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
Full Episode
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.
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,
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