, Municipal government (Mayor Mamdani), Non-profit sector (Coalition for the Homeless), Police, Healthcare workers, Shelter system workers
Beneficiaries: Real estate developers and landlords who profit from housing scarcity, Property owners whose values are protected by limited affordable housing, Private shelter operators receiving government contracts
Harmed Parties: Homeless individuals facing death by exposure, Working class unable to afford housing, Disabled and elderly populations lacking adequate care, Undocumented immigrants competing for limited shelter beds
The homeless population possesses no structural power within this arrangement—they can neither withhold labor nor threaten capital accumulation. Real estate interests maintain dominance through political influence over housing policy, while the state mediates between property interests and minimal humanitarian obligations. Non-profits fill gaps left by state withdrawal, effectively subsidizing the reproduction of labor that capital no longer requires while absorbing potential political discontent.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Housing treated as investment commodity rather than use-value, Decades of affordable housing defunding under neoliberalism, Private equity acquisition of rental housing stock, Wage stagnation relative to housing costs, Deinstitutionalization of mental health care without community alternatives
Housing under capitalism is produced for exchange-value (profit) rather than use-value (shelter). The homeless represent a surplus population—workers no longer needed by capital—whom the housing market prices out entirely. The shelter system functions as a degraded form of social reproduction, maintaining bodies at bare subsistence without enabling genuine labor power reproduction. Non-profit workers like De La Cruz perform care work that the state and market refuse to adequately fund.
Resources at Stake: Urban land values in New York City, Municipal budget allocation between policing and social services, Real estate development rights, Federal and state housing subsidies
Historical Context
Precedents: Reagan-era deinstitutionalization and HUD budget cuts (1980s), Giuliani-era criminalization of homelessness, 2008 financial crisis foreclosure wave, COVID-19 eviction moratorium expiration, Historical poorhouses and workhouses as predecessors to shelters
This crisis represents the mature contradictions of neoliberal urbanism—forty years of policies prioritizing real estate speculation, privatizing public housing, and criminalizing poverty. The doubling of cold-related deaths (14 to 30 annually) between 2013-2018 and 2018-2022 tracks with accelerating housing financialization. New York's 'right to shelter' mandate—won through 1980s litigation—represents an earlier period's class compromise now being hollowed out through systematic underfunding and warehouse-style congregate shelters.
Contradictions
Primary: Housing exists as both a basic survival necessity and a speculative commodity—these functions are fundamentally incompatible. When housing is produced for profit, those who cannot pay market rates are rendered homeless, but their continued existence contradicts capitalism's ideological claim to provide for all who participate in the market.
Secondary: The shelter system is legally mandated but designed to be punitive, creating conditions that drive people to risk death rather than use it, The state must manage surplus populations it cannot employ while maintaining property relations that produce this surplus, Non-profits simultaneously ameliorate suffering and legitimize the system producing it, Police sweeps 'solve' homelessness by relocating it rather than housing people
These contradictions intensify as housing costs continue outpacing wages and climate change produces more extreme weather. The current trajectory points toward either expanded criminalization and forced institutionalization, or a political rupture demanding housing decommodification. The article's mention of Mayor Mamdani (a democratic socialist) suggests some electoral pressure, but fundamental resolution requires challenging private property in housing—a struggle beyond electoral politics.
Global Interconnections
New York's housing crisis connects to global patterns of urban dispossession under financialized capitalism. Private equity firms that acquired distressed housing after 2008 operate internationally, extracting rent from working-class tenants across borders. The same logic driving homelessness in New York produces favelas in São Paulo and informal settlements in Lagos—capital produces housing for profit while millions lack shelter worldwide. Climate change intensifies these contradictions: extreme weather events kill the unsheltered while climate migration and disaster displacement increase housing demand. The material reality is that capitalism simultaneously generates both the housing crisis and the environmental conditions that make it lethal. International solidarity among housing movements—from Berlin's rent control referendums to South African shack dwellers' movements—represents the embryonic form of resistance to housing as global commodity.
Conclusion
The deaths of ten New Yorkers in one week of cold weather are not accidents or policy failures but the predictable outcome of treating housing as a commodity. As De La Cruz states, 'we live in a country that should be able to provide the basic necessities'—the resources exist, but their allocation is determined by profit rather than need. For working-class people, the lesson is that electoral reformism cannot fundamentally resolve housing contradictions rooted in property relations. Tenant organizing, rent strikes, and demands for housing decommodification represent the necessary terrain of struggle. The immediate fight for 'safe haven' shelters and tenant protections must connect to the longer-term project of removing housing from the market entirely. Every frozen body is an indictment of a system that builds luxury towers while people die in doorways.
Suggested Reading
- The State and Revolution by V.I. Lenin (1917) Lenin's analysis of the state as an instrument of class rule illuminates why municipal government responds to homelessness with police sweeps rather than housing provision—the state manages capitalism's contradictions, it doesn't resolve them.
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (2007) Klein documents how crises—including housing crises—become opportunities for further privatization and dispossession, a pattern visible in post-2008 housing financialization that intensified New York's affordability crisis.
- The New Imperialism by David Harvey (2003) Harvey's concept of 'accumulation by dispossession' explains how housing becomes a site of capital extraction from working-class populations, connecting local homelessness to global patterns of urban displacement.