Last week, we spoke to Maxine—a long-haul trucker who works full-time, but still lost her home when she could no longer pay her rent. We wanted to know how that could happen. And it turns out, the problem is much bigger than we thought. If you want to be on What We Spend, we'd love to hear from you. Write us at [email protected] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Maxine and what challenges does she face?
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.
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Chapter 2: What does it mean to be part of the working homeless?
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.
homelessness in the public imagination is very much limited 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 a far more pervasive reality. 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.
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Chapter 3: How does the housing crisis affect working Americans?
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?
Yeah, often they sort of cycle between living in a vehicle if they have a vehicle, living with relatives or friends or coworkers as long as they possibly can. And that usually is a very temporary arrangement. And then, you know, cycling 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. Mm-hmm. 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, 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.
And do we have any sense of how common this is?
Well, over the last two years, we have had the highest level of homelessness on record. Like 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 bad. exponentially worse.
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Chapter 4: What are the root causes of homelessness in America?
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.
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 Center. It's what's called the coordinated entry point to receive assistance if you are a family or individual experiencing homelessness. And Celeste shows up 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 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 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. 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, you know, 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... placed at the front of the queue for help. And Celeste, she finds herself saying, what about my cancer? Doesn't that make me vulnerable? And even that, the caseworker says, ma'am, yes, that's awful, but it just doesn't count.
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Chapter 5: How are families navigating housing insecurity?
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.
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, 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 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 individual reasons, 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.
Is this new?
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 a exactly 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 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.
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Chapter 6: What systemic issues contribute to the housing crisis?
Yes, because as a society, we have a refusal, I think, 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.
Instead of feeling shame ourselves as a society that there would be so many people who have been deprived of this basic necessity, we turn around and level this judgment, this contempt, this blame and shame on the people experiencing it.
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 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 tomorrow. They feel incredibly ashamed about that. 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.
Well, and it means that none of us are safe.
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.
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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Chapter 7: How does the definition of homelessness affect assistance?
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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.
There's one statistic that kind of succinctly sums up why we are looking at the highest rents. level of homelessness on record, that since 1985, rents nationwide across the country have outpaced income growth by 325%. Oh my God. 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, New York. 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, well, just move somewhere cheaper.
You know, why don't you just go somewhere more affordable, where more affordable housing exists? Really, across the country, this lack of just housing that people can afford, that especially poor and working class people can afford, has just evaporated.
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.
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 Brit was born in the early 90s, public housing had been systematically defunded and was kind of already 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
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Chapter 8: What is the future of housing affordability in America?
That means not everyone who qualifies, who meets the income requirements, who falls below that threshold in terms of income, And even who checks all of the other boxes 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.
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.
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 this precious resource of a roof overhead is treated as a lottery in America.
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 that year that her voucher expired and she was unable to use it and it was taken away from her, about 1,100 other families had their voucher expire out of 1,600.
And why is that happening? Why are landlords saying, no, I'm not going to take that voucher?
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.
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