3547 - Blinken Blames Protesters for Gaza Genocide; America’s Homelessness Hits Historic High w/ Brian Goldstone

Summary

Podcast Summary: Majority Report with Sam Seder Episode: 3547 - Blinken Blames Protesters for Gaza Genocide; America’s Homelessness Hits Historic High
Guest: Brian Goldstone, Journalist and Author of There is no Place for Us Working and Homeless in America
Release Date: July 28, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 3547 of The Majority Report with Sam Seder, host Sam Seder delves into pressing political and social issues, with a particular focus on international relations and the burgeoning homelessness crisis in the United States. The episode features an in-depth interview with Brian Goldstone, a renowned journalist and author who explores the multifaceted nature of homelessness in America.

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U.S. Foreign Policy and Gaza Crisis

Sam begins by highlighting recent developments in U.S. foreign policy, notably Secretary of State Antony Blinken's controversial statements regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Blinken has faced criticism for attributing the dire conditions in Gaza to local protests, a stance that has sparked widespread debate.

Notable Quote:

“He’s talking about his experience with this when he's doing it to other people.”
— Sam Seder [07:03]

This segment underscores the tension between U.S. diplomatic rhetoric and on-the-ground realities in conflict zones.

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America’s Homelessness Epidemic

Transitioning to domestic issues, Sam introduces Brian Goldstone to discuss the unprecedented rise in homelessness across the United States. Goldstone's expertise provides a comprehensive look into how homelessness has escalated to historic highs, exacerbated by systemic failures and policy shortcomings.

Key Points:

• Underreported Numbers: Goldstone reveals that the actual number of homeless individuals may be up to six times higher than official counts, emphasizing the hidden "shadow realm" of homelessness.

  Notable Quote:

  “The true number of those who are unhoused right now in this country is, and this is a conservative estimate, about six times greater than the official number.”
  — Brian Goldstone [26:30]

• Systemic Push Factors: The interview highlights how aggressive eviction practices by large private equity firms, such as the Prager Group, force individuals like Celeste into homelessness despite their efforts to remain housed.

  Notable Quote:

  “That is what pushed Celeste and her children into homelessness.”
  — Brian Goldstone [31:52]

• Extended Stay Hotels as Shelters: Goldstone discusses the rise of extended stay hotels, owned by private equity firms like Blackstone and Starwood Capital, which profit from the precarious situation of the homeless, turning shelters into “expensive prisons.”

  Notable Quote:

  “This extended stay hotel is basically an extremely profitable homeless shelter.”
  — Brian Goldstone [34:54]

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Policy Implications and Executive Orders

The conversation shifts to recent executive actions, particularly those spearheaded by former President Donald Trump, which are critiqued for exacerbating homelessness rather than alleviating it. Policies perceived as punitive and lacking in supportive measures have intensified the crisis.

Notable Quote:

“Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, violent attacks. The implication is that every person is homeless because of personal failings.”
— Brian Goldstone [72:20]

Goldstone asserts that such policies marginalize the homeless by attributing their plight to personal deficiencies rather than acknowledging systemic issues.

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Racial Dimensions of Homelessness

A significant portion of the discussion addresses the racial disparities inherent in homelessness statistics. In cities like Atlanta, up to 93% of homeless families are Black, highlighting the intersection of race and economic disenfranchisement.

Notable Quote:

“The racialized character of housing precarity and homelessness is absolutely pronounced.”
— Brian Goldstone [60:30]

Goldstone connects historical housing discrimination, such as redlining and restricted covenants, to the current racial disparities in homelessness, demonstrating how systemic racism perpetuates economic instability among Black communities.

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Barriers to Housing and the Voucher System

Goldstone explores the inefficacies of housing vouchers, detailing how bureaucratic hurdles and landlord discrimination render these vouchers largely unusable. The high rate of voucher expirations without utilization underscores a critical flaw in the current support systems.

Notable Quote:

“1600 vouchers are issued to families in Atlanta, and 1100 expire before they can be used.”
— Brian Goldstone [46:45]

This statistic exemplifies the disconnect between intended support mechanisms and their real-world application, leaving many families without viable housing solutions.

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Economic Factors and the Rental Market

The episode examines how economic policies and market dynamics have made homeownership unattainable for many, leading to a growing "renter class" trapped in cycles of insecurity and exploitation by corporate landlords.

Notable Quote:

“Homelessness has become big business in this country and until we really confront that, it’s not going to end.”
— Brian Goldstone [56:28]

Goldstone argues that the financialization of housing and the prioritization of profit over human necessity have deepened the homelessness crisis, making it a lucrative industry rather than a social issue to be addressed.

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Concluding Insights

Brian Goldstone emphasizes the need for systemic change to address homelessness effectively. He advocates for policies that prioritize affordable housing, dismantle exploitative landlord practices, and recognize homelessness as a multifaceted social issue rather than a result of individual failings.

Notable Quote:

“We need widespread systemic change. It is capitalism.”
— Brian Goldstone [73:00]

The episode concludes with a call to action for policymakers and society to reevaluate and restructure the economic and social frameworks that allow homelessness to persist and worsen.

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Closing Thoughts

Episode 3547 of The Majority Report with Sam Seder offers a sobering examination of the homelessness crisis in the United States, intertwined with critical perspectives on international policies affecting Gaza. Through Brian Goldstone's insightful analysis, listeners are encouraged to recognize the depth of systemic failings and the urgent need for comprehensive reform to address the root causes of homelessness.

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Note: This summary excludes sections related to sponsorships, advertisements, and the podcast's "fun half," focusing solely on the substantive discussions and insights provided in the episode.

Transcript

[Sam Cedar]

Hey. Today's episode is sponsored by Smalls. In this world we're living in these days, things are a little crazy. Maybe you want to, I don't know, snuggle up with your cat a little bit. A lot of similarities between my cat Griffin in the news cycle. I don't know which day he's going to pee in the, in the apartment or take a poop outside of the cat litter. But one thing is for sure, my cat love Smalls. This podcast is sponsored by Smalls. If you're a listener to the show, you know that my cat loves Smalls. You know that the Matt's cat loves Smalls. Both of them. Both of them. You get 60% off your first order plus free shipping. Head to smalls.com, use our promo code Majority for a limited time only. Smalls cat food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients that you would find in your fridge. The best part is it's delivered right to your door. That's why cats.com named Smalls their best overall cat food. Smalls also not just has a whole array of different flavors. My cat loves the chicken one and the one with the turkey. He's more of like a foul guy, I guess. But they also have all sorts of snacks. Like they have this broth that you can pour in and sort of hyperize the food.

[Emma Vigland]

I guess make your dry food a little bit more exciting.

[Sam Cedar]

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[Brian Goldstone]

The.

[Sam Cedar]

Majority report with Sam Cedar. It is Monday, July 28, 2025. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of There is no Place for Us Working and Homeless in America. Also on the program today, Trump supposedly makes a trade deal with the EU as reports emerged that the Japanese deal may have been vaporware. Another report, the DOJ gives Ghislaine Maxwell conditioned immunity. This as Trump runs from the Epstein claims. Epstein claims Trump gives Russia 10 to 12 days to end its invasion of Ukraine. Maybe that's 11, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 12.

[Matt Binder]

What is this fixation on deadlines?

[Sam Cedar]

It's 10 to 12.

[Emma Vigland]

It's 13 to 14 then maybe.

[Matt Binder]

And why declare them publicly?

[Brian Goldstone]

It's firm, Semi, firm.

[Sam Cedar]

Meanwhile, two leading Israeli rights groups accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. This as Netanyahu says, no one is starving. At least that's what he says in English. DOJ drops its case versus Los Angeles protesters after ICE officers caught lying about in their booking reports Trump wants to prosecute Beyonce.

[Matt Binder]

You know how I feel about those.

[Emma Vigland]

Doing country music while black is against the law.

[Sam Cedar]

Democrats plan 20 million dollar fund to target Texas redistricting in a hope to scare Texas congressional Republicans. Meanwhile, another whistleblower claims that the DOJ plan to ignore corporate courts. New report, 1 in 5 homes in California are investor owned and a poll finds Democrats with their lowest approval rating in 35 years. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us on a Monday.

[Matt Binder]

It is fun day Monday.

[Sam Cedar]

Fun day Monday. I guess that's what we're doing here. Fun day Monday.

[Brian Goldstone]

I don't know.

[Sam Cedar]

Weekend went a little fast. It could be fun day. Yeah, it could be fun day. It could be fun day. We'll see this report. Obviously there's a, a newfound, we talked about this with Mehdi on Friday, but there is a seemingly sort of now a broad understanding in the mainstream media that there is mass starvation going on in Gaza. This is not something that happens overnight, although I guess with children it literally could. But there is a broader understanding standing of it and we're starting to see more understanding and appreciation that a the death toll in Gaza, which of course we've been saying here and Emma's been beating this drum for months and months and months, is probably significantly larger than the official tally at this point.

[Matt Binder]

All they can verify basically in terms of they need to be able to put names to people in order to count the death toll as official. But there are literally just hundreds of thousands of people unaccounted for, likely under.

[Sam Cedar]

Rubble, miles of rubble.

[Matt Binder]

There's just, there were reports maybe a year ago that they were just like putting flesh and body parts into bags and in some way like sort of semi counting that as one dead person. But that's not in the official death toll. I mean, Israel hasn't let any journalists, outside of the Palestinian journalists who they're assassinating in Gaza in for a reason. And it's because they don't want the west to catch up to what they're doing until it's entirely too late. And that's my cynical feeling about this moment right now. I'm happy to see Obama and other Democrats, you know, Democrats talking about starvation in Gaza. But my feeling is, is that this is a bit of a cya, because we know that the level of starvation that so many people are facing, it might quite literally be too late even if they were to get nutrition tomorrow or in the next hour.

[Sam Cedar]

And I've seen now you're starting to see reports. I mean, again, because of those reasons, much of it is sort of educated guesses. But up to perhaps 20% of the Palestinian population in Gaza could be dead now. And with this said, two human rights groups in separate reports released jointly said that Israel's policies in Gaza, statements about senior officials about its goals and the systemic dismantling of the territory's health system has contributed to their conclusion of genocide. The two groups, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have not been allowed into Gaza. Their reports are based on testimonies, documents, eyewitnesses, and consultations with legal experts. So there is a growing awareness across various sectors of, I guess, of the world and including within the context of Israel. And it seems like we say increasingly in this country that Israel is not only guilty of genocide and a willful starvation of the Palestinian people living in Gaza. And we're starting to see one of the indications that something feels imminent, whether it is like, you know, the understanding that journalists are going to get in there, that people are going to start to have documented accounts of what's going on in there from the outside world into Gaza is starting to, it appears, make many of those who are the architects of this and the enablers of this are worried that they may have to be held to account. And at least rhetorically, we're starting to see sort of the most obscene of defenses. It's not hard to find some of these people on Twitter or X saying, well, people were saying that it was a genocide so early. People were saying that there was mass starvation so early that it made it impossible for us to be aware of it. And not the least of which is Anthony Blinken, who is on the X Files podcast with Christian Amanpour. This is what Blinken had to say. It's just shocking and appalling.

[Jared Kushner]

I'm very proud of my. My heritage. And of course, what happened on October 7 resonated in a personal way with me, not just a professional way, because in my own family history, I have relatives who were forced out of countries by pogroms and came to the United States. A late stepfather who was a Holocaust survivor who survived Auschwitz and Dachau and Majdanek and all these camps. His entire family was exterminated. And so the act, the Horrific act of October 7 brought a lot of that to the surface. And I thought it was important in that moment to connect in a personal way with so many people in Israel who were traumatized. But in so many ways, that day in the collective global consciousness has been almost erased by everything that followed.

[Matt Binder]

And why is that?

[Sam Cedar]

I wish.

[Matt Binder]

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Like, this level of narcissism is just exhausting. It's exhausting. What happened to Blinken's ancestors is a horrific crime or stuff, or family members is a horrific, horrific crime. Which is why people were saying in the wake of October 7th, let's not commit those crimes again. When we're talking about the starvation, this is going to affect, even if people survive this genocide like it did for Jews in the extermination camps, in the Holocaust, it's going to affect their children on a cellular level. This is the generational trauma that he inflicted on Palestine, that he's using this moment to talk about his own history. You did it to other people. It's going to be the same thing. The genetics of these folks will be indelibly altered by the starvation that they've experienced, and their children will feel the effects. So he's talking about his experience with this when he's doing it to other people.

[Jared Kushner]

And I feel this so strongly because I also feel deeply the suffering of men, women and children in Gaza. I've met with families, American families, Palestinian Americans, who lost their entire families, little girls and little boys. I have the pictures that I still kept of one family. And so I have some sense of what they're going through. And there's no hierarchy of Loss. There's no hierarchy. There's no difference, sounds like it, between an Israeli child, a Palestinian child.

[Sam Cedar]

What's shocking about this is that he could easily have been citing his family as a fundamental reason why I would not enable this to happen again. And it is as if he had nothing to do with the policy, no agency, absolutely. Just sort of everything in the passive voice here. But he is now sort of like, this is his wind up. Find out, like, why, what's going to justify his fundamental role in enabling this.

[Brian Goldstone]

Continue.

[Jared Kushner]

Killed in this horror that Hamas initiated. But I wish as well that those who understandably have been so moved and motivated by everything that's happened since October 7th, if they'd spent just maybe 10% of their time calling on Hamas, demanding Hamas put down its arms, give up the hostages, stop what it's doing, maybe if the world had done that, we'd also be in a different place. But to come to your question more.

[Sam Cedar]

Specifically, can I stop? I mean, just like the. In what possible scenario, aside from the fact that we know on multiple occasions, including under the Biden administration, Hamas offered to release all the hostages. I mean, from day one, release all the hostages if no invasion, but subsequent to that, release the hostages if you promise to end the war. I mean, what, what possible difference if 10% of anything of anybody, like, what is he talking about here? Also just some type of excuse for him to sort of justify. Like, yeah, they sort of made us do it.

[Matt Binder]

Right. I mean, it's, it's literally, it's like saying, you know, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it was so horrific and so everything that followed, it was basically understandable. And you have to understand the full picture of the extermination. It's just, it's unfathomable. And also, Hamas did not start this on October 7th. Israel has been, quote, putting Gaza on a diet, but blocking food and electricity and water and all of that for decades. They have been putting Palestinians on a diet for this entire time period. This is just the final solution of the starvation that has already been in place for almost my entire lifetime.

[Emma Vigland]

Does anybody think that Blinken State Department put 10% of its energy towards getting Israel to stop? Nobody in the world could argue that.

[Sam Cedar]

Continue. Let's see, give it another sec, couple of seconds.

[Jared Kushner]

Calling on Hamas, demanding Hamas put down its arms, give up the hostages, stop what it's doing. Maybe if the world had done that, we'd also be in a different place. But to come to your question more specifically, look, I think what President Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu from day one, exactly as you said was exactly right. And there's a big difference between doing your best to eliminate the threat such that what happened on October 7th couldn't be repeated versus some futile and misguided campaign to try to eradicate all of Hamas. That simply is not going to happen and will leave Israel holding the bag. We believe before the October 7, there were somewhere around 35 to 40,000 armed Hamas militants, again organized militarily. And that military organization was dismantled by what Israel did and it was dismantled more.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, it's as if he had absolutely no role in any of this. It is fascinating and also just horrific. I mean, I don't know what else to say.

[Emma Vigland]

Just one final note. I would if you want to feel a little bit heartened, go to the comment section of Amanpour's video here and every one of them is like the top one here. This guy is a war criminal. Genocide. Blinken still lying. How does he sleep at night? His compliance to the horrific suffering of the Palestinian people will be his legacy. So this ain't working. And they should probably course correct, if only for their self preservation, because I know they don't. I know Blinken doesn't actually care about Palestinians, despite claiming to carry photos about around with them around.

[Matt Binder]

And you just headline this, Sam, the Democratic Party's approval rating is the lowest it's been in what, like 30 years is what you said. So does could supporting a genocide and stabbing Palestinians in the back as opposed to in the chest like the Republicans do? Could that have anything to do with, with how people feel about it? I mean, New York primary voters seem to think so.

[Sam Cedar]

We'll see. All right. Well, in a moment we're going to be talking to Brian Goldstone. He is a journalist and author of There Is no Place for Us Working in Homelessness in America. And couldn't be also relevant both in terms of what's going on in the country, in terms of homelessness, and also just in the wake of Donald Trump's executive order from three or four days ago on. I hesitate to say that it's actually addressing the unhoused as much as it is sort of some type of notion that, well, we should round everybody up and put them into an institution. But we can talk about that in a moment. We've got a couple of sponsors, very easy to put off your doctor's appointment, whether you have avoided going or just booking one. And why? Because it's usually a pain in the butt. Maybe you need a dentist appointment, maybe you've been waiting to go see a doctor for three years. Well, ZocDoc makes it super easy to find the doctor right now and makes it all easy online and helps in finding out if they take your insurance. Leave it to a professional. I don't know about you, but my social feed is filled with different health trends. Can red light therapy solve every skin problem? Should you be slamming olive oil shots? Let's give the algorithm a rest. Turn to healthcare professionals with Zocdoc. It's easy and find doctors that are right for you and instantly book an appointment online. As I get older, I catch myself thinking I should go to the doctor more. Without a doubt, things like stress, aches, but it can be tough to find one. You want to keep yourself healthy, but it's hard to find the right doctor. That is until zocdoc shows up. They make it so easy to find the right fit and book an appointment fast and directly on their website. ZocDoc is a free app or website. You can search and compare high quality in network doctors and click instantly to book an appointment. Zocdoc lets you book in network appointments with more than 100,000 doctors across every specialty. You can filter for doctors who are near you. Filters for ones that take your insurance, ones that are a good fit for you can find the type of care you're looking for. Maybe it's you want a good bedside manner, maybe you want fast wait times, maybe you want doctors who are considered to have good listening skills. And then the best part is you can see their actual appointment openings. You don't have to go back and forth with a, you know, on the.

[Matt Binder]

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[Sam Cedar]

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[Matt Binder]

Oh yeah. I mean it's really helpful because it's just so hard to get doctors on the phone and I don't understand why like everybody isn't using this to be honest with you.

[Sam Cedar]

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[Brian Goldstone]

It.

[Sam Cedar]

We are back. Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program. Brian Goldstone, journalist and author. There is no place for us working and homeless in America. Brian, welcome to the program.

[Brian Goldstone]

It's really great to be with you.

[Sam Cedar]

Let's start with just sort of, I mean you, you've written basically an ethnography in many respects. Five Families. And let's just sort of take some of the broader pictures. You write about Atlanta. But Atlanta is, I think, in many respects, certainly, you know, according to, like, indicative of a dynamic that we have going on in the country. But maybe we should just start with the idea of, like, what. What you believe is the delta between the official numbers of homelessness and what the actual numbers are.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah. You know, I was shocked to discover, in the course of recording this book and researching it over the, you know, five, six years, I was really, really shocked to discover that as bad as the official numbers on homelessness are, and it's important to note that in the last two years, we've seen the highest level of homelessness on record, according to the official count. As bad as those official numbers are, the reality is exponentially worse. There is this entire world of homelessness, what I refer to in the book as a kind of shadow realm of homelessness that we're not seeing, that is not just out of sight and invisible, but that has been actively rendered invisible. And, and I point out in the book, by cobbling together different data sources, that the true number of those who are unhoused right now in this country is, and this is a conservative estimate, about six times greater than the official number. So we're talking a catastrophe of truly unprecedented proportions. And I think that that is just while the book is based in Atlanta, the reality is that this truly is a nationwide crisis.

[Sam Cedar]

And.

[Brian Goldstone]

And it. It reaches into every single corner of this country.

[Sam Cedar]

And so we should say, like, the official number is somewhere in the 700,000. And so, you know, your. Your sense is that it's. It's closer to over 4 million people. And, you know, I want to get to the. The Trump executive order because on some level, like the, the rendered invisible. I mean, it seems to be the fundamental driving principle of that executive order is to how can we make this. This. This problem seem even more distant, I guess, in many respects. But let's start with how did you choose? There were. There were four families. Five. Excuse me. And how did you choose these five?

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, I mean, it was less a matter, I think, of me choosing them than the, you know, the question of, like, who is going to allow me into their life in. In such a way that, you know, readers will. Will experience what it looks like and what it feels like for. For parents, for their kids, when this most basic human necessity is always out of reach. And, you know, the book actually had its genesis in a magazine story that I reported and wrote for the New Republic over A period of about seven months. And while I was reporting that book, I was just meeting tons and tons of families and individuals who were working and working and working some more. And it still wasn't enough to keep themselves and their children housed. You know, some journalists have a problem of like, they have the story and then they need to find someone who is going to exemplify that story, who's going to carry it. For me, the problem wasn't like, who is going to exemplify this, it's how do you narrow it down? I mean, there are so many people, not just in Atlanta, but again, across the country. And so, yeah, it was really a matter like of meeting dozens of families, dozens of individuals and through the course of just getting to know them and building trust, figuring out like who has space and in their life for someone to just be immersing themselves in their day to day lives. And that was really the aspiration for this book, was to just immerse myself in their day to day lives as much as humanly possible. And that's a pretty tall order for anyone, but especially for people who are already completely, to put it mild, maxed out with stress, with anxiety, trying to, trying to keep themselves housed and to find housing.

[Sam Cedar]

And what I was struck with is the, the, there are so many different. It's, it feels like, I mean just from, from, from these five examples, paths to this, homeless. Now a couple of them at least end up in almost the same scenario, particularly with these extended stay hotels, which is, is a story in and of itself in many respects. But let's start with for instance, Celeste, because she was, I mean, lots of challenges she's dealing with. But her homelessness was a function of a landlord essentially trying to, I guess, take advantage of her house burning down by charging her. Her house burns down, that she's renting and then he, without her knowledge, evicts her. She's obviously not in the house, but files an eviction notice without her awareness. And that just sort of like makes it impossible for her to get into other housing. Walk us through this story.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, you know, her story really illustrates why over the last few years of working on this, it has just driven me nuts to hear people talk about, you know, families and individuals in America falling into homelessness. They are being pushed. And Celeste's story, as I think all of the family stories in the book, show us that this was a matter of being pushed, this wasn't a matter of falling. You know, her story, as you mentioned, begins in this really dramatic way, a very Singular way with her. Her rental home burning down. It was later discovered that an abusive acts set fire to this rental home. She had recently taken a restraining order out on him. But even though it was this fire that was sort of the first domino that fell, it wasn't the fire that caused Celeste and her children to become homeless. It was the fact that, as you said, you know, months after the house fire, she came to learn that her landlord, which was not a mom and pop landlord, it was a private equity firm called the Prager Group. They own tens of thousands of rental units across the south. The Prager Group demanded, when her home burned down, that she pay rent not only for that current month. The fire had happened at the beginning of the month. She hadn't yet paid her rent, not only pay that current month's rent, but an additional month as well, in order to be released from her lease. She, of course, refused to do that. She thought that was the end of it. And then months later, when she was applying for other apartments, was denied because of an eviction on her record in Georgia, she didn't even have to be notified that an eviction had been filed against her. She didn't have to be notified in person. The sheriff was able to carry out what's called a tack and mail dispossessory. And when she went to the burned down home, which still hadn't been repaired, in the mailbox on the eviction notice was written by the sheriff, served to fire destroyed property. So, you know, when I've told friends and colleagues about this story over the years, they say, oh, that's so tragic that, you know, domestic violence, this house fire, led to them becoming homeless. No, what led to them becoming homeless was a housing system that prioritizes, that has enabled firms like the Prager Group to prioritize profits over all else, over just the basic necessity for a place to live that has so stacked the cards against tenants and given landlords all of the power. That is what pushed Celeste and her children into homelessness.

[Sam Cedar]

And she had two children. She was then subsequently diagnosed with, if I remember correctly, ovarian and breast cancer. And then she's looking for assistance. And this I found also just sort of stunning. Just walk us through her timeline briefly.

[Brian Goldstone]

So after the fire, after realizing with the eviction that her credit score has been tanked, that this three digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to housing and other basic necessities, once she realizes that her credit scores, in effect locking her out of the formal housing market and essentially destroying any chance she has of getting back into housing even if she can't afford it. She does what scores of other families have done, and she, in the absence of any family shelters, she went to an extended stay hotel. And this place at first was a kind of refuge for her, but she realizes over the, over the next few weeks and then months that she has fallen into what people refer to as the hotel trap that she has landed in what another family in the book calls an expensive prison. This extended stay hotel is, is basically an extremely profitable homeless shelter. And they are proliferating across the country as it happens. Private equity firms aren't just buying up the homes that people currently live in, the rental housing. They're also increasingly buying up the very places that families like Celeste are forced into once they become homeless. And so Black Blackstone and Starwood Capital, during the time that Celeste was living at this squalid extended stay hotel, they purchased Extended Stay America, the largest chain of extended stay hotels for, for $6 billion, because they saw how extremely profitable all this precarity has become. So Celeste is desperate to get out of this hotel. She is desperate to get out. And finally, after refusing the term homeless for herself, really wanted to kind of resist that label because she had this kind of like, name it and claim it theology where if she put that label on herself, she would sort of become that in, in a very deep way. But finally, she's just desperate to get out. She. She's having to choose between going to her chemo appointment for ovarian and breast cancer to treat that cancer, or going to her warehouse job. And just one quick side note, you know, this book is about the rise of the working homeless. And it's very important that we attend not only to the homeless side of that equation, but the working side as well. Because in Celeste's case, it wasn't just the poverty wages that she was earning at this warehouse job. It was the fact that she had no sick leave, she had no benefits, no health insurance. So if she doesn't go to work, she doesn't get paid. If she doesn't get paid, she and her children go from being in this room out on the street, and she goes to Gateway center, the coordinated entry point to access homeless services in Atlanta. Every city in the country and municipality has their own version of Gateway, where you have to go to try to obtain services. And she is told that despite her cancer, she is not vulnerable enough. Her vulnerability score is too low to qualify for assistance, and in fact, she's Told that because she is not in a shelter or on the street, she does not fit the definition of literal homelessness. That is HUD's sort of way of policing who counts as homeless. And none of the families I write about in this book are counted as homeless. None of them fit the official definition. And Celeste leaves Gateway center that day completely empty handed. She's actually told, when she says, fine, we'll go to a shelter. If that's what we have to do to be considered homeless, we'll go to a shelter.

[Sam Cedar]

And.

[Brian Goldstone]

And the caseworker stops. She says, ma', am, actually you mentioned that your son just turned 15. Celeste says, yeah. The caseworker says, I'm sorry, none of the family shelters in Georgia allow boys over the age of 13. So he would have to go to a men's shelter by himself. And of course she's not going to split up her family. And she leaves empty handed. And that is what, you know, it's bad enough to be homeless. The only thing worse than being homeless in America is, is not even earning the designation homeless, because then you are. You literally don't count. Your experience is written out of the story we tell about homelessness and you are denied any form of assistance.

[Matt Binder]

Can I ask you a bit more about shelters and the role that they play in defining homelessness? A lot of accounts that we'll hear just up here in New York or that homeless shelters, there's a lot of lack of safety, people are fearful of being robbed. And it still is quite similar up north here that like, you need to be able to be in a shelter to have certain designations. Like what, when you speak to these people, what have been the broad experiences with shelters and if you could clarify how that fits into how homelessness is defined legally.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah. So just to get to the definition first, so every year when the point in time count is conducted, which is the federal government's official homeless census, where volunteers across the country fan out to count everyone who is experiencing homelessness, only those who are in shelters or on the street are counted. And so, so that. That has existed since 2005. And every year, you know, when the point in time count results come out and, and those numbers are, you know, they then appear in newspaper headlines. Those headlines are reflecting what I would argue is just a very tiny sliver of the total homeless population. Here in DeKalb county in Georgia, where I live, which is one of the most populous counties in the south right now, there is not a single shelter for families in the entire county. So when you don't have shelter. Like, I mean, to put it in. In very real terms, like, if you have one shelter in a city and you count everyone who is living in that shelter that year, that the point in time count is conducted, those families would count as homeless. If you close that shelter today, those families will go from being homeless to no longer being homeless simply because they are no longer in that shelter. If they're not on the street, if they do what families do, which is go in their cars or start staying in the overcrowded apartments of others or to these hotels. So it's this very arbitrary and, I think, very cruel way of limiting the scope of homelessness in this country. We can imagine that there are very clear political motivations to narrow the scope in this way. But, you know, New York is exceptional in that there is a right to shelter in New York. So the shelter system is unusually and exceptionally sprawling and large, and many of the families who are homeless in New York are in that shelter system, even though in New York, too, there are. There's just a huge number of people who are excluded. But that really is exceptional. And the rest of the country, it's not just a matter that shelters are unsafe, that the conditions are abysmal. It's often the case that they simply don't exist, especially for families. And when they don't exist, or when families can't access them or don't want to access them for very good reasons, they literally don't count.

[Sam Cedar]

You have another story about British who also has two kids, younger kids, and the story of housing vouchers. In this dynamic, it seems sort of on some level analogous, this idea of, like, you know, if there's no housing, if there's no shelters, then there's no homeless people. This also feels like a bureaucratic way of actually sort of like ostensibly providing for unhoused people, but not ultimately having to buy the sort of the context in which they offer. So walk us through what happens with Britain, who also ends up at an efficiency hotel. But I'm particularly like the Section 8 voucher, but tell us that story.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, I mean, Britt is really interesting because through her own life trajectory, you can kind of tell the story of housing policy in America. Brit is. Her roots in Atlanta go back five generations. When she was born, she and her family actually lived in public housing, and Atlanta was the first city in the country to build public housing, as it happens, in the 1930s. But by the time Britt was born, Atlanta had become the first city in the country to begin demolishing all of its public housing in favor of this neoliberal experiment in effectively leaving people's housing needs to the private market to meet and take care of. So Britt's family, as she's growing up, is displaced from the public housing where they live. And British, as a child, actually experiences homelessness with. With her mother living in. In these awful hotels and going from place to place, attending, I believe, three different schools in one year as a child. And. And she is determined as an adult with her own children to make a home for herself and her kids in the city. She's determined, you know, not to leave. She also realizes that there is nowhere else to go for her because there really isn't anywhere that that is more affordable where she has family ties and so forth. And so, you know, Brit, she.

[Sam Cedar]

She.

[Brian Goldstone]

Everything for her hinges on the possibility of getting a housing voucher. And when the book opens, she has, two years earlier, won the voucher lottery. I think the fact that we even use the word lottery in relation to this absolutely essential form of assistance is telling. It says a lot about how we treat housing in America. But she wins the voucher lottery, and two years later, when the book opens, she's finally gotten off the waiting list. Here is the key to her having a home in the city, being able to afford it. What happens is that ultimately she can't find a landlord who will accept the voucher. There's a lot of talk within housing policy circles about how landlords discriminate against voucher holders for, you know, racist reasons for. Because of the stigma attached to, you know, those people. And that is certainly true. But what a lot of that discussion leaves out is how, you know, landlords are refusing to take vouchers in these hot rental markets because they simply don't have a financial incentive to. Because they. They can't jack up rents at will. There's so much competition just for a single apartment that they can afford to refuse the subsidy. And when Brit ends up losing the voucher because it expires the year that she loses her voucher, about 1600 vouchers are issued to families in Atlanta, and 1100 expire before they can be used. No landlord will accept it. That is what we did when we went from a model of public housing of the government being directly involved in providing for housing to leaving people's housing needs to the market and its. And its whims.

[Sam Cedar]

That's just insane. That figure, that particular. That the 1100 of the 1600 expire. Obviously, these people have been waiting years to get these vouchers and then they can't use them.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

It's just, it's just, it's just insane. Let's also just one more example because this is Maurice and Natalie. Natalia, this is another example of sort of the industry that has been built around people's deprivation. I don't know how else to really say it. I mean, the private equity stuff with both the owning the rental stock and then also owning the sort of like what happens when you lose the rental stock. It sort of feels like, I don't know, somebody coming in, buying, like we're going to buy all the dollar stores and we're going to buy also the, I don't know what, the dollar tree. And as people go from Dollar General to dollar tree because their pay gets cut or whatever it is, or the recession happens. Well, we, we make money on both ends. Yeah. But let's talk about Maurice and Natalia because again, there's another situation where the building sold, they get booted, and then they end up having to get involved with Liberty Rent. And walk us through this because this is also a crazy story.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah. Something I, I forgot to mention in relation to Brit's story that is definitely there for Maurice and Natalia as well is the way that, you know, the backdrop for all of this in a city like Atlanta, and here Atlanta is absolutely representative of any number of cities across the country. The backdrop for all of this is a city that has undergone this much celebrated renaissance, an absolute, you know, just transformation of its urban center. Rampant gentrification, corporate profits are surging. The signs of growth in Atlanta are everywhere. And, you know, and what we are seeing is that families like Brits, like Maurice and Natalia's, they're not just being pushed out of the neighborhoods they grew up in, they're being pushed out of housing altogether. So that's, that's the backdrop. Maurice and Natalia, they actually grew up in D.C. and they were priced out of their formerly black working class neighborhood in D.C. and went to Atlanta as part of what has been termed the new great migration of, you know, people whose, whose grandparents, great grandparents fled the Jim Crow south in search of economic opportunity in the north, they come back to Atlanta, to the south, to this black mecca, thinking they can achieve their middle class aspirations here. Only come to find out after living in their apartment for several years, stably house, their landlord decides to terminate their lease prematurely because it's a great time to sell. Their home, they realize, has all along been an investment vehicle for their landlord. And at that point, you know, that when their lease is terminated, they are, they and their children are, they're pushed into what a caseworker in the book calls the housing Hunger Games. They realize that the ground has kind of shifted under their feet just in the time they've been renting in Atlanta. They're, they're thrust into the housing Hunger Games. And, and in that context, they, their credit score is too low because of student debt and they are forced to use this, this co signing company called Liberty Rent, where you're basically paying these outrageous fees in order to have this company co sign in order to get you into an apartment that actually does nothing to keep them in their apartment. They end up getting evicted when they are only a few days late on their rent. Their landlord, like Celeste's is a private equity firm, this one based in Nashville called Covenant Capital. And they have been employing this, this automated eviction system where if you're just a few days late, there's no human to call and talk to. An eviction is filed against you. And before they knew it, they were now living in a studio sized hotel room at Extended Stay America. In the span of, of eight months, they spent $17,000 on their room. That is more than double what they had been paying for the two bedroom apartment that they were just evicted from. So I mean, I mean as you were describing it, it truly is like, I mean dystopian is a cliche to throw, but there's no other word. It is, it is a nightmarish scenario where there is nowhere to turn.

[Sam Cedar]

I want to pull out a little bit, but what, what have you, like in the time that the, you've done this reporting and the book comes out, like, have you followed up with some of these folks? Like where, what happens to these people?

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, I have stayed in very, very close contact with all of them. We are in touch every week, sometimes every day. Like we're still in very close contact. One of the conditions for their participation in the book was that I would protect their privacy. And also so like we use pseudonyms in the book to protect their privacy and especially the children. And also that like what is contained in the book would be more or less what I talk about and describe. But having said that, I will just say without getting into specifics that you know, as much as I wanted their stories to have a happy ending and as much as, you know, my editor, like just for readability, to not leave readers in this state of desperation and just despair to give some happy endings, I mean, Maurice and Natalia, when the book ends, are the closest, I think, to having a happy end, they actually get into an apartment. But their dreams of homeownership, they realize are dead. So that's very hard. Since then, all of the families have, have continued to struggle. They have you know, even, even with, with readers and myself, you know, trying to offer financial support and other types of support. Many of them like their credit scores are just too low. They, it just, it shows that like what people need is not a GoFundMe. They don't need necessarily just an infusion of cash. As important as money is. Like, what we need is like widespread systemic change. And, and they have just continued to sort of experience the vicissitudes of belonging to the renter class in the United States.

[Matt Binder]

And what you're just. Oh, sorry Sam, go ahead.

[Sam Cedar]

Well, I just want to say, you know, the, the, the Biden administration and this is sort of like, you know, one slice, but this kept occurring to me in the context of, of Celeste in terms of like credit scores and whatnot. The, the Biden administration had gotten, had eliminated medical debt from a credit score and the Trump administration just reversed that. And so you have a whole host of like, of people, I mean, I have no idea what the numbers we're talking about who just in one day all of a sudden can no longer qualify to rent an apartment. And then it just becomes an incredible spiral where you have these like sort of Paris, like, I don't know what else say like these parasitical business entities that are there to just like we're going to exploit the shit out of this now.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, I think that is what was so striking, is that at every single step in these families journeys, as documented in this book, there are entire business models designed not just to profit off their insecurity and to capitalize on it, but to really exacerbate it, to ensure that this, that this crisis of housing and homelessness is not meaningfully addressed. And in that sense I think that we really have to reckon with, with that profit motive lurking and not just the private equity firms, but the co signing companies, the, you know, the, all of these entities, the application fees that families have to pay just to apply for an apartment or with no guarantee they'll be, you know, that their application will be approved, they lose hundreds of dollars per application just in applying these non refundable fees. So it, you know, homelessness has become big business in this country and until we really confront that, I think, you know, it's, it's not going to end and it's not enough to Just say we need to build more housing, we need to let the market do its thing, we need to cut regulation, cut the red tape and then the market will sort of take care of these things. No, we have to address it at its source, which to me is, I mean not to put too fine a point on it, but it's capitalism. It is, it is the fact that these, that the ability to stay housed in this country has been left to a system and what they, a system that has really no financial incentive in keeping them stable that is really militating against this security at every turn. And yeah, I think that that is.

[Sam Cedar]

Very much the entire incentive is to keep them trapped in this cycle. I mean it's like, you know, like payday rental, excuse me, payday loan companies. I mean it has the same dynamic of like the more, you know, once we get you in our clutches, like you, you have less and less chance of avoiding our clutches.

[Brian Goldstone]

Exactly. I mean there's that famous Baldwin quote about, you know, how extremely expensive it is to be poor in America. I think what these families experiences illustrate is sort of the flip side of that, which is how extremely lucrative all of this insecurity has become for some.

[Matt Binder]

Yeah, and you hinted on it at it there just about. This is not being a supply problem, this is a problem of overcoming modification. And you know, you have these companies like, like Blackstone that are just buying up these single family homes and there. It also gives an opportunity for them to orient. Well, I mean that's, that's about how purchasing homes and less about maybe some of these more apartment buildings, but it's still the same dynamic that you describe, which is just like the, the problem is that all the power lies with landlords and corporations and none with tenants.

[Brian Goldstone]

That's right. I don't know if you guys remember, but during the pandemic, in the early days of the pandemic, there were these two brothers in Tennessee who were driving around buying up hand sanitizer at every Dollar General they could find. And they rented a U Haul and they stockpiled all of this hand sanitizer in there and, and they made headlines. They were rightly vilified. There were calls for them to be prosecuted. And I remember thinking at that time when I was in the middle of this reporting, that is what we've allowed housing to become in this country. We have allowed for it to be hoarded up, essentially thrown in a U Haul truck and then auctioned off to the highest bidder. And we don't call that by its proper name. Which is price gouging. We just call that supply and demand economics. We say that know this scarcity has produced this. This need, never mind the ways that that scarcity itself has been arguably engineered. But that scarcity has produced a condition where. Where this fundamental human necessity is just being auctioned off to the highest bidder. We see it really clearly like after the wildfires in California, you know, where landlords were, were jacking up rents overnight by 100%, 120%. And again, there was. There's justified outrage at that. But I think what I'm trying to suggest is that that is. That is just the normal rental market in widening swaths of America today, in Atlanta, in Nashville and Charlotte. That is what it is like to be a renter. Rents being jacked up way past the rate of inflation, past the rate of what it would cost to cover, you know, growing insurance costs and property taxes. And just because they can. Just because they can get away with it.

[Sam Cedar]

Let's talk about how race mixes with this, because both from your book and from some of the interviews I have read with you, you've outlined how in the context of Atlanta, it was something, I think it was like 90, 93% of people who are unhoused, not necessarily officially, but within the context of this sort of netherworld, are black. But that it really is the most marginalized, economically deprived cohort of people in various cities, and that who. That cohort changes based upon what city it is. Could you go into that, to that dynamic?

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, it's a great question, you know, because when I started this project, I really wanted to have, you know, to sort of like check all these demographic boxes. I wanted to have this diversity of subjects where, you know, the white working class character, you know, family, individual. And as I began reporting, as I was standing in line at these food pantries on Saturday morning, every single person in line was black. And as you mentioned, in a city that is no longer majority black, Atlanta once was majority black, but it no longer is. It's about, I believe, 46, 47% black. Now, 93% of families who are homeless in the city are black. So in many ways, to find that one family somewhere up who is homeless right now would be really forced because this is what homelessness looks like in Atlanta. The racialized character of housing, precarity and homelessness is absolutely pronounced. And as you mentioned, you know, it will take a different form in different cities and different regions. I reported a magazine story several years ago in Salinas, California, where the overwhelming majority of People who were homeless were, were migrant families and Latino farm workers. So it does vary. In Minnesota, where I recently was, it's indigenous and Native American families and individuals. But the racialized character is there. And there's a moment in the book where Natalia, she has enrolled in an associate's degree program at Georgia State. She's reading this history book and her eyes are being opened. She has this moment of revelation where in reading about sort of the post reconstruction period in America and how the promise of 40 mules and a slave was broken and you had millions of men, women and children who were freed, emancipated from slavery into a country where they were systematically deprived of property rights, of ownership rights, she's realizing that that is where her own story, her own experience of housing insecurity begins. And, and you know, and that was a revelation for me too, because the Wikipedia version of homelessness and housing insecurity in America, you know, it starts with, it's basically a white story. It begins in the colonial era and then through the Civil War with, you know, white soldiers returning home, but their homes are no longer there, and on through, you know, Jacob Riis's great army of tramps in the lead up to the Depression and so forth. That is kind of the official story of homelessness in America. But I think there's a different story we can tell where again, millions of people are forced into a labor economy of low wages, rent and debt. And that has just continued through a history of redlining, of restricted covenants, of all sorts of practices that have just again and again perpetuated dispossession, displacement and discrimination. And that, I believe, is what has produced that 93% statistic.

[Sam Cedar]

Is there. I mean, I, I would imagine the, the lack of political power is both racialized and obviously a function of, of just the, the material deprivation. And so it's much easier for it to be submerged as a political issue, and particularly when on the other side of that you have people making a lot of money who definitely have access to state lawmakers, to city lawmakers, to federal lawmakers. And to the extent that they're advocating for anything, it is nothing that's going to stop this cycle because that's how they're enriching themselves.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah. You know, I remember during the reporting after, and this is something that happens toward the end of the book after about a dozen families are evicted at gunpoint from this extended stay hotel efficiency lodge, they're evicted from gunpoint because they, they have lost their jobs, they can't pay Their. Their hotel rent. And the hotel hires this private militia basically, to come in point, semiautomatic weapons in the. In the faces of children and their parents, forcing them out of the rooms that they've lived in, in some cases for years. Forcing them out. And a few days after that, I was. I was with all of these families at a nearby park. A local group called Housing Justice League was trying to organize these residents, these. These families against. Against the owner of this property, trying to organize them, trying to organize protests. And, and it was the same day that the election results were announced that Biden had won. And at that time, you know, Georgia was on the verge of turning blue. And there was all this excitement and certain, you know, my neighborhood, the neighborhood I live in, around that are in progressive circles. And I remember thinking, standing with these families, they are completely off the radar of both parties. The abandonment of these families has been a bipartisan project, a bipartisan phenomenon. And, you know, they couldn't have cared less standing in that park that this press, this person had just won the presidency and not this person. And, And I don't want to be glib about that because there are actual differences. But, you know, over the next four years, through the Biden years, the circumstances that families like them were going to changed. Not at all. And a caseworker in the book, Carla Wells, I. I really appreciate something she says, you know, she has been in the trenches of homeless services for. For many years. And she basically says, you know, what my clients need, yes, they need money. Yes, they need resources. But what they need more than anything is power. They. I mean, they. They feel powerless to even understand what is happening to them. Like, why can't we just have a roof over our head? Why can't we just know from one night to the next where me and my children are going to be living? You know, just a complete and utter lack of power. And for her, that is the most devastating fact about what these families are experiencing.

[Sam Cedar]

How much of what they're experiencing do they perceive as systemic, and how much of it do they perceive as a function of their own poor life choices or something like that? Because I just remember, I think it was no Man Nomad Land. I can't remember the book, but that was Jessica Pruders. Yes. Interviewed them, I feel like five, 10 years ago. And one of the things that they sort of really recognized, and this is a lot of people lost their homes during the housing crisis was that almost to a person, they did not perceive, at least for a long time, that there was Anything systemic about this, that it was all a function of. I made bad decisions, I got unlucky or whatever it was, that there was no sense of that.

[Brian Goldstone]

I think one of the things that was hardest for me in spending all of this time with these families day after day after day, was seeing the shame that especially the parents internalized about what they were going through. Even though we would sit for hours and hours and. And, you know, I would be trying to, like, show them, like, look at the larger picture here. This is not your fault. Like, you are doing everything you're supposed to do. You are working your ass off. There are not enough hours in the week for you to work. Like, you are working two jobs, three jobs. You are doing everything you are supposed to do in this country to have just stability, and it's not there, and it's not your fault. And even though I would say that, like, the shame was still there, it was just omnipresent for them. And, you know, it makes me think of this. There was an article written, I believe, in the late 80s or early 90s by Peter Marcuse, the son of Herbert Marcuse. Peter Marcuse is a brilliant thinker on housing in America. He's largely neglected today, which is a shame. But he had an article in the Socialist Review, I believe it was called Neutralizing Homelessness. And what he's talking about there is the way that homelessness, this crisis that was mounting back then that had just exploded in the United States, how it had been neutralized, how it had been stripped of its properly political economic implications and root causes, and instead had become a story about individual pathology and about life choice choices and about mental illness and addiction and, you know, and housing and the economy and racist. A history of racist housing policy, all of that had sort of been left out. And homelessness as a phenomenon had been neutralized. And I think that is what is happening when these families, despite even, like, knowing the larger picture, like, seeing it like it's still. There's a leap to embracing that. And I think in the same way that until recently in this country, healthcare was also kind of depoliticized. Like, if you went bankrupt because you had cancer and you couldn't afford your medical bills, that was seen as like, well, you should have made better decisions instead of. No, this is a reflection of how. Of this uniquely American malady that is utterly avoidable and preventable. Like, in the same way, I think housing and homelessness has. Has yet to be properly politicized in that way, Even though an entire movement of tenant Organizing and housing justice is, is helping to change that.

[Sam Cedar]

We should say that, that Trump's executive order issued last week, it seems to me, does exactly, I mean, pushes that narrative dramatically. I mean, it literally. I think the first, the first one, the first line in purpose and policy. Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, violent attacks. I mean, it's all. The implication is that every, that people are homeless because they're on drugs, they're homeless because they're, they have mental or emotional problems. The overwhelming majority of these individuals, it says of, of the people who are homeless on a single night, 275,000, which of course is, just means like not, you know, on the streets or not in a shelter. I mean, it's just a, a drop in the bucket. Overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental condition, or both. Two thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs. I mean, this is all a way to marginalize people and to obfuscate the fact that this is a systemic problem.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, and it's nothing new in this country. I mean, since the 1980s during the Reagan administration, when mass homelessness first erupted, the, this has been the tactic, and it's a tactic that then went through successive presidential administrations to basically control the narrative around why are so many people deprived of housing in this country. And of course, they don't see it as being deprived of housing. They just see it as kind of a choice to not have a home. This is nothing new. This is an old tactic. And I was really surprised to go back to that earlier moment in the 80s when all of this was first emerging, to find that the Reagan administration actually actively shaped even the research that could be conducted on homelessness. There was an article in the journal Nature called Reagan versus the Social Sciences. Because ethnographers, sociologists, demographers, public health scholars who wanted to study the effects of racist housing policy, who wanted to study the effects of the gutted social safety net, the gutting of low income housing support and so forth, on homelessness. They were denied grants, and the people who were funded were people who were looking at the link between mental illness and addiction or alcoholism and homelessness. The National Institute for Mental Health became the primary purveyor of knowledge about homelessness in America. And that attempt to control the narrative was successful. By the end of the 80s, the New York Times and CBS News conducted a poll of New Yorkers at random asking what causes homelessness? And the number one answer was psychological problems. The number two answer was a refusal to work Laziness Not a single person mentioned housing. And meanwhile, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population at that time was, were children under the age of six. So there is a direct line of continuity from that obfuscation, that concerted attempt to obscure the true causes of homelessness and what we're seeing today. And it's violent, it's horrific. And the attempt to just get people off the street, to push them out of sight, or as will probably be the case, to push them into these concentration camps where they may be forced into free labor, that will do nothing. That will maybe address the tip of the iceberg, those who are on the street, but that will do nothing to address the rest of the iceberg under the water surface, which is in many ways what my book is about, this vast iceberg under the surface. And it will just continue to, to come out into the open because the root causes are not being addressed.

[Matt Binder]

Trump, Trump and Kushner, Jared Kushner, his son in law, both slumlords like that. Trump had got, cut his teeth, I think, you know, as depicted in that movie with the, the Apprentice with Roy Cohn, because he was being sued over discriminatory housing policy. The Trumps were. And then Kushner was, was a more like advanced model of this, of milking all of his tenants for, for, for their worth with these decrepit housing developments. And it, it just, to me, it feels like also orienting our economy around home ownership and how heavily financialized that has been is a big part of this as well. It has widened the gap between owners, which include landlords and increasingly private equity and these big financial firms and people who are trying to get housing just to survive. Is that the big story here is, is also how the banks and home ownership has widened this gap?

[Brian Goldstone]

Yeah, I mean, homeownership is, is becoming elusive for, for people for whom it was very much within reach, you know, a decade ago, two decades ago. So, so that, you know, the ranks of the renter class, and not just the temporary renter class, but a semi permanent renter class, the ranks of that population is growing by the day. You know, some numbers that are just outrageous. Like right now in America, There are about 53 million workers who are earning under $10.30 an hour there. You know, since 1985, rents have outpaced income gains by 325%. You know, these kinds of statistics show us that this is not just some bizarre aberration that I'm documenting in this book. These families are not some marginal phenomenon. This is the condition in many cases of renting as a poor and you know, and increasingly a middle class or downwardly mobile middle class member of the society. And you know, I mean, this latest budget, the big beautiful budget, it just for detention centers alone, it's allocating $45 billion. That's more than four times what the US government spent last year in building new affordable housing. And so, you know, I think, I'm not a politician, but if I were a politician, I would be proclaiming every day that we are spending four times as much on cages, on putting human beings in cages as we are on just putting people in homes and building homes. So I mean, there are just these realities that once you see them, it's like, I mean, I'm an anthropologist. My background is in anthropology. Before I was a journalist and anthropologists, our basic move is to say, is to take the familiar and make it straight strange to seem sort of bizarre. And nowhere is that more urgent, I think, than when it comes to housing. Like how utterly bizarre is it that this is what we're doing, this is what we're doing with, with, with this fundamental human necessity. And so, yeah, I, I didn't think when I finished this book that it could get any worse. But what we're seeing right now is gasoline just being poured on, on an already disastrous situation.

[Sam Cedar]

And what you said earlier about what happened during the Reagan administration and the impact of it 40 some odd years later and continued impact, I think, you know, when we start to see these things, why are they not taking any more data in the Department of Education? Why are they not taking any more data in terms of EPA and climate change? I mean, all of these things are designed to hide the reality of what's going on. Very often a function of capitalism. I mean, that it, you know, I would, the vast majority of roads lead back to that because we have incentivized the wrong things in our society and empowered the wrong people. I can't encourage people to read your book enough. There are, in the final chapters, there's, you know, policy prescriptions and stories of attempts to, to organize, which are very difficult for folks who are having to struggle with so many material issues that, you know, the idea of starting a political, a journey to gain political power, you know, is secondary to making sure that your kids have a place to live and your family has a place to live. But it's fascinating and I think at one point the housing as an investment vehicle and providing housing as a burgeoning business is in many ways the biggest, if not Maybe perhaps not the only, but certainly close to the only culprit. Brian Goldstone. The book is there's no place for Us working in homeless in America. We will put a link to that @ Majority FM and in the podcast and YouTube description. Thanks again, really appreciate it.

[Brian Goldstone]

Thank you for this great conversation.

[Matt Binder]

Thank you.

[Sam Cedar]

All right, folks, really fascinating stuff and a lot to be learned there across a bunch of different policies and issues that we have in this country. All right, we're going to take a break, head into the fun half where some of it will probably be fun. Maybe, maybe.

[Matt Binder]

Yeah, we didn't get off to the right start with that blinking clip which elevated my heart. I gotta say.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, every day another thing to be.

[Emma Vigland]

And if you just put 10% of your effort towards saying Hamas should knock it off and give the hostage.

[Matt Binder]

There's just something really the concerned face like the. It just like it just. You are a phony mother effer. Truly.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, you know, but how many of us have. Have just put 10% of our efforts into saying people should have homes and then. Yeah, why. Maybe that's why we have that problem.

[Emma Vigland]

If you just put 10% of your efforts towards say Mandela should tell South African blacks to get their act together. Maybe this apartheid stuff would have sorted it out. You know, I'm just spitballing here. It's just. Don't you feel like you're the one.

[Matt Binder]

I also should.

[Emma Vigland]

Who should be contrite in this moment.

[Matt Binder]

I just also love the idea that like you had complete control over this, but you needed some sort of energy balance from the collective protests for it to tip your own, the scales of your own, your own actions are said.

[Sam Cedar]

That maybe we would have been able to get more 2000 pound bombs to bomb tents and then this problem would have gone away.

[Emma Vigland]

You were taking 10% of the time to say Israel would never bomb a hospital.

[Sam Cedar]

My God.

[Matt Binder]

Oh God. Remember those conversations.

[Emma Vigland]

Well, I certainly do. Some people seem to think it's going to be forgotten.

[Matt Binder]

But I will not forget.

[Sam Cedar]

Folks, your support that makes this show possible. You can become a [e-mail] when you do, you not only get the free show, free of commercials, but you get the fun half which is, you know, at least once or twice a week, fun moments. But it's your support that makes this show possible. You can help this show survive and thrive by going to join the majorityreport.com jointhemajorityreport.com also just coffee, fair trade coffee, hot chocolate. Use the Coupon code. Majority get 10 off. You can buy the Majority Report blend. So check it out, Matt. Left reckoning.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah, Left reckoning. We actually had Brian on a week or so ago talking about the same book. So if you want more, I would check that out. It's a really great book. Maybe one of the books of the year. Also, Dave and I did a Sunday show yesterday, patreon.com left reckon you get access to that? Talked about. Well, this blinking clip. Talk about Jeff Daniels and every other liberal taking the wrong message from Doris Kearns Goodwin's team of rivals, which is that apparently they think Lincoln filled his cabinet up with a bunch of centrists.

[Matt Binder]

That's the opposite of what happened.

[Emma Vigland]

The rivals were abolitionists.

[Matt Binder]

He was seen as the centrist.

[Emma Vigland]

So Jeff Daniels saying Kamala would have been like Lincoln because she would have put Liz Cheney in her cabinet.

[Sam Cedar]

Like.

[Emma Vigland]

I had an aneurysm trying to discuss that and how.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean, Blinker Daniels, the actor.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah, he's talking with some CNN folks. Yeah, it's on the sound sheet actually today too, if we wanted it.

[Matt Binder]

Why is she like, nobody.

[Emma Vigland]

Because everyone's a baby.

[Matt Binder]

Because she's a black woman?

[Emma Vigland]

No, no, it's. Oh, oh, no.

[Matt Binder]

Why they assume she's this like.

[Emma Vigland]

No, it's because. It's because they don't have any frame of reference for presidential politics besides Barack Obama and the conversation around Barack Obama. Everyone, every liberal read one book, which was Doris Kearns Goodwin Team Arrivals, and they didn't actually read it. They heard Doris Kearns Goodwin talk about it, about how look at all the different personalities in Lincoln's cabinet. But it, but now it's a, it's a, it's a license to include like Zionists and corporatists in your cabinet.

[Sam Cedar]

They don't have enough to stay in society, man.

[Emma Vigland]

It's, it's driving me absolutely insane how. I mean, kindergarten our politics is in this country.

[Sam Cedar]

But anyway, I guess he would be.

[Jared Kushner]

The dumber from dumb and dumber.

[Sam Cedar]

All right, folks, see you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now, but I think around 18 months out, we're gonna look back and go.

[Brian Goldstone]

Like, wow.

[Sam Cedar]

What, what is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on, hold on for a second. Emma, welcome to the Program. Matt. What is up, everyone? Fun hack. No. McKee.

[Matt Binder]

You did it.

[Sam Cedar]

Fun Pat. Let's go.

[Matt Binder]

Brandon.

[Sam Cedar]

Let's go, Brandon. Bradley, you want to say hello?

[Brian Goldstone]

Sorry to disappoint everyone.

[Emma Vigland]

I'm just a random guy.

[Sam Cedar]

It's all the boys today.

[Matt Binder]

Fundamentally false. No. I'm sorry. Women.

[Sam Cedar]

Stop talking for a second and let me finish.

[Matt Binder]

Where is this coming from?

[Brian Goldstone]

Dude?

[Sam Cedar]

But. Dude, you want to smoke this? 7A.

[Brian Goldstone]

Yes.

[Sam Cedar]

Hi. Me. Is yes. Is this me? Is it me? It is you. Is this me?

[Brian Goldstone]

Hello?

[Sam Cedar]

Is this me? I think it is you. Who is you? No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind?

[Brian Goldstone]

Sports.

[Jared Kushner]

We can discuss free markets.

[Brian Goldstone]

And we can discuss capitalism.

[Sam Cedar]

I'm gonna go Skyline Libertarians.

[Emma Vigland]

They're so stupid.

[Sam Cedar]

Though common sense says of course.

[Matt Binder]

Gobbledygook.

[Sam Cedar]

We nailed him.

[Matt Binder]

So what's 79 plus 21?

[Sam Cedar]

Challenge. Man.

[Jared Kushner]

I'm positively quivering.

[Sam Cedar]

I believe 96. I want to say 8, 5, 7, 2, 1, 0, 3, 5, 5, 0, 1, 1 half. 3, 8, 9, 11.

[Emma Vigland]

For instance.

[Matt Binder]

$3,400. $1900. 5, 4.

[Sam Cedar]

$3 trillion. Sold. It's a zero sum game. Actually.

[Matt Binder]

You're making me think less.

[Sam Cedar]

But let me say this. You can call it satire. Sam goes to satire.

[Brian Goldstone]

On top of it all. Yeah.

[Sam Cedar]

My favorite part about you is just.

[Matt Binder]

Like every day, all day, like everything you do.

[Sam Cedar]

Without a doubt. Hey, buddy. We see you. All right, folks, folks, folks, folks.

[Matt Binder]

It's just the week being weeded out. Obviously.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. Sun's out, guns out. I. I don't know.

[Matt Binder]

But you should know.

[Sam Cedar]

People just don't.

[Emma Vigland]

Like to entertain ideas anymore.

[Sam Cedar]

I have a question. Who cares?

[Emma Vigland]

Our chat is enabled, folks.

[Sam Cedar]

I love it.

[Brian Goldstone]

I do love, love that.

[Sam Cedar]

Gotta jump. Gotta be quick. I gotta jump.

[Brian Goldstone]

I'm losing it, bro.

[Sam Cedar]

Two o', clock, we're already late, and the guy's being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulag.

[Matt Binder]

Outrageous.

[Sam Cedar]

Like, what is wrong with you?

[Brian Goldstone]

Love you.

[Sam Cedar]

Bye. Love you. Bye. Bye.