"A Quality of Life" is composed of oral narratives and testimonies of homeless people being harassed and/or arrested in New York City's public spaces.  Woven together, this collection of instinctively honest first person accounts exposes the nature of public living and working on the street in New York City.  This documentary explores the history of Quality of Life, or Zero Tolerance Policing, the violent atmosphere and unsanitary conditions of the municipal shelter system, the consequences of criminalization as it pertains to housing and employment and strategies to prevent these civil rights violations - proposed by those individuals who are directly affected.  

Their stories are layered and mixed with the sounds of the urban environment.  Reverberating subway cars, multilingual chatter, street traffic and public rallies situate the listeners' experience and provide context for where these punitive social policies are practiced and enforced. 

"A Quality of Life" examines public encounters between homeless people and police officers, who use their own discretion to determine when conduct is "disorderly". The documentary questions, who's "quality of life" is the City improving? Instead of understanding and focusing on structural issues that create homelessness and crime, punitive policies and social control mechanisms frame these problems as one of an individualized moral failure leading to neighborhood decline.