Courtney Harrell (Host)
speaker
376 appearances
10 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Courtney Harrell (Host)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
How do you all talk to each other about that? What do you say to each other?
If the job is paying so far below what you need to meet your basic needs, what is keeping you in this job?
Are there other jobs besides trucking that you could imagine having more stability in?
We talked before about the freedom you would feel on the road.
When you're talking about your long-term future that you are imagining for yourself, your dream of this land, does that include trucking? Or is your long-term dream leaving trucking behind?
In the weeks after recording the episode, Maxine was still living in her truck and saving money towards the future. But she did get one piece of good news. Her company is getting her a newer truck. Thank you to Alex Leslie at the American Transportation Research Institute and Steve Vasselli. They both helped us understand the trucking industry for this episode.
If you want to know more, check out Steve's book, The Big Rig, Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream. What we spend is an Odyssey original podcast. It's written and hosted by me, Courtney Harrell. Our producers are Margot Gray and Kristen Torres. Our editor is Jonathan Menjivar. Our executive producers are Maddy Sprung-Kaiser and Leah Reese Dennis.
Theme song and original music by Matt McGinley. Additional music from APM Music. Mixing by Pedro Alvira. Special thanks to Melissa Akiko Slaughter, Joel Lovell, Jenna Weiss-Berman, J.D. Crowley, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hilary Schuff, Sean Cherry, Laura Berman, and Hilary Van Ornum. If you want to be on What We Spend, we'd love to hear from you.
Write us at whatwespendpodcast at gmail.com.
Last week on What We Spend, we met Maxine. She's a long-haul truck driver in North Carolina who was working all the time, cutting corners where she could, and finding that the bills still just kept adding up. If you haven't listened to that episode, pause now, go listen to it, and then come back.
If you did listen, then you know that while she was recording, Maxine was forced to make the really hard decision to give up her apartment, because she just isn't making enough money to pay her rent. We wanted to know more about how this could be happening to Maxine and also to other people around the country.
How could someone be working full-time, providing an essential service that the rest of us rely on and still not make enough to meet her basic needs? And how many other Maxines are out there? This week, instead of diving into another person's diaries, we're going to try and get some answers to those questions.
We've got a guest who's been looking into this exact subject for years, and he estimates that there are millions of people across the country who can't afford housing. His reporting helps answer so many of the questions Maxine's story brought up. Why is rent so expensive? Why don't wages seem to be increasing with rent? And what in the world can we do about it?
I'm Courtney Harrell, and this is what we spend. This week, we're going to talk about this problem with housing with journalist Brian Goldstone. He's the author of There Is No Place For Us, a new book that tries to understand our housing crisis by following five families in Atlanta.
We'll talk about a couple of them, but for now, the most important thing to know is that everyone Brian followed had full-time jobs, sometimes more than one, and all of them still couldn't afford housing. Like Maxine, they are the working homeless, people who are trapped in a cycle of housing struggles that doesn't fit the picture of homelessness that comes to mind for most of us.
Brian says they're part of a whole world of homelessness that most of us aren't seeing.
Yeah. I mean, I think in our last episode, we talked to somebody who I think we would say is a member of the 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?
And do we have any sense of how common this is?
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.
Showing 41–60 of 376 · page 3 of 19
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