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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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.
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.
Is this new?
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 people?
Well, and it means that none of us are safe.
After the break, we'll talk about how we got here and why, housed or unhoused, everyone is feeling the strain.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, yeah. Britt, the woman in Brian's book, actually wins that lottery. Miraculously, her name is picked. 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.
And why is that happening? Why are landlords saying, no, I'm not going to take that voucher?
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.
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.
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. Can you talk about that group of people at all?
Can people do anything when they're evicted?
So what do we do? How do we fix this?
Showing 61–80 of 376 · page 4 of 19
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