Elliott, 61, was born and raised in Poughkeepsie. After spending his early years in foster care due to his parents' alcoholism, he became homeless at 15 and slept at the Poughkeepsie train station. He turned to theft for survival and spent over two decades in and out of prison. Since returning to the area in 2010, Elliott has struggled to find steady work due to his criminal record. Today, he makes a living collecting and selling scrap metal, stays out of trouble, and deals with prostate cancer.

“What I always tell young people is this: go to school, get an education. Education is the key to success in this country. I was just a kid on the street with no one to look up to and no one to learn from.”

“This place used to be full of trees, and a lot of homeless people lived under them,” Elliott said. “You could see tents from the street. But last year, the mayor had most of the trees cut down and pushed the homeless out of Main Street.”

Sid, 53, was born and raised in Poughkeepsie. He now lives in a local park and collects and sells recyclables to earn money. Photographed in front of an abandoned building.

“This place is full of abandoned buildings. People sleep on the street, no jobs, no money. The mayor just wants to push the homeless out. Nobody cares about people here.”

Andrew, 43, was born in Beacon and has lived in Poughkeepsie since he was two. He works a range of part-time jobs—cooking in fast food restaurants, working in warehouses—anything that helps him get by.

“This place has always been a shit place,” he says, “but now it’s even worse. When I was a kid, the streets were full of people, kids walking and playing—now there’s nothing. Still, it’s home.”

Dinayharae, 15, moved to Poughkeepsie from Newburgh three years ago and now attends Poughkeepsie High School. She wants to become an investment agent—not to work for someone else, but to have others work for her.

“I wish the schools could give everybody more opportunities, and the food feels like jail food. The neighborhood is very good—I could say, from my last neighborhood, I don't experience the same thing. Here, even though some people have beef together, they still could get together. It's dangerous, but a lot of places are more dangerous, from a lot of things, than here. I feel like the community could be changed in a different way, though. For example, like, streets, how people try to get the crackers off the streets and put them in. Some people can't even walk in the streets at night because they feel like they're gonna get snatched up and unsafe. We shouldn't have to feel like that, you know?”

In the summer of 2025, I spent a day on Main Street in Poughkeepsie, just a few minutes from where I live.

I had wanted to photograph there for a while. Several people I photographed for my Lyme disease project live in this neighborhood, and they told me stories about homelessness, violence, and drug-related problems. They would often tell me to be careful if I was there at night.

I live in a beautiful area near Vassar College. Yet just a few minutes away, the reality can feel completely different.

I know this is not unusual in the United States. Most cities have neighborhoods like this. But even after living here for ten years, it is still something I struggle to make sense of.

During an assignment, I spent a day talking with adults and teenagers in the area. I wasn’t looking for any particular story. I simply wanted to understand who the people living there were, what their lives looked like, and what they thought about the place they lived.

Most of the stories people shared ultimately pointed toward larger structural issues. In many ways, these issues seemed widely known. What I couldn’t stop wondering was why something so visible could feel so absent from public conversation.