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- [00:02]
A
Hey there, it's Sam Sanders. The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this past week honoring some of the best journalism and writing from the past year, including work by several reporters we featured on this show. One of this year's winners is journalist Brian Goldstone for his book There Is no Place for Us, a deeply reported exploration of the lives of working homeless people in America and the US Policies that make stable housing so difficult to secure. In Conversation. Host Shamita Basu interviewed him when the book was released last spring. So we wanted to bring that conversation back today. Congrats to Brian on the award. I hope you enjoy listening.
- [00:47]
B
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today why so many working people are homeless in America. A few years ago, Celeste Walker found herself in an impossible situation. She was living in Atlanta with her three kids. She was working a warehouse job, but had recently been diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancer and was undergoing treatment. On top of everything else, she had lost her housing and was desperate for help. So she went to Gateway Center, a local organization that provides assistance to homeless, homeless families.
- [01:29]
A
She got there before dawn and there was already a line going around the building, women, children and men trying to get help.
- [01:37]
B
That's journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone. Brian says after hours of waiting, Celeste was finally seen by a caseworker.
- [01:45]
A
But during her interview with the caseworker, she was basically told that she wasn't homeless in the right way, that she didn't fit the definition of what is called literal homelessness, which is people on the street or in shelters.
- [02:01]
B
Celeste had been living with her children in a squalid extended stay hotel. And the caseworker told her that in order to access resources and support, she would need to go to a homeless shelter.
- [02:12]
A
And Celeste said, well, I don't want to go to a shelter, but okay, fine, like if that's what we have to do. And then the caseworker paused and she said, well, actually you mentioned that Your son is 14 years old. The family shelters don't allow boys over the age of 13. So he would have to, you would have to be separated and he would have to go to a men's shelter.
- [02:32]
B
She said she couldn't separate her family and she left empty handed.
- [02:36]
A
That was a gutting realization for her. And it was a shocking realization for me to see that even her cancer didn't render her what this caseworker referred to as vulnerable enough to qualify for assistance.
- [02:49]
B
Celeste and her kids are one of five Atlanta families profiled in Brian's new book. There Is no place for working and homeless in America. It's a captivating read about a substantial but largely overlooked population. People who have a job or jobs, but who don't have stable housing. They live in their cars, in hotels, on relatives couches. Brian follows these families as they try time and time again to find affordable and consistent housing, but are priced out by rising rents, unable to qualify for assistance programs, or forced into predatory schemes. It's an issue that Brian says is only getting worse as the few supports that exist for these families are stripped away and the cost of living in the United States grows. But incomes remain unchanged.
- [03:42]
A
The reason I first embarked on this journey on this project is because my wife is a nurse practitioner. She's working at a community health center here in Atlanta called mercy care. And she was telling me about all these patients she was seeing who had full time jobs. They were working at places like Walmart or driving for Uber and Lyft, and at the end of their shifts, they were going home, not to apartments, but to shelters or to these hotels or sleeping in their car. And she was shocked by that, and I was shocked by that. That these two words, working and homeless, could go together in America. It just upended everything. I thought I knew about both of those words, about work and homelessness alike. You know, about the nature of work, that if you just clock enough hours, you might not make it rich, but you'll be able to meet your most basic needs. And so that's what propelled me on this journey.
- [04:36]
B
Well, do we have a sense of scale here? I mean, that there is a homelessness count that happens every year nationwide, but do we know the actual number of people who are kind of slipping through the cracks here, People who are homeless in a sense, but are not being counted as homeless?
- [04:53]
A
The kind of astonishing reality is that as bad as the official numbers are, and this most recent point in time count, as it's called, revealed that homelessness in America for the second year in a row was at a record high. Over 740,000 people were counted in the official count. And what I show in the book is that the real number of people experiencing homelessness, if you factor in people like Celeste, is about six times that number. None of the families in my book would be counted and are counted in the annual homeless census. And so this problem has only worsened over the years as affordable housing has disappeared, as people's wages have stagnated, and yet rents have skyrocketed. Since 1985, rents have outpaced incomes in this country by 325%. And in that figure we see how this problem, it didn't start recently, but it has absolutely continued to spiral.
- [06:01]
B
It's just been outpaced very well.
- [06:03]
A
It's just been outpaced. There's just a growing chasm between what people are earning and what it costs to keep a roof over your head.
- [06:12]
B
Yeah. I made a note of this stat in your book, which made my eyes pop too. Today there isn't a single state, metropolitan area or county in the United States where a full time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two bedroom apartment. It just doesn't exist.
- [06:28]
A
Exactly. And I mean, I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting that that is true. A common response I've gotten when people have read some of the reporting I've done over the years on housing insecurity in America is, well, why don't they just move somewhere cheaper? You know, just go somewhere else. And the really striking reality is that increasingly there is nowhere else to go. Even if you move to some, you know, rural county, yes, the rents might be lower there than say, in New York City, but the wages are also going to be lower. You're much more likely to be making 7, 25 an hour. So that chasm between what things cost and what you're making, it exists all over the country. And if you're disabled, I mean, there are millions of people in this country with disabilities who are dependent on ssi, a form of fixed income. And there is nowhere in the entire country where SSI, which is capped right now, I believe at $967 a month, that's the maximum you can earn. And there is nowhere in this country where that is enough to afford the average rent. So millions of people are trapped in these circumstances where they simply either can't work anymore, it's physically impossible to work more, or you're not allowed to work more. If you get SSI and housing, this essential human need remains always out of reach.
- [07:56]
B
Wow. Maybe let's turn to Atlanta more specifically because that's where these families are in your book. Can you talk a little bit about Atlanta and the housing landscape there?
- [08:09]
A
Part of the reason I situated the book and the reporting in Atlanta is because of how unique Atlanta is when it comes to housing policy in America. Atlanta during the 1930s and under sort of the New Deal, progressive era, was the first city in the country to build public housing for its poor and working class residents. Back then, it's important to note that that was only for mostly white working class and Poor families. So there was racism baked into public housing from the very beginning. But Atlanta was sort of at the vanguard of saying, we're going to try to provide for the housing needs of our most vulnerable residents. And then in the 1990s and 2000s, Atlanta was also at the vanguard and being the first city in the country to start demolishing all of its public housing in favor of sort of putting people's housing needs in the hands of private landlords and profiteers. But I based this book in Atlanta not only because of how it's unique or special, but also because of how representative it is. Atlanta could just as easily be Austin or Phoenix or Nashville or Charlotte or San Jose or Brooklyn or any number of other cities in this country where the revitalization of urban space and the renaissance of these cities is coming at the expense of its poor and working class families and individuals. They're the casualties of Atlanta's success and all of the things that city boosters and so many more well off residents celebrate about. What Atlanta has become has really taken a very, very heavy toll on thousands of people. Not on the fringes of society, but the very people who power the city, who make it possible, who are taking care of our children at daycares, who are taking care of our elders in caregiver positions, who are delivering our food or cleaning Atlanta's world class airport. These are the people who are making the city possible, and yet they're relentlessly being pushed out, not only of the neighborhoods that they grew up in, but out of housing altogether.
- [10:19]
B
Let's talk about one person's story that's a really good example of a lot of those. A lot of those dynamics you just described. And I understand that for the book you change people's names to protect their privacy. But let's talk about the person that you call Britt Wilkinson. Tell me about her and what she's up against in her search for housing when we first meet her.
- [10:40]
A
Yeah, so brittle. The first kind of moment we encounter in the book with Britt is like millions of low income families in this country. She enters the lottery for a Section 8 housing voucher. The fact that it's called a lottery is telling because only one in four families in America who qualify, who meet the criteria for housing assistance actually are able to receive it. So it's not an entitlement where anyone who meets the income level or the requirements automatically gets it in the way that, say, food stamps are. There's a lottery to decide how to parcel out this incredibly scarce and incredibly Valuable resource. And so Brit enters a lottery along with tens of thousands of other Atlantans, and she miraculously is picked. She's picked not for an apartment, she's picked for the waiting list. And when the book opens, it's two years after she first got on the waiting list, and she gets the email that you have finally been selected off the waiting list and you can now get an apartment. She thinks, great, like, when am I moving in? And then she runs up against the reality that she has to find a landlord willing to take her voucher.
- [11:52]
B
And just to say, I mean, at this time, when she gets the email, she is living on the sofa at her great grandmother's house with her two young kids in a situation that to her feels very like her great grandmother is tolerating it. But they're kind of getting a clear message like, this place is too small for all of us. You gotta figure out a plan. You gotta move on.
- [12:13]
A
Every morning, Britt is leaving her great grandmother's apartment and taking public transportation to get to the Atlanta airport where she works at an eatery called Lowcountry.
- [12:25]
B
And. And it's a full time job.
- [12:27]
A
It's a full time job. And she is, you know, she's a grown ass adult, as she put it. And she is confined to her great grandmother's living room, she and her two children, and she can't wait to get her own place. So when she gets the news that she's finally off the waiting list, she's ecstatic. And she feels like, okay, this is the key to our security in the city. Long story short, she ends up losing the voucher because no landlord in the city will accept it. And that is a phenomenon that is often left out of our housing policy discussions. And what it shows us is that you can increase the number of vouchers that are out there and available to families. But in a city like Atlanta, where the rental market is so, as realtors like to say, hot, it is increasingly impossible for families with vouchers to find a landlord to accept it. Because the landlord just feels like, well, you know, there's a stigma around people with vouchers. And if I could get just a regular tenant in and I don't have to pass any safety inspections, which landlords do have to go through with a voucher. I'm just not going to rent to someone with a voucher. And so after miraculously winning this voucher in the lottery, she ends up losing it when it expires. She can't find anyone to take it.
- [13:49]
B
I'M going to misremember this number, but I have it somewhere in my head where it was something around 1600 vouchers had been issued in the same year as her, but something like around a thousand expired before they could be used. This just shows that people are unable to find a way to use their voucher before it expires.
- [14:08]
A
It's really astonishing. And that statistic, that sort of huge gap between the number of people who have been awarded vouchers and the number of people who are actually able to use them, that again is replicated throughout the country.
- [14:22]
B
Tell me a little bit more about another housing program that she eventually comes into contact with. This is known as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, also called LI Tech.
- [14:32]
A
Exactly.
- [14:33]
B
Tell me about that. How does that function?
- [14:36]
A
So after Britt loses her housing voucher and she's now sort of left to fend for herself yet again in the private market, she eventually ends up again. It feels really almost miraculous that she's able to find a complex, an apartment complex with rents that are relatively affordable. They're not as affordable as the rents would have been with a voucher, but they're relatively affordable for her. And those. The reason the rents are able to be relatively affordable is because the property owner was able to take advantage of these tax credits and as a result was able to give tenants at this complex called Gladstone, rents that were more within their means. And fatefully, what we discover as her story continues is that the landlord, the property owner also took advantage of a little known kind of loophole in the LIHTC program that allows landlords to leave the program prematurely. So any landlord or property owner who takes advantage of these tax credits has to agree to keep this complex or a certain number of units at the complex affordable for 30 years.
- [15:48]
B
Right.
- [15:49]
A
So within that 30 years, you can't raise the rents beyond a certain level. You can't evict people just because you want to get wealthier tenants in. You have to abide by certain rules in order to take advantage of these lucrative tax credits. And what Britt discovers, along with all of her neighbors, is that her landlord, property owner, was able to take advantage of this really kind of obscure loophole called the qualified contract loophole and was able to sell this property to a developer called Empire Communities. And during the pandemic, while I was in the middle of my reporting, Britt and her family, along with over 100 other residents at this complex, were evicted en masse and were left without any housing.
- [16:37]
B
What does Britt end up doing after she's forced out of this apartment.
- [16:42]
A
Britt comes to the realization eventually. I mean, it's so hard for her to get here because she is kind of a perennial optimist and she wants to see every sort of setback as, okay, well, maybe to put it in her words, maybe God's trying to do something here, and I just don't see it. Maybe God is wanting to turn this, what feels like a curse right now, into a blessing. So when she's forced to leave Gladstone, at first she thinks, you know, maybe I'll be able to get into this new apartment complex down the street. That hope quickly vanishes because she sees that the rents are about quadruple what she had been paying at Gladstone. It would take up about 98% of her monthly income to live at this apartment if she were even to be approved, which she wouldn't be because of her income. So she begins crashing with this friend, then another friend. And the title of the book, There is no Place for Us, comes from Britt. Britt, who grew up in Atlanta, who takes pride in her city, who always felt like this city is mine as much as it's anyone's. I'm not gonna leave the city. This is my city. She returns to Chosewood park, the neighborhood where Gladstone was, where she and her children were forced to leave. She comes back several months later. This is after they've now become homeless again, after they have no stable shelter. And she's actually cleaning an Airbnb nearby with her aunt to pick up extra money. She also works at Chick Fil A. She's back in the neighborhood and she sees this shiny new neighborhood. She sees this beer garden that sprung up across the street from her old apartment. And she looks around and she's like, this place is really, really nice. Wow. But for me and my kids, there's no place for us here. And you know, the title in that sense is it's as much a kind of practical statement, there's no place for Us as it is a kind of existential statement. Because it's like, well, if there's no place for us here, then where is there a place for us?
- [18:44]
B
Let's turn to another family that we meet in the book, Maurice and Natalia. They are a two income household. Both of them are working when we meet their family, and yet they are still struggling to make life work for them and their family. Two kids with one on the way when we first meet them. Tell me a little bit about their story.
- [19:03]
A
Yeah, I'm glad you asked about them because Maurice and Natalia, whatever myths we might indulge about homelessness and who is experiencing homelessness and why people become homeless, Maurice and Natalia kind of explode those myths. They explode those stereotypes. As you mentioned, this is a two parent household. They have three children. Maurice works at Enterprise. He has a very stable job at Enterprise Rental Car. And Natalia works at State Farm in their call center. They both grew up in D.C. they're black, and they were sort of systematically priced out of the neighborhoods that they grew up in in D.C. that were quickly gentrifying and revitalizing. So they realized there's no place for them in D.C. and Natalia gets a job offer in Atlanta, and they jump at it, because Atlanta, in their mind, is this black mecca where they feel like they can achieve their middle class aspirations. And when they come to Atlanta, they move not to the sort of city center, but to one of the suburbs, a suburb called Sandy Springs. And they were ideal tenants. They prided themselves on paying their rent early many months because they were so worried about doing any anything to disrupt this kind of fragile financial arrangement that they had. And lo and behold, they find out that the investor who owns their apartment is wanting to sell it, and she's very nice about it, but their lease is terminated, and this place they've lived in for two years is now taken out from underneath them. And they go on Zillow and apartments.com and they are shocked to see how the sort of ground has changed under their feet during the time they've been living there. And one thing leads to another, and Natalia ends up having to go on short term disability leave because of postpartum depression. And that one little thing is what kind of causes their situation to spiral.
- [21:06]
B
Mm. Well, this brings us to the role of private equity in the housing crisis. Maurice and Natalia's story. Because they're struggling to be approved for an apartment because of their credit score. And then they end up getting an eviction notice after being only a few days late on their rent in another place. Tell me about private equity in all of this.
- [21:26]
A
Yeah. So in their case, after they lost their apartment where they had been stably housed for a couple of years, they ended up getting into another one that was way less affordable for them and was really stretching them thin. And they basically discovered that this huge complex in Sandy Springs was owned by a landlord who was out of state. It was a private equity firm based in Nashville. And when they were just a few days late on their rent, an eviction was filed against them. And corporate landlords and private equity firms and other institutional investors. Unlike what are often called, like mom and pop landlords who may own a few properties, these big landlords are much more likely to use an eviction filing just as a way of collecting rent. So you're just a couple of days late. They're not necessarily intending to put you out of your apartment, but they're filing an eviction against you to just get you to pay your rent. And for them, the cost of even filing the eviction is put back on the tenant. Right. So the tenant now has to pay a late fee, plus whatever fees there were for filing the eviction against them. And that's what happens to them. And it's just an example of how pernicious the practices are that we're seeing when housing is taken over by actors whose sole motive is maximizing their returns. That's it. So Maurice and Natalia, they're evicted, and the place they end up in extended stay America is an extended stay hotel a few blocks away from that apartment that's eventually bought by Blackstone, another private equity firm. And so it's shocking to realize that the same private equity firms and kind of Wall street investors who are buying up vast swaths of America's rental properties are also cornering the market on the places where people go once they lose their housing.
- [23:32]
B
Can you describe the conditions that we're talking about when we talk about extended stay hotels? This is not the same as, you know, someone staying somewhere for two weeks on business. A lot of the time people are staying there for years. What are the conditions like?
- [23:46]
A
I think when people hear extended stay hotel, they have in mind maybe a residence Inn or a Homewood Suites, a place where, like you said, you know, business travelers might go or traveling nurses or healthcare workers. These hotels that I'm talking about are at the other end of the spectrum. The hotel that I spent most of my reporting at, a school bus would pull up there every morning to pick up dozens of children who had been staying there not for months, but years. There were parents who have the hotel address on their driver's license. And these hotels that I'm talking about are often abysmal in terms of the living conditions there. We're talking mold, rodents, all manner of just really, really awful conditions. And not only are the conditions bad, but they're often way, way more expensive than an apartment would be next door to that hotel. But you have this growing class of people who have been pushed out of the sort of formal housing market. And these extended stay hotels are just proliferating across America, right Now, and just
- [24:58]
B
to say they're pushed out of the housing market by things like having evictions on their record or having poor credit scores, things like that.
- [25:06]
A
Right, exactly. Celeste, who I was talking about earlier, you know, who goes to Gateway center and she has cancer, the reason she ended up homeless is because her home burned down. And the private equity firm, again, who owned her rental property, filed an eviction against her on a property that had been burned down because she refused to pay rent at that property, not only for the current month, but they wanted her to pay an additional month as well, to break her lease and move somewhere. So she laughed at them, said, of course I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to give you money for an apartment that's no longer habitable. And lo and behold, months later, she finds out they filed an eviction against her and that tanked her credit score. So once your credit score, once this three digit number that has come to determine for millions of people whether they have access to vital things like housing, once that three digit number went below a certain threshold, you could basically kiss goodbye any possibility of getting into an apartment again. It didn't matter how much money you make, that credit score is going to keep you out. So these hotels people are trapped there. They call it the hotel trap, because you're paying by the week and you're basically giving over the entirety of your monthly or weekly income to this hotel. And if you are even one day late, unlike with a traditional apartment where the landlord has to evict you and go through the courts to get you out, these hotels can lock you out at a moment's notice. And this room you've lived in for two or three years with your kids is no longer yours. So it's incredibly predatory, it's incredibly precarious, and it's incredibly pervasive, and we just don't see it. I was just shocked to realize that these hotels I was driving by every day as a resident of Atlanta are effectively for profit homeless shelters where people who have nowhere else to go are forced to languish.
- [27:05]
B
What are some of the solutions that you outline in your book? I know you have really specific policy solutions that you would like to see, have bipartisan support, have enough support to actually get passed and that you think would make really meaningful difference to especially this group of people, people who are working and unhoused.
- [27:25]
A
Yeah, there's all sorts of really practical things that we can do immediately. And some of these measures are passed at the city or state level. It doesn't even require Congress or the president to sort of take these things seriously. So for instance, here in Georgia, in order to apply for an apartment, you now have to pay application and administrative fees. So you could spend about $200 just applying for an apartment. These fees are non refundable even if you're rejected. And the tol this takes, I mean, if you're only paying one of these fees, you know, once or twice in the course of finding an apartment, okay, that's just money you lose. But we're talking about five, six, seven times you're applying for an apartment in this hot rental market and being denied and you're wasting all of this money on application and administrative fees. That's just low hanging fruit that today, if our elected officials here in Georgia saw how predatory and exploitative that is, and it's basically just a way of maximizing the revenue of property management companies and landlords with nothing gained for the tenants, they could do away with that immediately and it would immediately ease the suffering of so many people in this state. So there's stuff like that that's just very immediate. Like we could have habitability requirements that say if your hot water heater isn't working for not days or weeks, but months, the landlord has to fix it or else you don't have to pay your rent. And but as happened to one family in the book, when they refused to pay their rent for that very reason, they were evicted and forced out of their home. And there was nothing, no legal recourse that could fix that situation. So there are laws that need to change that could very easily change today. There are more kind of long term solutions. And the biggest one that I'm excited about is a model called social housing. And again, it's kind of public housing done right. It's a model that cities like Vienna have implemented to kind of staggering success where people across income levels are able to rest knowing that their rent is not going to be going up by 30% year to year. That just as homeowners are guaranteed, you know, that their mortgage will remain fixed over a certain period of time, these renters are also assured that they can budget knowing that their rents aren't going to be increased exponentially. So it will require an investment. But that's the kind of long term vision, that's the kind of North Star, I think. And ultimately, when we look at this problem at the true scale, you know, like in all of its severity and magnitude, we realize that a few tiny homes over here or a couple of supportive Housing units over there or a couple of units at 80% AMI in this complex, it's just not going to be even close to sufficient to tackling this disaster.
- [30:28]
B
It sounds like what you're saying in the book is part of the problem is that we haven't fully committed to any real solutions. You see a lot of half measures being implemented is the way that you put it, in cities across the country, in Atlanta, too. So first we need to agree to commit. But in order to do that, it sounds like what we really need is a big cultural shift in how we think about being housed. Moving it from this idea of it being a privilege to it really being right. People deserve to have housing. How do we get there? I mean, that sounds like a much harder problem to solve. Shifting attitudes, not just shifting policy, for sure.
- [31:08]
A
I think that we are going to have to have a pretty drastic widening, expanding of our moral and political imagination. Looking to the private market to solve a problem in many ways created by that very market is not going to get us anywhere. We see education in this country, K through 12 education, as just a basic thing that everyone who lives here should have access to, Right? And we build public schools in order to ensure that that right to education is met. We don't look to just private schools to meet children's educational needs. And yet with housing, this fundamental human need, we've basically said, let's let the private market determine whether someone can be housed or not. And public housing in this country emerged because of that very problem, because there wasn't enough housing for people who couldn't afford what the market was demanding. And so the government said, we're going to build public housing where people can be guaranteed a roof overhead. And public housing was allowed to collapse in this country and deteriorate because the money was just stripped away and it was allowed to fall into disrepair. It was set up to fail. But if we can widen our moral and political imaginations enough to say, let's give everyone in this country, not just people who are working, but everyone in this richest nation on earth, our roof overhead, we can absolutely do it. And you know, something that I thought about a lot during the pandemic, there was a lot of outrage at people who were hoarding essential items, like hand sanitizer, if you remember, or N95 masks. There was so much outrage that people would be hoarding these essential items and then just selling them off, basically auctioning them off to the highest bidder. You know, $90 for a bottle of hand sanitizer. And that was Prosecuted. People were arrested for that. And yet again, with housing, this incredibly important necessity, we've allowed it to be hoarded. We've allowed for it to be stockpiled by a few actors, and then it's just auctioned off. And the lucky few who are able to afford it, yeah, they get housing. But the many, many, many more who are actually powering this country, who are powering our cities, who are making our society possible through their labor and through their work, they're left out, and they're left to fend for themselves, and they end up in these abysmal places. So my hope is that people, when they read these stories, it will feel intuitive and natural to then say, how do we change this for families like this? How do we change this as a country to be able to ensure that they don't have to live like this anymore.
- [34:06]
B
Yeah. I mean, Brian, I take everything that you're saying, but the reality is the White House is reportedly considering major cuts to federal housing programs. The administration has fired the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines, which could impact access to assistance programs. And just last month, President Trump issued an executive order eliminating a longtime commission that coordinates the federal response to homelessness. So it seems that this country is really leaning away from solving its housing problems in the ways that you're suggesting. I mean, how does that make you feel as someone with this journalistic experience, as someone with an academic take on what's happening with housing in America?
- [34:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it's important to point out that the reporting for this book began in the first Trump administration, and then it went into the Biden administration, and now we're back in the Trump administration, and the conditions and circumstances for the people I'm writing about basically remained the same. So in one sense, and I don't think it's too strong to use this word, the abandonment of the working poor in America has been a bipartisan phenomenon. Having said that, it is terrifying to see that even the minimal supports, the sort of already threadbare safety net that exists for the families I'm writing about is really being just actively shredded right now. And it can feel kind of utopian or idealistic to be talking about ensuring housing is a fundamental right for every American. But I think it's important that our moral and political compass not be determined by what this or that political leader happens to be pushing at a particular moment. I've been really encouraged by the fact that, you know, and this really took off during the pandemic, that a vibrant tenant rights movement has emerged in this country. The eviction moratorium would not have happened if tenants themselves, the people who are impacted by this, what might be called engineered neglect, that the people who are most directly impacted said, we're not going to stand for that anymore. We are going to demand that our elected officials take our plight seriously. And that's the reason we had an eviction moratorium that kept millions of people in their homes. So I'm very encouraged by the fact that as bleak as things might feel right now, the seeds of change are often planted in those very conditions. And I don't think that we need to stop talking about housing as a fundamental right just because that seems so out of sync with the priorities of a party that happens to be very powerful right now.
- [37:09]
B
I mean, I know that you've been writing about homelessness in America even before working on this book, but. But did working on this book make you rethink any of your own ideas about people who are working and homeless, about homelessness in general?
- [37:24]
A
Yeah. I mean, the journey began in shock. The journey began in a kind of state of astonishment. And I think that only grew as I saw all of the systems that were sort of converging to make this crisis possible. Not just housing, not just the precariousness of work and sort of the gigafication of work, as it's sometimes called. But for instance, the fact that in Georgia, they didn't expand Medicaid. So one of the families in the book, when the mother is desperate for therapy, she can't access it because Georgia didn't expand Medicaid, and all she's eligible for are family planning services like sterilization or birth control. So you see how all these systems are interlocking. And I think that that stunned me as I encountered them one by one. And that sense of people being pushed, not falling into homelessness, I think was just fortified continually by confronting that reality in people's own individual lives. And I think one other thing that I've really changed my mind about throughout this process that I alluded to already is just where change is going to come from. Change is not going to come, I think, from policymakers just waking up one day and deciding they want to ease the pain of people like Maurice and Natalia and Britt and Celeste and Kara and Michelle and their kids. Like, change is going to come when at the bottom, those who are impacted and those who are maybe not directly impacted, but care enough about those who are where we care about our neighbors, where we're asking ourselves what kinds of cities are we creating for ourselves where we demand that their suffering be taken seriously? So I think I've changed my mind about that as well in this process.
- [39:13]
B
Brian, thank you for your time. Thank you for this book, and thank you to all the people who spoke to you for the book and allowed for their stories to be told in this way.
- [39:22]
A
Thank you for this wonderful conversation.
- [39:28]
B
You can find There is no place for us working and homeless in America on Apple Books. We'll include a link to it on our Show Notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.