Brian Goldstone (3:45)

Homelessness in the public imagination is very much limited to what we, to what we see with our eyes, to what we see on the street. But you know, what I try to show in this book is that what we see on the street is just the tip of the iceberg. It's just the most sort of extreme and conspicuous edge of, of a far more pervasive problem. And in some ways the population of people who I'm following in this book and again, who are kind of representative of a huge, huge number of people around the country, they are in some ways like everything that is below the water surface, the whole part of the iceberg that we're not seeing. And because of the ways that homelessness is so stigmatized in our country, a lot of the families and individuals who I write about, they just are doing everything they can to remain as invisible and hidden as possible.

Courtney Harrell (4:45)

Yeah, I mean, I think in our last episode we talked to somebody who I think we would say is a member of the like hidden homeless that you're talking about. Her name was Maxine. She is a full time long haul truck driver and she got to the point in her life where she could no longer afford to pay for her apartment and had to start living in her truck full time. And I wondered about what you saw in your reporting. If the people who can no longer afford housing are not on the street, where else are they turning to? Whenever they don't have someplace to go?

Brian Goldstone (5:21)

Yeah, often they, they sort of cycle between living in a vehicle, if they have a vehicle, living with relatives or friends or co workers as long as they possibly can, you know, and that usually is a very temporary arrangement, and then, you know, cycling through from there to a shelter, if there is shelter space available. And, you know, increasingly these extended stay hotels are proliferating across the country as kind of, you know, what I've come to think of as like, commercial, extremely profitable homeless shelters. So, for example, here in DeKalb county, where I live, one of the most populous counties in the south, there is today not a single homeless shelter for families. And so if you are a family, if you're one of the families who I write about in the book, who's lost housing, your choice is basically to sleep in your car, if you, again, if you have a car, or to stay with others or to go to one of these hotels. And by definition, they have income, but that income is going toward just paying the weekly rates at these hotels. One of the families in my book, they came to refer to it as their expensive prison because in the course of just eight months, they spent $17,000 on their room rent. So these places not only are extremely lucrative, but they are totally substandard conditions. Everything you can imagine, from mold and rodents to cockroaches and broken plumbing. And the management at these places, they know that these families and individuals, the working homeless, have nowhere else to go. And that desperation is really being preyed upon.

Courtney Harrell (7:07)

And do we have any sense of how common this is?

Brian Goldstone (7:10)

Well, over the last two years, we have had the highest level of homelessness on record, like since. Since the federal government began conducting the homeless census the last two years. First two years ago was the highest level on record. And then we broke that record this most recent year. As bad as those official numbers are, the reality is exponentially worse. And I show that if we include all of the families who I write about in this book, these families who are languishing in these extended stay hotels or living in their cars or in the overcrowded apartments of others. If we include all those people, we're looking at roughly six times the official number, which would be over 4 million Americans currently deprived of a place to live.

Courtney Harrell (8:01)

Let's zoom in on one of those 4 million Americans, Brian. Followed a woman named Celeste. Celeste is a single mom of three kids, and one day she got a call that her house was on fire. It turned out that an angry ex boyfriend had intentionally burned it down. So now she needed to find a new apartment. She searched and searched for something in her budget, sleeping on the floor of friend's house after friend's house while she did. And then she finally found an apartment she could afford, but her application was rejected because it turned out that the private equity firm that owned her last apartment had evicted her without her even knowing it. When she didn't pay rent on her burned down apartment, she said it was like having a scarlet E. That made it that much more difficult to find a place she could afford.

Brian Goldstone (8:51)

So Celeste is like, okay, I can't do this on my own. I am right on the verge of being on the street with my children. I'm going to go try to get assistance. And you know, she had been really reluctant, as so many people are to put even the term homeless on herself. But finally she is desperate enough to go get help. And she goes to this place called Gateway Center. And every city in America has its own version of Gateway. It's what's called the coordinated entry point point to receive assistance if you are a family or individual experiencing homelessness. And Celeste shows up, you know, before dawn, around 4:30 in the morning. And she ends up waiting hours, hours in line before she's finally seen. And she has her manila folder filled with all the documentation around, you know, this house fire and the unjust eviction and the way her credit score was affected and all the documentation, and she's ready to tell her story. But. But when the caseworker finally sits her down at this desk and begins asking her questions, the questions are like, how long have you been living on the street? How often do you do drugs? When was the last time you were incarcerated? Do you ever, you know, engage in sex work? Celeste is like, no, Never. None. Not at all. You know, that's how she's answering these questions. And finally the caseworker looks up at her and says, ma' am, I'm so sorry, but based on the answers you've given, your vulnerability score, as it's called, is just too low. You're not vulnerable enough to receive assistance. And Celeste realizes that all these things she's so proud of, her work ethic, the fact that she doesn't do drugs, doesn't drink, all these things she's proud of are actually making it less likely that she will receive help because the Way this homeless service assistance system is set up is where, you know, it's those who are most at immediate risk of dying, those are the people who are, you know, sort of placed at the front of the queue for. For help. And Celeste, you know, she finds herself saying, what about my cancer? What about, you know, doesn't that make me vulnerable? And even that, the caseworker says, ma' am, you know, yes, that's awful, but it just doesn't count. You're not homeless in the right way. And when she leaves Gateway center, the line is just as long as it had been before dawn. It's still snaking around the building. And that is basically the system that we have for helping the millions of families and individuals who are in a similar situation.

Courtney Harrell (11:35)

I mean, so the system is fit into a very old definition of homelessness so that we can tackle this in the very few ways that we know how, or you're on your own.

Brian Goldstone (11:50)

Yeah. I think it's important to note, though, that it's not just an old definition of homelessness. It's that this definition has been systematically designed to limit not only the number of people who are considered homeless in this country, but, you know, because we can imagine, for obvious political reasons, it serves those in power to be able to say that this crisis is actually smaller than. Than it really is. It also drastically changes our sense of the causes of homelessness, because if we limit homelessness just to those who are on the street, it's easier to convince ourselves that homelessness is caused for these, you know, these individual reasons, these. These personal pathologies when we are limiting it in this really dramatic way only to those on the street. But when we widen the lens, then we have to start grappling with stories like Celeste of people who are working and working and working some more, and it simply is not enough to secure one of the most fundamental human necessities.

Courtney Harrell (12:58)

Is this new?

Brian Goldstone (13:00)

I think it's easy to forget that mass homelessness in this country is relatively new. It really exploded during the 1980s. It goes back to precisely that moment when the funding for housing, assistance for public housing, and other things across sort of the social safety net were just being gutted. And, you know, during the 80s, that's when this narrative that homelessness is caused by laziness or that it's a lifestyle choice or that it's just caused by mental illness or alcoholism, that's when that narrative really took shape as the result of a very concerted attempt on the part of that government at the time to control the narrative to control the public perception of this mounting disaster. But even at that time, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of six, and they belonged to families who were exactly, you know, part of this phenomenon of the working homeless. We just didn't acknowledge that reality at the time. So I wouldn't say that the phenomenon, the experience of people, you know, working and it just not being enough to afford housing is itself new. What is new, I would argue, is the sheer scale and magnitude of this phenomenon, just how pervasive this experience has become.

Courtney Harrell (14:27)

Well, and you're saying, too, we have these ideas about homelessness as a culture? And is that why, when you were talking about Celeste being hesitant to take on this homelessness label, like, do you think. Is that what that's about, that people don't want to be seen as. I am broken?

Brian Goldstone (14:44)

Yes, because as a society, we have a refusal, I think, to. To acknowledge the root causes of this severe deprivation that so many millions of people in the richest nation on earth have been forced to live with. And instead of feeling shame ourselves as a society, that there would be so many people who have been deprived of this basic necessity, we. We. We turn around and. And level this judgment, this contempt, this blame, and shame on the people experiencing it. And, you know, one of the most heartbreaking things, I think, for me in the course of reporting this book was to see how that shame has been internalized and how even when it's so obvious that there are all these structural forces and conditions that are just actively making it impossible to achieve stability, that these parents, they feel shame. They feel shame that they can't provide for their kids, that. That they can't tell their kids at the end of the school day, here's where we're staying tonight, here's where we're staying tomor tomorrow. They feel incredibly ashamed about that. And, you know, part of why I think the term working homeless is so necessary for us to confront as a country is because that term is a scandal. The stories we've told ourselves are upended by the phrase working homeless. And what that tells us is that we can no longer indulge this fantasy that getting a job is an exit from this most severe form of deprivation. What we're seeing is that a job actually just accompanies this most severe form of deprivation. And once we confront that as a country, we are forced to ask really, really difficult questions about how we got here.

Courtney Harrell (16:50)

Well, and it means that none of us are safe.

Brian Goldstone (16:54)

It means that none of us are safe. It means that the line separating housed from unhoused in America is much more porous than many of us would like to admit.

Courtney Harrell (17:08)

After the break, we'll talk about how we got here and why. Housed or unhoused, everyone is feeling the strain.

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Courtney Harrell (17:58)

Sale, host of Death, Sex and Money, the show from Slate, about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. Many of us have something going on behind closed doors. Like a listener, we called Elizabeth, who told us she's a hoarder. I see mess beyond probably what most people think of when they think of messages. We'll work through it all together on Death, Sex and Money. Listen wherever you get Podcasts if you're an experienced pet owner, you already know that having a pet is 25% belly rubs, 25% yelling drop it. And 50% groaning at the bill from every pet visit. Which is why Lemonade Pet insurance is tailor made for your pet and can save you up to 90% on vet bills. It can help cover checkups, emergencies, diagnostics, basically all the stuff that makes your bank account get nervous. Claims are filed super easily through the Lemonade app, and half get settled instantly. Get a'@lemonade.com pet and they'll help cover the vet bill for whatever your pet swallowed after you yelled drop it. So obviously the question of why we have so many people struggling to afford housing is a big one, but Brian says it really boils down to three things decreasing tenant protections, low wages, and skyrocketing rents.

Brian Goldstone (19:16)

There's one statistic that kind of succinctly sums up why we are looking at the highest level of homelessness on record that since 1985, rents nationwide across the country have outpaced income growth by 325%.

Courtney Harrell (19:37)

Oh my God.

Brian Goldstone (19:38)

So the chasm between what people are making in their jobs and what it costs to remain housed has just continued to grow and grow and grow. And as that Chasm has grown. So has the number of people who are homeless in this country. It's really that simple. It's not just a problem. In some of the most predictable kind of coastal cities like LA, San Francisco, NY. Those are the places where much of our kind of coverage of the homelessness and housing crisis tends to be centered. One really astonishing statistic that I cite in the book is that today in America, there is not a single city, county or metro area or state in the entire country where a full time minimum wage worker is earning enough to afford an average two bedroom apartment, just like a modest two bedroom apartment. This is not a question of like, we'll just move somewhere cheaper. You know, why don't you just go somewhere more, more affordable where, where more affordable housing exists really across the country. This, this lack of just housing that people can afford, that especially poor and working class people can afford, has just evaporated.

Courtney Harrell (20:58)

One place poor and working class people often turn is low income housing, including public housing. But there's a lot of problems with that too, which you can see in the story of another person in Brian's book, a woman named Britt who grew up in public housing in Atlanta.

Brian Goldstone (21:15)

But what is often left out of the story of low income and sort of public housing in America is that, you know, public housing was designed to fail. It was set up to fail. By the time Britt was born in the early 90s, public housing had been systematically defunded and was kind of already on, on its way out in Atlanta. Atlanta was the first city in the country to build public housing in the 30s. And then in the 90s and 2000s, it was the first city to begin this sort of experiment in demolishing all of its public housing. And so what took the place of public housing was a voucher system. So this voucher system, basically, instead of the government building and maintaining housing itself, was saying, we'll give you this, this voucher where you can go to a landlord and we will pay a significant part of your rent to that landlord. Now the only problem is, unlike say food stamps or Social Security or Medicaid, these, this housing assistance is not an entitlement. That means not everyone who qualifies, who meets the, the income requirements, who falls below that threshold of income, and even who checks all of the other boxes that we've, that we've set up to kind of limit the number of people who can access this. That means they have a job, they don't have a criminal background. Only one in four Americans who check each of those boxes actually gets this housing assistance.

Courtney Harrell (22:48)

Only one in four who qualify for the assistance actually get it because the government programs are so underfunded that there's just not enough money to cover everyone who should be able to get help.

Brian Goldstone (23:01)

So what they've done is they set up this lottery where it's really called a lottery. And that itself is telling. I think that, that this, this precious resource of, of a roof overhead is treated as a lottery in America.

Courtney Harrell (23:15)

Yeah, Brit, the woman in Brian's book actually wins that lottery. Miraculously, her name is picked up, but that doesn't get her an apartment or even the rental voucher. It gets her on a waiting list to get the voucher, and she ends up waiting two years. But then, okay, so she finally gets her voucher. Now she has to find a landlord that will accept it, and she can't. Not a single landlord in her price range will take it. So her voucher expires and she's still left without a home.

Brian Goldstone (23:46)

And that year that her voucher expired and she was unable to use it and it was taken away from her, about 1100 other families had their voucher expire out of 1600.

Courtney Harrell (23:58)

And why is that happening? Like, are there, why are landlords saying, no, I'm not going to take that voucher?

Brian Goldstone (24:04)

Well, in neighborhoods and cities where gentrification is rampant, where the real estate market is really hot, where competition for a single rental unit is incredibly fierce, there just is no financial incentive for a landlord to accept this voucher.

Courtney Harrell (24:21)

This partly goes back to the stigma we talked about before. Some landlords assume that anyone relying on a voucher to pay part of their rent is not going to be responsible enough to pay for the rest of it. But also, there's another issue. There's just not enough housing to go around. And that limited inventory means that landlords can just charge more and more, making the gap between what people make and what they need to make to pay rent bigger and bigger.

Brian Goldstone (24:49)

Right now in America, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which is an advocacy group based in D.C. they calculate every year what they call the housing wage needed to afford just a modest two bedroom apartment in America. And then they break it down by city. But nationally, right now, the housing wage needed to afford just the Median rent is $32.12 an hour. And the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. But that housing wage, the wage needed to afford housing, has just continued to go up and up and up and up every single year to the point where it's now $32.12 an hour. So there are 52 million workers in this country right now who earn less than $15 an hour. 52 million.

Courtney Harrell (25:53)

Let's go back to Celeste. She's the woman in Brian's book whose house burned down. She is one of the millions looking for housing she can afford with really low wages. But for Celeste and a lot of people, that's not the only complicating factor.

Brian Goldstone (26:08)

It wasn't just that rents had skyrocketed, but the fact that her job, this job that she had poured everything and gave every part of herself to, did not provide basic things like sick leave or health benefits. So when Celeste is eventually diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, as she and her children are living at this hotel, she's having to decide whether to go to her warehouse job or to go to her appointment for chemotherapy. And if she decides to go to the chemo appointment, she doesn't get paid. And if she doesn't get paid, she doesn't pay her hotel bill and, and then she and her kids are on the street. So it's also that the very nature of work itself in this country has dramatically been transformed. It's become dramatically more volatile, insecure, precarious. Entire segments of our, of our economy, entire industries have been gigafied. It's, it's jobs like, like Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, doordash drivers, it's, it's home health aides, it's other kinds of caregivers, daycare workers whose jobs have really, you know, been contracted out to these third parties or where the work itself is just volatile and you don't know. You know, this week I'm getting 30 hours, next week I'm getting 10 hours and you just, there's no guarantee from one week, one month, one year to the next. If you can even keep the job for more than a year, you know what it will be paying, how many hours you'll be getting. And it just has ripple effects through every area of the worker's life. At Designer Shoe Warehouse we believe that shoes are an important part of, well.

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That make up your whole world. DSW is there and we've got just the shoes. Find a shoe for every you from brands you love at brag worthy prices at your DSW store or dsw.com we've been talking mostly about the group of people who already do not have secure housing to go to. And then there's this whole other group of people that is a huge part of the country who have housing but are on edge where they're not making enough to be able to know that they're going to be able to comfortably afford the place that they're living. They're uncertain how long they are going to have the stability that they have right now. They're to going, can you talk about that group of people at all?

Brian Goldstone (28:59)

So right now in America, there are roughly 12.1 million renter households who are classified as, and this is the technical term, severely cost burdened. They are paying more than half of their monthly income just on rent. And research shows that that when someone, especially a low income household, is severely cost burdened, when they are spending that much of their monthly income on their rent, they are right on the precipice of homelessness. So right now in America, we have over 12 million renter households. That is not just individuals. Those households often are comprised of families with children who are right on the brink of being pushed into homelessness. And part of the conversation about homelessness in America, making it so difficult to sort of end this, this crisis, it's that we're so focused on getting people out of homelessness that we're not looking enough at what leads people to become homeless to begin with. There's not nearly enough discussion about how to prevent homelessness from happening to begin with. So for example, in a city like LA or San Francisco, for every one person who is able to get out of homelessness into housing, another four people become unhoused. And the reason we have this relentless churn is because we are not focused on keeping people in the homes they already occupy. And so it's not just a matter of keeping rents affordable, and it's not just a matter of getting people out of homelessness into housing. It's a matter of passing just basic habitability laws making, you know, passing laws that make it illegal for a landlord to retaliate against a tenant for reporting unsafe conditions to the authorities. So in Georgia, you know, there was no law when I was reporting this book that made it illegal for a landlord to evict a tenant simply for reporting unsafe conditions to public authorities. A landlord could just say, if you don't like it, I'm going to evict you. And that's exactly what happens.

Courtney Harrell (31:15)

And can people do anything when they're evicted?

Brian Goldstone (31:17)

Well, one really sort of low hanging Fruit policy solution that would immediately lower the number of people being pushed into homelessness is just ensuring what's called a right to counsel in eviction cases. So in the vast majority of eviction cases, when the tenant even knows they've had an eviction filed against them, in Celeste's case, she didn't even know an eviction had been filed against them. Research shows that when a tenant has a lawyer on their side, they are just exponentially more likely to be able to fight the eviction. They're more likely to have a lawyer saying to the judge, judge, these are all the reasons why this person shouldn't be evicted. Or when the landlord even sees that the tenant has a lawyer, they'll often drop the eviction case and, for example, say, fine, I'll fix the hot water heater. But when tenants don't have a lawyer on their side, they have usually no legal recourse. And most evictions happen in a matter of seconds, minutes. In eviction court, the judge says to the tenant, did you pay your rent, yes or no? And if the tenant says no, the eviction is done and the family no longer has a place to live.

Courtney Harrell (32:32)

So what do we do? How do we fix this?

Brian Goldstone (32:36)

We really have to attack it in each one of sort of the realms that I mentioned, the realm of tenant protections, of keeping people in the homes they already have, of making those homes as safe and affordable as possible for those who currently have housing. We have to strengthen tenant rights. We also have to make wages begin to meet the growing cost of living in this country, including the cost of remaining housed. But we also have to strengthen labor protections. We have to make sick leave and health benefits more readily available to America's workers. We have to make it easier to form a union, because it's through unions that millions of American workers were able to have that stability to begin with. And we need, we need more housing. We need more housing that poor and working class people can afford. And you know, in that regard, the solution that I find most promising and that where I sort of end up in the book, is this model of what's called social housing.

Courtney Harrell (33:43)

Social housing is government owned housing that's built to be high quality and stay affordable. But unlike public housing in the US it's open to people across all income levels. And it's a model that's worked really well in other countries like Vienna.

Brian Goldstone (33:59)

Austria has been just a shining example of what can happen when a city says, you know what, we're not going to leave this, this essential human necessity to the whims of the, of the market, we are going to get in the housing business ourselves. And in Vienna, it's basically like public housing done right. Public housing, if it hadn't been allowed to fall into disrepair and if poverty hadn't been concentrated in these places and if there hadn't been a stigma attached to them. Social housing, it's for people across different income levels. So it's not just the poorest of the poor and people just pay a fraction of their monthly income to, to live in these units. And it has been just a startling success story and it has drastically reduced the number of people who are housing insecure in a, in a country like Austria. Finland has also implemented social housing where they are building social housing on government owned land. And a couple of decades ago, homelessness was skyrocketing and Finland effectively ended not just visible street homelessness, but all types of homelessness through this social housing model. But you know, the reality is that this kind of massive public investment in housing will take a paradigm shift in how we think about housing in America. We see housing as a commodity, as a kind of vehicle for wealth accumulation. And we've basically said that the few who are lucky enough to own property, the few who are lucky enough to be homeowners, they will accumulate this wealth. But the many, many, many more who just need a place to live and who are part of this renter class, they are going to be at the mercy of a system, of a market that really has no, that may or may not have an incentive to keep them housed. And we need to start to think of housing the way we do, like public education, where we've said every Kid K through 12 is going to have just this fundamental right to a public education. It's not just going to be dependent on them being able to afford a private school. We're going to build public schools for all kids. And yes, there's a lot of flaws with that model, suffice it to say, but that's where our paradigm is when it comes to education. And we need to start to treat housing in the same way. It's just this essential public good that benefits all of society when people have access to it.

Courtney Harrell (36:38)

Where did Britt and Celeste end up in the period of time that you were following them?

Brian Goldstone (36:42)

So when the book ends, that's when Britt says, there is no place for us, there's no place for me and my kids. Not just in Atlanta. But it's an existential statement as well, like, I don't even know where we can be in this country anymore. Celeste when the book ends, she too, you know, she came to Atlanta from Florida when she was much younger, seeking opportunity. She had all these middle class aspirations and when the book ends, she has been so beaten down and demoralized. Yes, by the time the book ends, her cancer is finally in remission, but everything she hoped for has just fallen apart and she ends up going back to Florida kind of in defeat. And you know, when she and her kids begin making the drive back to Florida in the same vehicle that they were sleeping in here in Atlanta, they actually don't know where they're going to be living. And that's how her story ends.

Courtney Harrell (37:41)

So both still without secure housing.

Brian Goldstone (37:45)

That's right.

Courtney Harrell (37:47)

Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your book and your very important reporting.

Brian Goldstone (37:54)

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Courtney Harrell (37:58)

Brian's book is There Is no Place for Us, what We Spend is An Odyssey original podcast. It's written and hosted by me, Courtney Harrell. Our producers are Margo Gray and Kristin Torres. Our editor is Jonathan Menhivar. Our executive producers are Maddie Sprung Keyser and Leah Rhys Dennis. Theme song and original music by Matt McGinley. Additional music from APM music mixing by Pedro Alvira.

Brian Goldstone (38:36)

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Courtney Harrell (38:45)

It'S attention, affection, knowledge and there's this.

Brian Goldstone (38:48)

Huge response to and making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job. That's dedication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.

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I'm Emma Greed and I've spent the last 20 years building, running and investing in some incredible businesses. I've co founded a multi billion dollar unicorn and had my hand in several other companies that have generated hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. The more success I've had, the more people started coming to me with questions. How do you start a business? How do you raise money? How do I bounce back from failure? So it got me thinking, why not just ask the people I aspire to the most? How did they actually do what they do? I'm so incredibly lucky to know some of the smartest minds out there and now I'm bringing their insights along with mine, unfiltered, directly to you on my new podcast Aspire with Emma Greed, I'll dive into the big questions and everyone wants to know about success in business and in life. Through weekly conversations, you'll get the tangible tools, the real no BS stories, and undeniable little hacks that actually help you level up, Listen to and follow Aspire with Emma Greed and Odyssey Podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts.