Starting in the mid-1970s, New York’s streets filled with a new kind of vagabond—the so-called “bums,” “panhandlers,” and “shopping bag ladies” (known as SBLs among aides to Mayor Ed Koch). A third of this population, by some estimates, had been released from state mental institutions with nowhere to go. The city’s cheapest housing, its notorious Single Room Occupancy hotels, were closing to make way for luxury buildings.
