The Housing Hunger Games

Homeless sweeps have become the go-to bipartisan performance of doing something about the U S housing predicament a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans city halls and the White House alike But sweeps are not a fix They re a way to make homelessness less visible while the emergency deepens The roots stretch back decades President Ronald Reagan s Tax Adjustment Act of pulled the federal regime out of building and maintaining masses housing paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits The effect is the system we live with currently one that does little to stem the tide Last year more than people were officially counted as homeless the highest number ever recorded Nearly of them were children And that number leaves out the hidden homeless families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels What causes homelessness in the s as now is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford says Brian Goldstone journalist and author of the new book There Is No Place for Us Working and Homeless in America This week on The Intercept Briefing Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident it s the product of deliberate political choices It s an engineered abandonment of not thousands not hundreds of thousands but millions of families Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen Transcript Laura Flynn Welcome to The Intercept Briefing I m Laura Flynn Living on a tight budget can feel like balancing on top of a metaphorical Jenga tower one wrong move and the whole thing collapses Maybe your hours are cut at work or you lose your job or your credit tally is dinged Maybe an eviction notice lands on your door Suddenly what once felt stable is gone When we think of homelessness in America we often picture people living on the streets maybe in tents or cars But it can come for a great number of of us faster than one might imagine As journalist Brian Goldstone writes homelessness isn t a fixed state It s a point along a spectrum in a motel in the present day on a couch the day after possibly in a tent a year from now Here s the thing Homelessness in the U S is increasing Last year more than people were officially counted as homeless the highest number ever recorded Nearly of them were children And those figures don t capture the hidden homeless the families doubling up in cramped apartments or living in motels Meanwhile housing costs are rising while incomes especially for low-wage workers are not keeping pace Nearly million children live in poverty in the U S that s also a growing number The precariousness people and families face are under even greater pressure in the present day Donald Trump We re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks our beautiful beautiful parks which now a lot of people can t walk on They ve very dirty very got a lot of problems But we ve already started that we re moving the encampments away trying to take care of people Specific of those people we don t even know how they got there LF President Donald Trump is calling for encampment sweeps implementing budget cuts to food assistance and medical care aid proposing changes that would make it easier for landlords to evict people in residents housing or who are receiving housing assistance and even limiting the amount of time someone can receive assistance To understand the realities so a great number of face trying to handle staying housed in America the present day I spoke to Brian Goldstone His new book There Is No Place for Us Working and Homeless in America captures the problem with deep reporting and vivid storytelling And just a note I spoke to Brian a sparse weeks ago before Trump s latest attacks Here s our conversation Welcome to the Intercept Briefing Brian Brian Goldstone Thank you It s wonderful to be with you Laura Flynn Your book tells the stories of five families and I want to start with one of those stories Can you introduce us to Celeste Brian Goldstone Yeah absolutely So Celeste s story begins in a really dramatic way One day she s driving home from work with her children She s just picked them up from school She s left her warehouse job and her neighbor calls to say that her rental home is on fire And by the time Celeste makes it back to her rental it has burned down The street is closed off and the family loses everything The only possessions they have left are the scant things that were in the kids backpacks and a scant loads of dirty laundry that Celeste had thrown in her Dodge Durango that morning intending to go to the laundromat after work They ve lost everything else And it s later determined that an abusive ex who Celeste had lately taken a restraining order out on was responsible for the fire And even though this fire was kind of the first domino that fell on Celeste and her children becoming homeless I think it s really vital to note that it wasn t the fire it wasn t even the domestic violence that led them to become homeless What led them to become homeless ultimately was the fact that months after the fire Celeste was applying for apartments and she was denied She was notified that there was an eviction that had been filed against her and she declared that s not true I don t have an eviction on my record Come to find out that after this fire took place Celeste called her landlord which was not just like a mom-and-pop landlord it was a private equity firm called the Prager Group They owned tens of thousands of rentals across the south And when Celeste called to request that she be put in another home in their portfolio they communicated her that in order to terminate her lease on this house that had just burned down she would have to pay not only the current month s rent the fire had happened at the beginning of the month so she hadn t yet paid her rent but an additional month s rent as well And she would lose her safety deposit And Celeste had hung up in disgust But yeah like months later identified out that after she hung up they filed an eviction against her for nonpayment In Georgia a tenant doesn t even have to be notified of an eviction in person The sheriff was able to carry out what s called tack and mail dispossessory And when she genuinely drove to the house that had been burned down it still hadn t been repaired in the mailbox she uncovered an eviction notice on which the sheriff had written served to fire-destroyed property So at this point in her story Celeste realized that her chances of getting into an apartment were basically destroyed And her credit result this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to something as basic as a place to live she realized her credit amount would basically lock her out of the formal housing industry In those proceeding months before she exposed out about the eviction she had been calling on favors from every friend relative co-worker to allow her and her kids to sleep on a couch to sleep in a basement Multiple nights were even spent sleeping in her Dodge Durango And those nights were terrifying for her because it wasn t just having to wake up for work the next morning despite lack of sleep and just the fear of someone maybe developing into her car or hurting them It was also that the cops would come And that fear was founded In Georgia over a third of child removals are the direct product of inadequate housing So at that point when Celeste realized that she was locked out of the formal housing industry she was desperate to get out of her car And she did what scores of other homeless and precariously housed families and individuals in America are doing She went to an extended stay hotel LF Like you stated Celeste and her family went to a budget motel and like others in the book as well And it s this kind of place I would think of as on the edge of homelessness I grew up in a place like this in LA in the s And I dependably thought of us as like not quite homeless but very close to it And in contemporary times there is greater recognition that people and families living in motels and overcrowded homes do meet the definition of homeless but often slip through the cracks of official counts Can you walk us through how homelessness is defined and counted in the U S and how those definitions shape both our understanding of the predicament and how guidance are allocated or distributed BG It s veritably instructive just to continue following Celeste as she and her children move into this squalid extended stay hotel Like a large number of people Celeste up to this point she thought that these extended stay hotels that she was passing by every day as a resident of Atlanta were hotels just you know as we tend to think of them Specific people when they hear extended stay hotel they think of places where traveling nurses or soundness care workers or business people will stay These hotels are truly extremely profitable homeless shelters They re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally where working people are preponderance likely to be deprived of a stable place to live But these hotels as Celeste came to discover are veritably extremely profitable homeless shelters They are places that are proliferating around the country They re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally where working people are the majority likely to be deprived of a stable place to live These are places that don t require a credit points to get in And so this entire underclass of Americans who really make up what one journalist friend of mine calls the credit underclass these are places where they are forced to go in the absence of family shelters or in the absence of any other accommodations So Celeste when she ends up at this place called Efficiency Lodge there are nearly a dozen similar places lining the roads around this hotel The weekly rent at this place was almost double what she had been paying for the rental home that had just burned down So these places are not cheap even though they re called budget hotels They re certainly much more expensive than a real rental apartment And Celeste after staying there for a sparse weeks this place that she thought at first could be a refuge for her kids kind of a temporary stopping point she realizes they have to get out that they ve fallen into what people refer to as the hotel trap What also happens in Celeste s story is she s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer So at that point she s been resisting the term homeless for herself and for her kids She has this kind of name it and claim theology that says that if she puts that label on herself she will become that thing she will become that in a very deep way But eventually she fishes out a homeless deposit list that a school social worker gave her She calls the numbers and one number after another they say you ve got to go to Gateway Center you got to go to Gateway Center to get help And she goes to Gateway Center which is called the Coordinated Entry Point That s where people who are homeless in Atlanta and every city in the country has their own version of Gateway Center it s where they go to access services So Celeste she goes there and that s where as you mentioned she ultimately encounters a definition of homelessness that locks her and her children out of help And you know when she sits down with a caseworker even though she has ovarian and breast cancer she s advised that it doesn t render her vulnerable enough to access support to access housing assistance And then she s described that she doesn t even meet the definition of what the governing body calls literal homelessness That s a term that comes from HUD the U S Department of Housing and Urban Maturation And even the Department of Coaching truly categorizes families and children living in these hotels as homeless along with families and individuals or children who are living in doubled-up arrangements with others in apartments They consider that homeless because school social workers and teachers saw over the years that this was just as volatile for children just as precarious as being in a homeless shelter or being on the street So the Department of Instruction considers them homeless but HUD does not And the caseworker tells Celeste I m so sorry If you want to be considered homeless and therefore qualify for assistance you have to go with your kids to a shelter But then the kicker comes in where Celeste says fine we ll go to a shelter and the woman says wait you mentioned your son just turned None of the shelters in Atlanta allow boys over the age of So he would have to go by himself to a men s shelter And of class Celeste is not willing to do that The point in saying all of this is not that this was particular bizarre aberration this was just a tragic falling through the cracks This is an engineered neglect It s an engineered abandonment of not thousands not hundreds of thousands but millions of families just like Celeste who are homeless But they have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness They literally don t count And one of the shocking things that I discovered in the subject of working on this book and reporting it was that there s this entire world of homelessness that is out of sight that we re not seeing And what that tells us is that as bad as the official numbers on homelessness are the reality is exponentially worse They have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness They literally don t count LF Your book focuses on working families people hustling across multiple jobs gig work side hustles and people are doing all this while also unable to certainly make ends meet and are just one step away from an eviction and homelessness And it s a direct rebuke as you were alluding to this narrative we see so often in the media that fixates on street encampments addiction or mental illness and portrays people s homelessness as the product of personal failings and not societal failings You outline these various factors that contribute to all of this but I want to focus on one of them which is working and the job domain what that looks like for the families you followed and how in the modern day s labor conditions are feeding this problem BG Absolutely When we talk about this dramatic rise of the working homeless in America that s what my book is ultimately about is this staggering staggering rise of the working homeless that we attend not only to the homeless part of that equation and unpack that term And as you mentioned show the options that this category confounds and really upends the myths and stereotypes that we as a society have perpetuated about those experiencing homelessness And it s become commonplace in discussions of the housing predicament and the homelessness dilemma to talk about a growing chasm between what people are earning in their jobs and just what it costs to have a place to live to keep a roof overhead And that s absolutely true All of the people in this book they are working and working and working specific more But their wages which are effectively poverty wages are not enough just to afford this basic human necessity But I think it s not just a matter of wages when we talk about the working homeless It s also that the nature of work itself has really changed over the last couple of decades Work itself labor itself has grown ever more precarious ever more insecure One of the people in the book Cass she works at the Atlanta airport the pride and enjoyment of Atlanta s business activity She works an overnight shift cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors And Cass s employer is not the airport It s genuinely a third-party contractor who gives Cass hours a week of work because at she would be eligible for benefits like sick leave or robustness insurance So she s working She s making not much at all But it s also the nature of the work that she doesn t have these benefits Celeste when she s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer she s having to decide do I go to my warehouse job or do I go to my chemo appointment Because if I go to my chemo appointment I don t get paid because I don t have sick leave And if I don t get paid me and my children go from living in this awful extended-stay hotel room to being on the street or being back in our car Why have these myths and stereotypes about homelessness been allowed to flourish in the way they have And I think that gets back to the question of why have these myths and stereotypes about homelessness been allowed to flourish in the way they have And part of it I think is that it insulates those who are benefiting from these conditions It shields them from the scrutiny the interrogation that I think we as a society would begin to demand if the reality of housing precarity and homelessness came out in all of its really brutal and ugly reality LF OK when you argue that homelessness reflects societal failures you re challenging the dominant narrative of individual responsibility and meritocracy How do you tackle conversations with readers or policymakers who might intellectually accept your premise but maybe still struggle emotionally or politically with the implications that our entire approach has been fundamentally misdirected BG It s helpful to remember that mass homelessness as we know it is a relatively newest phenomenon in America It erupted in the s during the Reagan administration And from the beginning there was a concerted effort on the part of that administration and the part of those in power at that time to control the narrative about homelessness to shape citizens perception So even though at that time the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of these ideas that homelessness is caused by mental illness by alcoholism by addiction or as Reagan put it by a lifestyle choice a refusal to work Those really became the dominant narratives in this country about homelessness By the end of the s the New York Times and CBS News conducted a poll asking New Yorkers at random what causes homelessness And the number one answer was psychological problems The number two answer was a refusal to work Not a single person mentioned housing There was a concerted effort on the part of the Reagan administration to control the narrative about homelessness to shape residents perception Never mind the fact that the Reagan administration as various listeners will be aware ushered in this neoliberal experiment in slashing decimating the social safety net gutting assistance for housing especially low-income housing Researchers scholars who yearned to review the effects of a legacy of racist housing initiative or the gutting of the safety net on this burgeoning homelessness predicament they were systematically not funded They were not given grants But scholars and researchers who needed to look at alcoholism or addiction or mental illness in relation to homelessness they were the ones who were funded To the extent that the journal Nature veritably had an article called Reagan versus the social sciences because of just how concerted that tactic was to make a certain kind of research and therefore a certain kind of knowledge manageable That attempt to control the narrative was very much profitable And I think we re living under the legacy of that this day It is undeniable that greater part people who are suffering the bulk visibly on the street who are unhoused are in the throes of mental distress They are often in the throes of substance use and addiction First of all it s essential to note that those struggles are often the consequence of homelessness not the cause What causes homelessness in the s as now is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford That is the variable That is why we see huge rates of homelessness in places that are very very expensive or where affordable housing does not exist and we don t see it in places that might have high rates of drug use like certain areas of Appalachia but housing is still relatively available That is the variable is not having access to housing that people can afford LF You write about President Ronald Reagan s Tax Adjustment Act of and how that got the federal cabinet out of the business of society housing And now we have this patchwork system of vouchers and tax credits Gentrification is obviously a major factor in driving homelessness not just in Atlanta but throughout cities across the country for over a decade now Can you talk a bit about how gentrification is played out in Atlanta specifically because I feel like that is a particularly captivating story And can you also explain the term rent gap and how it drives gentrification BG So along with these myths and stereotypes about what causes homelessness I think we also as a society have tended to think of homelessness as a obstacle of poverty a predicament of really extreme poverty Part of what I m trying to argue in the book is that the current homelessness accident that we are witnessing is less a situation of poverty than of prosperity a particular kind of prosperity It s the product not of a failing business activity but a booming business sector a thriving business sector It s just not thriving for the people I m writing about The current homelessness mishap is the product not of a failing market but a booming commercial sector a thriving financial sector It s just not thriving for the people I m writing about Part of the reason I base the book in Atlanta is because of how representative the city is Over the last several years Atlanta has undergone this much-celebrated renaissance a wholesale transformation of its urban space and its city center White flight into the suburbs has been reversed and now white educated relatively wealthy people are flocking back to the very city that was abandoned years ago in the sort of post-industrial era And that is a trend that we re seeing across the country Unemployment in a city like Atlanta has been at historic low The signs of improvement and corporate profits are everywhere and yet the people I m writing about in this book they re not just being pushed out of the neighborhoods they grew up in formerly Black working-class neighborhoods they are increasingly being pushed out of housing altogether And that is a trend we see across the nation So I think that it s major as you mentioned that we really look at gentrification not just as this kind of aesthetic phenomenon a phenomenon that sees cafes appear where empty storefronts were once standing But what I m trying to show in this book is that gentrification is planned That it happens as the conclusion of very particular decisions at the city level at the level of urban planning and city framework Before a neighborhood is gentrified it first has to become gentrifiable That is a process that begins not with individual homeowners or renters moving into a neighborhood And you know you mentioned this term rent gap Rent gap is a concept that comes from the geographer Neil Smith And a newest book by Samuel Stein called Capital City flushes this out a bit more But a rent gap is basically a gap that exists between the current value of a property and what it could demand or collect if certain conditions were met In the event of Atlanta one of the biggest rent-gap drivers creators of a rent gap in the city s history is the emergence of the Atlanta Beltline which is a -mile mixed-use trail that circles the city Everything that the Beltline touches or is anticipated to touch again property values have just been skyrocketing in those areas and investors have been swooping in That s a classic example of rent gap The wider the rent gap the more valuable it is for speculators and profiteers and it really is at the heart of why gentrification has been fueling not just this housing insecurity but homelessness Break LF You also write about this cottage industry of predatory companies that have developed in this current setting where more than percent of American households are considered cost burdened meaning more than percent of their income goes to keeping a roof over their head So how have corporate landlords private equity companies and co-signing lease companies for example contributed to the housing situation BG One of the astonishing realities that I encountered in reporting this book over a multitude of years was the fact that private equity firms Wall Street firms they re not just buying up vast swaths of America s rental housing stock That is something that I think has become familiar for a multitude of of us But that in itself is shocking and the tactics that are employed once they take over this housing is really startling One of the families in the book Maurice and Natalia and their children they end up in one of these apartment complexes owned by a private equity firm called Covenant Capital based in Nashville And they are the casualties of this automated eviction system where if you re just a couple of days late on your rent there s no human to call and talk to They tried to call They only got an answering machine Instead an eviction is automatically filed against the tenant Related Oakland s Moms Housing Were Evicted by a Giant Corporation That Runs National Home-Flipping Operation And this private equity firm that owns the property they re not really worried if this family gets evicted because the demand the competition just for a single apartment in these red-hot rental markets is so fierce that another family will take their place almost instantly And also the court costs are put on the family that s evicted So that s what happens to Maurice and Natalia So it s not just that these firms like Covenant Capital are making the housing that people right now live in evermore insecure and precarious What was truly astonishing was that they re also buying up the places where families and individuals are forced into once they are pushed into homelessness Just to stay with Maurice and Natalia once they become homeless with their children they move to a studio-sized room at Extended Stay America And they are paying more than double for the studio-sized hotel room whose conditions like with Celeste s hotel room are just abysmal I mean I spent countless hours in this room and saw roaches scurrying across the floor I saw water leaking from the ceiling bubbling up around the wall They re paying more than double for this room than they were for the two-bedroom apartment just down the street that they were evicted from Related Supreme Court Ended Eviction Moratorium but Pandemic Has Shown Road Map for Fighting Back What ultimately happens to this chain of hotels that Maurice and Natalia had moved into Extended Stay America is during the pandemic when all other hotel chains normal hotels were at like zero-percent occupancy these Extended Stay hotels remained at like - percent occupancy And Blackstone and Starwood Capital these private equity giants they noticed that and they noticed that Extended Stay America was bringing in revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars and they bought the chain for billion And various of us are familiar with the James Baldwin line about how in America how extremely expensive it is to be poor I think that the journeys of these families in the book what they illustrate really strikingly is the flipside of that equation how extremely profitable all of this precarity has become How extremely profitable all of this precarity has become LF It was Natalia and Maurice s story right where before they ended up at the motel they had to rely on a co-signing leasing company to get into an apartment but they were limited by which apartments they could rent from and ended up in a luxury apartment that was roach-infested Is that right BG Yeah and that s genuinely the one that they were evicted from because it was owned by Covenant Capital Even the way that they got into that apartment was because they had to go through this co-signing company Liberty Rent It s just yet another example of how every single turn in these family stories there are entire new business models designed to profit off their suffering and I would argue to ensure that their precarity continues LF I want to shift a bit to the current political circumstances President Donald Trump campaigned on deporting people to solve the national housing problem And then in July he signed an executive order to make it easier for cities and states to force homeless people that are living on the streets off the streets to where is unknown and even forcefully institutionalize people without their consent What do you make of this BG There s really no words for what we re seeing right now under this administration When I finished the book when I finished the reporting I really thought It can t get any worse Surely we as a nation will turn a corner soon and begin to meaningfully address this catastrophe of housing insecurity and homelessness What we re seeing under this administration is gasoline being poured on this situation and not just where housing assistance and the way that homelessness is treated is concerned but with these massive cuts to the safety net more generally with Medicaid cuts with cuts to food stamps The families who I wrote about in this book they and the millions of people like them their lives will become worse as a product of these budget cuts and the sort of continuation of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an organized abandonment Having revealed that there s a reading of this book that I m really trying to resist where people read it and they encounter the stories of these working families who are working not just one job but two jobs three jobs and it s not enough They re doing everything right They re doing everything that as a society we ve disclosed you need to do in order maybe not to get rich but to at least have a modicum of stability and yet that stability is still out of reach And when people read the book they have sympathy for these families and they feel awful But specific people who read the book they re also saying OK well that may be true of the working homeless but those we see on the street those are the ones we can banish Those are the ones that we can criminalize Those are the ones we can still continue to brutalize through ticketing them through rounding them up forcibly institutionalize them through now under this new executive order that Trump put through And that s a reading I really want to resist first of all because we re not talking about distinct populations here We re not talking about the working homeless on the one hand and these people who are on the street on the other This is better conceived I would argue as an entire spectrum of insecurity Homelessness in America is a spectrum of insecurity One day you could be in a hotel with your kids The next night you might be in the car with them A month from now you could be in a tent on the street That is how briskly families and individuals can cycle through these conditions And one person in the book Michelle when we first meet her it s Christmas Eve and she and her children are living in an apartment making Christmas Eve dinner for them and wearing a Santa hat And by the end of the book she is sleeping in a MARTA Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority station and could easily be mistaken in the grip of alcoholism an alcoholism that has developed as a outcome of preceding years of housing insecurity from the time the book opens and all of the approaches that were so avoidable so preventable where she could have remained stably housed but didn t Related With Sweeps of Homeless Encampments Liberal Cities Wage War on Poorest Residents And so I really want to emphasize that this is not a distinct population Those who we see on the street in a tent or in these encampments they are just the tip of the iceberg of homelessness in America And yes the people I m writing about in this book are those who comprise the much much bigger portion of the iceberg that is under the water surface that is not just invisible but that has been actively rendered invisible If we just criminalize homelessness and we don t address homelessness at its true root source which is an unavailability and a lack of access again to housing that people can afford then that entire world that s under the surface is going to continue to spill out into the open LF Well that s a great segue to my next question which is there s a lot of debate about how to solve the national housing situation Are there solutions that you think are being oversold or even counterproductive And if we re really serious about solving the homelessness situation and the housing emergency where do you think attention should be BG There are so various low-hanging-fruit plan solutions that can ease people suffering this instant that can both keep them in the homes they already have and that can get them into new homes that they don t yet have much easier much quicker I just want to say that I have a background in anthropology And as the anthropologist one thing we like to do in Anthro courses is say that the point of anthropology is to make the familiar strange to take things that are part of our status quo and to force us to look at them with fresh eyes And nowhere I would argue is that more urgently needed than when it comes to how we treat housing in this country It s just taken for granted in this country that housing is a bus for accumulating wealth That it s basically a luxury that if you can afford it you can have it but if you can t afford it you are just left to fend for yourself in what a incident manager in the book Carla Wells refers to as the housing Hunger Games These housing Hunger Games are what the families in this book are forced to suffer through And it s what millions of people in this country are forced to suffer through because housing is not treated as just a fundamental human right It s not treated as just a basic human necessity You know I remember during the pandemic in the early days there were these two brothers in Tennessee who were widely and justifiably vilified for going around to all the Dollar Generals they could find buying hand sanitizer and putting it in a U-Haul truck And then selling that hand sanitizer on eBay and Amazon for bucks a pop bucks a pop And there were calls for them to be prosecuted I remember thinking at that time as I was following these families and their experiences I remember thinking that is precisely what we ve allowed housing to become We ve allowed for it to be hoarded up and in effect put into a giant U-Haul truck and then auctioned off to the highest bidder But we don t call that by its proper name which is price-gouging price-gouging amid a national emergency We just call that supply and demand economics And I think until we encounter housing in this country with fresh eyes until we are shocked out of the complacency of continuing to treat housing this way this situation will just continue to spiral The true scale and severity of homelessness is to put a number on it definitely six times greater than the official figures So we re talking about million people right now in this country who have been deprived of housing Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in majority desperate need of a place to live I think that that is misguided The reason I m at pains to emphasize the true scale isn t just to catastrophize It s to say let s no longer kid ourselves that these nibble-around-the-edges solutions a limited tiny homes over here percent units at percent percent AMI Area Median Income over there that this is meaningfully addressing this dilemma at scale Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in greater part desperate need of a place to live I think that that is misguided I think we do need all the solutions on the table We don t have the luxury right now of having this kind of Manichaean vision of it s either the area or establishment intervention I think we need it all but I do think that we need to be clear-eyed about the true scale and severity so that we can say and this is what I believe Masses housing redone citizens housing done right which plenty of refer to as social housing which would be not again hundreds of thousands but millions of safe dignified affordable housing units owned by the society owned by the executive built on government-owned land That is really the only way we are going to get out of this catastrophe LF I m so glad you brought up Carla the scenario manager because I thought her view of the matter was so clear-eyed about the failures of the systems developed to solve homelessness in this country And your book is full of these gut-wrenching stories these harrowing stories of families trying to tackle this impossible maze trying to find and maintain shelter for what should be a basic human right Also includes stories like Carla and Pink who are people in the society whose generosity and openness brought a smile to my face as I learned about them And before we close any final thoughts BG I think it s easy in talking about these issues for words like homelessness to become a kind of abstraction yet another social malady a uniquely American social malady perhaps that is divorced from just the visceral reality of what it looks like what it feels like And I think that if the book accomplishes nothing else that is what I hope it will accomplish I was not long ago in conversation with one of my heroes the labor organizer Sara Nelson And she commented something that I think could almost be an epigraph for this project She explained before we can fix the dilemma we have to feel the problem And my hope really is that as readers follow these parents and their kids and just immerse themselves in the experience the desperation the anxiety the depression what community fitness researchers refer to as the toxic stress that these kids these parents are exposed to the procedures that this veritably rewires their brains and opens them up to all kinds of disabilities down the road that basically choke their futures that readers will encounter that in a very very immediate and visceral way And that even a term like homelessness or poverty that these terms will be imbued again with the full force of the devastating reality that they imply That is what I hope this book accomplishes because that s the only way I think that it will truly be solved It certainly won t be solved when policymakers even well-intentioned ones wake up one day and say we re going to tackle this It will be solved when the tens of millions of people in this country tenants renters and their allies those who themselves are right on the cusp of being pushed into homelessness say this is intolerable and we will not tolerate it any longer LF Brian there s so much more that we could talk about from how the families you followed navigated the pandemic to the failures of welfare-to-work programs like TANF Temporary Assistance for Needy Families but we re out of time And so I just want to say if you care about understanding the roots of America s housing predicament not just through numbers but through lived experiences you should read Brian Goldstone s book There s No Place for Us It s urgent it s compassionate and it s a warning because if we don t act more and more people will find themselves in the same impossible situation and too multiple people already have in the wealthiest country on Earth Thanks for joining us on the Intercept Briefing Brian BG Thank you Laura It was wonderful to talk to you LF That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing We want to hear from you Share your story with us at -POD-CAST That s - - You can also email us at podcasts theintercept com This episode was produced by Truc Nguyen Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief Chelsey B Coombs is our social and video producer Fei Liu is our product and design manager Nara Shin is our copy editor Will Stanton mixed our show Legal review by Shawn Musgrave Transcript by Anya Mehta Slip Stream provided our theme music You can advocacy our work at theintercept com join Your donation no matter the amount makes a real difference If you haven t already please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts And obviously tell all of your friends about us and better yet leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us Until next time I m Laura Flynn Thanks for listening The post The Housing Hunger Games appeared first on The Intercept