“Homeless Shelters and the Blues”

This article analyzes the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York’s political economy and its institutions.