Money Talks: The Working Homeless in America

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1:59Elizabeth Spiers: Hello, and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires. I'm co-host of Slate Money and a contributing writer for the Times Opinion section. And today I'm joined by Brian Goldstone, the author of There Is No Place For Us, Working and Homeless in America. Brian, introduce yourself. Hello, Elizabeth. I am a journalist and anthropologist. And as you mentioned, I'm the author of There Is No Place For Us. I spent about over five years reporting this book. And before that, I was writing various magazine stories on usually really bleak and depressing subjects around the world. As you do. As one does.

2:38As one does.

2:39Elizabeth Spiers: So this particular bleak and depressing subject is about homelessness in America, but particularly the homeless who are working and both undercounted and misrepresented. Yeah. You know, I first came to this subject through my wife, actually. She is a nurse practitioner and she was working at a community health center here in Atlanta where we live. This is around 2018. And she started noticing this trend among patients she was seeing. You were telling her that they were working at McDonald's or Walmart or packing boxes for Amazon or driving for DoorDash or Uber and Lyft. And when they finished their shifts, they weren't going to an apartment.

3:20They were going to a homeless shelter or to these squalid extended stay hotels or even sleeping on the street in some cases or sleeping in the very cars they had just done, like an airport run for Uber and Lyfton. And when she told me about that, I was stunned. And even as someone who had read books about homelessness, I had never seen the subject of work and homelessness or the working homeless sort of thematized explicitly. And I remember I put that into an academic search engine, like working homeless, just to see what there was already written about this. And I was just shocked that there was hardly anything in this huge archive on homelessness in America, very little that explicitly addressed this phenomenon.

4:09on. And so that was kind of the initial spark of interest. And I ended up writing a magazine story for the New Republic following one family here in Atlanta. And then that kind of developed into this book.

4:22Elizabeth Spiers: So one of the things that you talk about in the book is that the government counts people as homeless if they're living on the street or in the shelter system. But if they're living out of their car or maybe in an extended stay place or something, or they're doubling up as families, it doesn't count them at all. So given that, how big is our homeless population? Is it part of it that we're not seeing because it's just not included in those numbers? I was absolutely astonished to find that there's this entire world of homelessness that is not only out of sight, but that really has been written out of the story we tell ourselves as Americans about homelessness in this country.

5:01And, you know, what I came to discover is that what we see on the street, the tents, they're just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the water surface, so to speak, is the rest of this iceberg. And it's much, much bigger than that sort of extreme edge that's poking out of the water. And, you know, numerically, the last two years have seen the highest level of homelessness on record. Every year, the federal government conducts what's called the point in time count where volunteers across the country sort of fan out to count everyone who is homeless. But how that is defined is, like you mentioned, if you're living on the street or if you're in a shelter.

5:39And two years ago, it was the highest level on record. And then this most recent year broke that record. So we are seeing just a mind-blowing degree of homelessness in this country. But what my book shows is that as bad as the official figures are, the reality is exponentially worse. So by cobbling together different data sources, I show that a true estimate of the number of people who are homeless right now in America is roughly six times that of the official number. And that's a conservative estimate. We're talking roughly 4 million men, women, and children who are currently without a home in this country.

6:19And I try to argue in the book that this isn't just a matter of the numbers being much greater than we've been told. When we narrow the lens to only look at those who are in shelters or on the street, we get kind of a distorted vision, not just of the severity and magnitude of this crisis, but of its root causes. And when we expand the lens to include the families I write about in this book, the working homeless, we are forced to grapple with a very different set of explanations for why this disaster is spiraling.

6:55Elizabeth Spiers: It seems like the reasoning behind counting homeless this way is explicitly political and it stigmatizes poverty more. It says the homeless person who is the conspicuous person on the street who has mental health issues or maybe addiction issues is somehow indicative of the whole. That's right. You know, from the very moment when mass homelessness first exploded in America during the 1980s, and I think it's important to remember that this has not always been with us. Mass homelessness, as we currently know it, is this kind of tragic but unremarkable feature of the American cityscape. This has not always been with us.

7:35And, you know, when mass homelessness first emerged in the U.S. during the 1980s, there was a concerted effort on the part of the Reagan administration to, well, to first gaslight the nation and say that this wasn't actually happening. But people just had to look outside their windows and see, no, there are people who are now living on the street. When that effort at gaslighting the country failed and just denying that there was a problem, the strategy shifted to both downplaying its severity and crucially, controlling the narrative and shaping the perception of homelessness. So like deinstitutionalization, which is the process by which, you know, people were released from psychiatric institutions during the beginning in the fifties and running through the late seventies, that deinstitutionalization was sort of the primary driver of this crisis.

8:26And that was kind of convenient scapegoat because, you know, the Reagan administration could say, oh, the ACLU, you know, these liberals who wanted to open the psychiatric institutions, they're the ones to blame for this. What was left out was the fact that that administration had just completely decimated the social safety net in favor of this kind of neoliberal experiment in the government getting out, like one Reagan deputy put it, the government is getting out of the housing business period. So the funding for low-income housing, the funding for public housing, the funding for housing assistance was just gutted.

9:02And that was left out of the conversation about homelessness. And, you know, their attempt to control the narrative and to sort of say that homelessness was the result of these individual pathologies, it was surprisingly successful by, you know, later in the 1980s, the New York Times, and I believe it was CBS News, conducted a poll where they just asked New Yorkers at random what causes homelessness. And the number one answer was psychological problems. And the number two answer was laziness, a refusal to work. Not a single person mentioned housing. And, you know, meanwhile, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of six.

9:45So, you know, from the very beginning, there's just been this chasm between the reality of what causes homelessness and who is becoming homeless and the sort of stereotypes and myths that we as a society have perpetuated, in some ways I would argue, to shield ourselves as a society from asking really difficult questions about what is causing all of this suffering.

10:10Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, it seems like also people are really made uncomfortable by the notion that anyone could become homeless. Part of the narrative serves to give them a source of comfort if they think that homelessness is solely a function of extreme mental health problems or laziness. And they think, well, that's never going to be me. It's easier to kind of justify the extent to which our safety net has been completely eroded in as much as we ever had one. Absolutely. I mean, I think what is so scandalous and really discomforting about the term working homeless is that if those two words can go together, working and homeless, it shows that the line separating the housed from the unhoused is much more permeable and porous than I think many of us would like to believe.

10:57And we tend to think of homelessness as this phenomenon that afflicts those sort of on the fringes of society. Even people who are more prone to compassion for people experiencing homelessness or charity, we tend to think of homelessness as sort of emerging on the fringes. And I think what is so startling about this phenomenon, this growing phenomenon of the working homeless in America, is that these are not people on the fringes of society. These are people whose work, whose labor is actually powering our cities, whose work and labor is making possible the very growth and booming economy that paradoxically and really perversely is not just pushing those workers out of the neighborhoods they grew up in, but increasingly it's pushing them out of housing altogether.

11:47And I think that is a reality that we as a country, I think, are very concerned to avoid confronting for obvious reasons, because then it raises questions about not just these stories that we tell ourselves about the value of hard work and seeing work as an exit from poverty, but questions about what makes our economy run and at whose expense.

12:12Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, your book is just wonderfully well done. It reminded me a little bit of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's random family. And I think part of the reason why it's so affecting and good is because in the book, you follow around several different families who are experiencing this directly. and you piece together their stories from things they've told you, from public records, from interviews. And it's just a very detailed and moving look at how this happens. So I think it would be useful for our listeners in particular to hear a kind of example of how this escalates for one of the individuals in your book.

12:51Yeah, I wish I could tell you about all five of them because all of their stories are so unique and distinctive and, I mean, also heartbreaking. They all sort of illuminate a different aspect of the larger crisis and phenomenon. But let me tell you about Celeste. Celeste, her story in the book actually begins in a really dramatic way. It begins with her rental home burning down. She's driving home from her warehouse job one day and her neighbor calls and is like, you better get back here because your house is on fire. And by the time Celeste and her kids make it back to East Point, this city outside of downtown Atlanta, the home she's been renting has been destroyed by fire.

13:30And it turns out that an abusive ex, who she had recently taken a restraining order out on, was responsible and is later arrested. So the Red Cross gives her a couple of nights at a Howard Johnson near the airport. And the only possessions that Celeste and her kids have is a couple of loads of dirty laundry that she threw in the car that morning, intending to go to a laundromat after work and whatever items were in the kids' backpacks. Everything else is lost. And Celeste, she thinks that her housing search after that is going to be brief. But as she logs onto Zillow and apartments.com, she finds that the ground has kind of shifted under her feet during the time she's been renting.

14:11In the time she's been renting, Atlanta has undergone this much celebrated urban Renaissance, the so-called inner city, has now been transformed into a kind of playground for the rich. And all this emerging green space and new amenities and yoga studios and breweries and all the sort of predictable markers of gentrification, that's what Atlanta looks like now, that Celeste is looking for a place to live. And rents have gone up by about 65 % during that time. And Metro Atlanta as a whole has lost about 200 ,000 affordable housing units. So neighborhoods that were once affordable are no longer affordable.

14:50And Celeste's housing search becomes a lot more protracted than she expected. And three or four months later, she finally finds an apartment that she can afford. And the leasing agent prays with her that this is going to be the place that God has for her and her kids. And Celeste applies. And a few days later, that leasing agent calls her back and says, why didn't you tell me about the eviction on your record? And Celeste is like, what are you talking about? There is no eviction on my record. And it turns out, so just to rewind, after the house burned down, Celeste called her landlord, which was not a mom and pop landlord.

15:24It was actually a company called the Prager Group, a private equity firm that owned tens of thousands of rental properties across the South. and when she told this person from the Prager group that what had happened, she asked if she could relocate to a different rental property in their portfolio and she was told that in order to break her lease, she would have to first pay the current month's rent because the fire had happened at the beginning of the month. She hadn't yet paid her rent for that month but an additional month as well and she would lose her security deposit and Celeste was like, no way and as she told me the story, she said she hung up in disgust and come to find out now months later when she's denied at this other apartment, what had happened is the Prager Group filed an eviction against her.

16:10Celeste went to the home that had burned down. It still hadn't been repaired. And in the mailbox was an eviction notice. And on that notice, the sheriff who served what's called a tack and mail dispossessory, where a tenant doesn't even have to be notified in person that they've been evicted, on the form was written, served to fire destroyed property. That's incredible. It's incredible. So Celeste realizes that her credit score has been tanked, this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of Americans have access to something as fundamental as a place to live. Her credit score is tanked.

16:47She now has this scarlet E, this eviction on her record. And that is what pushes her and her children into homelessness. I'm really careful to show, and I hope the reader realizes, that as dramatic as the house fire was, that is not what led Celeste and her kids to become homeless. It was the fact that there was just this basic lack of tenant protections and tenant rights and this drastic power asymmetry between landlords and tenants in a state like Georgia is what pushed her and her kids into homelessness.

17:17Elizabeth Spiers: And, you know, her story gets worse. She ends up in an efficiency place and finds out she has cancer. She still doesn't qualify as a member of the vulnerable population because she's making just enough money that she can't get those benefits. And you have so many stories like that in the book where it almost sounds like Kafkaesque in terms of the way that things are happening. And I think it's just something that people don't see unless they've been subjected to it or they have a loved one or a close friend who's been through this. They don't see this sort of pylon of fees and the destruction of credit and lost jobs and stuff like that that just sort of creates a scenario where it's very difficult to dig yourself out of it.

18:01Something that was just really harrowing and startling to witness in the process of reporting this book was on the one hand, how at every step, at every turn in these families' journeys and Celeste's journey, there were entire business models designed to capitalize on this precarity, to squeeze every ounce of profit as possible from these families' predicaments. So like, for instance, it wasn't just that private equity firms like the Prager Group had bought up, you know, vast swaths of rental housing in states like Georgia and really across the country. It's that the very places that families like Celeste are pushed into once they become homeless, you mentioned efficiency, this place efficiency lodge, this extended stay hotel.

18:47These extended stay hotels are kind of a new frontier for investors seeking to profit off this housing crisis. So Blackstone and Starwood Capital, two private equity giants, they saw during the pandemic that while normal hotels were at like 0 % occupancy during the pandemic early on, these extended stay hotels at the bottom end of the spectrum, places with abysmal conditions and really slum conditions, but where rents at these places are exorbitant, they saw how profitable these places were. And so Blackstone and Starwood Capital bought extended state America for$6 billion during the pandemic.

19:25You know, there's that James Baldwin line about how very expensive it is to be poor in America. And I think what this reporting shows is also how extremely lucrative all this insecurity has become. So there's like that reality on the one hand. And then on the other, it's just like the attempt on the part of people like Celeste to get out of what one family in the book calls this expensive prison of this extended stay hotel and the barriers that they face in getting that help. Because as you said, when Celeste goes to Gateway Center, this coordinated entry point where anyone seeking homeless services or assistance has to go, she's basically told you're not homeless in the right way.

20:08You're not, if you were in a shelter on the street, we could help you, or at least you would be eligible for help. But since you're not, since you're homeless in this other way, we can't do anything for you. And so in that sense, it's like the only thing worse than being homeless in this country is not even like earning the designation homeless. And, you know, Celeste is diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer. And even that, as you mentioned, is not enough to make her vulnerable enough for this cruel and kind of arbitrary system.

20:39Elizabeth Spiers: There was, I think, a stat in your book that said in Georgia, a parent with four children needs to make under nine grand a month or sorry, a year in order to qualify for basic levels of Medicaid. There's another factor that comes up a lot in your book is that health care and housing are heavily intertwined. Totally. I mean, I think in our discussions of the homelessness and housing crisis in America, like, I mean, yes, the housing costs themselves are a huge factor. The rents are a huge factor. And wages, low wages and sort of the growing precarity and volatility of work itself in this country is a huge factor.

21:18But we also have all these sort of interlocking systems like healthcare, like education, like a lack of access to affordable childcare. And all of these systems come together to make this catastrophe possible. It was just completely wrenching for me to witness that moment in the book where Kara, her family becomes homeless when her landlord refuses to fix their hot water heater. And not for weeks, but week after week after week. and she can't bathe her kids and she can't take a shower despite coming home from her job at the public hospital where she's attaching electrodes to people's bodies all day and she just wants to bathe herself.

22:02And that's sort of the first domino that falls. And she just feels like she's going crazy throughout the course of this book. And at the end, she finally works out the courage to reach out for help to try to get a therapist. And she's told when she calls the Medicaid number that her form of Medicaid, because Georgia didn't expand Medicaid, that her form of Medicaid only covers contraception and sterilization and STD treatment. And, you know, basically this kind of eugenics and she's not eligible even for the most like basic mental health services. And, you know, we can almost like fast forward her story and imagine her years later, maybe she is someone that you pass in the subway station or on the street, and she's in the throes of mental illness now.

22:49And just to realize how utterly avoidable that was, but how this uniquely American refusal to fund the most basic services was a contributing factor in that deterioration.

23:04Elizabeth Spiers: We're going to take a quick break, and we'll get back to the conversation with Brian Goldstone.

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25:33Elizabeth Spiers: I want to go back for a minute to the idea of these predatory business models that explicitly exist to leech more money off of people who are already poor. And I want to talk about the efficiency stays for a minute. What's the business model there? Is it just that they can charge exorbitant rates for what the properties are? Or is it also a function of having different regulations because the tenants are not considered tenants by law. They're sort of like guests, right? Yeah. It's basically like all of those things together. These extended stay hotels and motels, what used to be a kind of backwater in the hotel industry, kind of a disreputable segment of the industry is now thriving because in part, people in the industry and investors and private equity firms like Blockstone and Starwood Capital are seeing that when you have a housing crisis and you have millions of Americans, like right now in America, there are roughly 12.1 million households.

26:36And so that's not individuals, that's households who are at immediate risk of falling into homelessness. They're one missed paycheck away, one car accident, lack of childcare, whatever it is. And so we have this huge population of people who are at immediate risk of being deprived of a home. And also, of course, close to 4 million people who are currently unhoused. And these hotels and motels are, they're basically for-profit homeless shelters. They're shelter of last resort for people who have nowhere else to go. Just like with Celeste, their credit scores have rendered them unable to sort of access the formal rental market.

27:18And so it's not necessarily that people can't afford rents any longer, although that may have been a reason why they originally lost their housing. It's that they've literally just been locked out of housing. When they go to apply, they're not approved. And so this is a business model that is preying on the desperation of people who have nowhere else to turn. And when you have literally a captive market, you can charge whatever you want and you don't have to really improve the conditions because the refrain that these families hear again and again from hotel management, when they're complaining about the black mold in their room, when they're complaining about ceilings that are dripping water onto your mattress and soaking your things, when they're complaining about the lack of security or just basic maintenance, the refrain that they hear again and again is, well, you're welcome to go somewhere else.

28:11And the reality is these people have nowhere else to go. These hotels are lining the peripheries of American cities. I was just stunned to find that these hotels that I'm driving by every day are filled with working families and individuals who have been living at these places not for months, but often for years. People have the hotel address on their driver's license. School buses pull up to these places every morning to pick up the dozens of kids who are living at these hotels. So we're talking about a huge population of people who are stuck in what is called the hotel trap, where the bulk of their income is going toward paying the rent.

28:52One family in the book, Maurice and Natalia, they end up spending$17 ,000 in the span of eight months for a studio-sized room at Extended Stay America. And the two-bedroom apartment they had been renting down the street that they were evicted from, the room at Extended Stay America was more than double what they had been paying for that two-bedroom apartment. So it is extremely expensive and the conditions are truly awful, but people have nowhere else to turn. And so the entire business model is aware of that. And these places are booming. They're being constructed and new development on these kinds of establishments are concentrated in areas of the country where working people are most likely to lose their housing.

29:37Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah. You know, another thing that I say to people who really do think of the homelessness problem as a function of bad individual choices is just that we just don't have enough housing. You know, you say in the book, the primary reason why we have homelessness is we don't have enough homes, really. And you also had a stat in here, and I don't know if this was just Atlanta or National, and 34 affordable rentals for every 100 low-income people who need them. Yes. Is that just Atlanta or is that? No, that's actually a nationwide figure. And the statistic that often accompanies that when I talk about this issue is the fact that Today in the United States, there isn't a single state, city, or county where a full-time minimum wage worker earning the local minimum wage, which is often higher than the federal minimum wage, like in California or Boston or New York.

30:30Here in Georgia, the minimum wage is still$7.25, which is the federal minimum wage, the minimum wage that hasn't been raised since 2009, which is just a stunning realization. but not a single place in the entire country where that full-time minimum wage worker can afford just a modest two-bedroom apartment, like the average cost two-bedroom apartment. And so this idea that you could just go somewhere cheaper, why don't you move somewhere more affordable, leave New York, leave San Francisco, go somewhere cheaper, there increasingly is nowhere else to go. And in that sense, the title of the book, There Is No Place For Us, That comes from one of the families in the book when the mom, Britt, realizes they have not only been priced out of their neighborhood, but pushed out of the possibility of stable housing altogether.

31:21Increasingly, that title, there is no place for us. Yes, that's an Atlanta title, but it's also a Nashville title, a Charlotte title, a New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Austin. It's a title that applies to a shocking number of cities across this country.

31:37Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I also think that people who say just move somewhere else have never actually had to move somewhere else because the cost of doing it, even if you aren't in this situation, is always expensive. But if you're struggling and you're living in poverty, even if you're working, one of the other things that you point out, too, is the number of hoops and administrative burden type things that make it difficult for those people to find jobs, find housing, or any kind of assistance. But I was thinking in particular about just the housing application process. Let's say you did want to move to somewhere that was cheaper.

32:13Elizabeth Spiers: There's the cost of moving. There's finding another job. There's even things like the application process in some cases. I mean, again, it's yet another sort of way that people's desperation is being preyed upon. And it's basically a form of price gouging. So people who have no other options, who are trying to just get into an apartment, landlords are now charging not just$50 to apply and run a background check, but like$100 per adult to apply for the application itself. And then they're tacking on like a$200,$250 administrative fee. Both the application fee and the admin fee have to be paid up front and they're non-refundable, even if you're rejected.

33:02So you have families who, and of course, it's like the poorest people who are impacted the most because they have the most to lose and they can afford the least. And so they're paying not just these fees one time, but eight times, nine times, losing not hundreds, but thousands of dollars just applying for apartments that they're then denied. They're rejected. And they're still without housing. And now they've lost all this money. And the reason why landlords and property management companies are doing this is because they can. Because in many states, it's just kind of like the Wild West. Or it's what one case manager in the book calls the housing hunger games, where it's just like, you know, all bets are off.

33:48It's everyone for themselves. And if you're lucky enough to get a place to live, that's great. But for the many, many more who are struggling, like they're just left to fund for themselves.

34:00Elizabeth Spiers: And if you do manage to get a place to live in areas where tenants' rights aren't very good, landlords can push you out for any reason. Some of the more appalling stories in your book are really about landlords doing things that are designed to push tenants out, but maybe nominally within the letter of law, maybe are fine. One of the horror stories was particularly striking to me because your subject had increasingly high electrical bills. And we're talking$600,$700 a month for a very small apartment. And she wasn't really using any electricity and the bill kept going up. And so she goes to the landlord and says, this has to be a mistake.

34:38Elizabeth Spiers: I'm not using this much electricity. And they say, go talk to the power company. She goes and talks to the power company. They agree that this is weird, but she gets bounced in between the two of them. And then finds out from other tenants that this is happening to them too. And that it may be just a way to push them out of the development because the landlord doesn't want to fix whatever is causing it. And I could see that happening. You know, that's happening, I think, globally in areas where there are energy problems, you know, and in large parts of Europe and the UK, people have run into this problem because they get these crazy energy bills.

35:13And Kara, who that happened to, that's the same person who we were just talking about a moment ago, who was trying to get therapy, trying to get mental health services. Because going through that, she landed in this apartment after experiencing a long bout of homelessness with her kids. After delivering DoorDash day after day after day with her kids in the car for eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours at a time because there was no childcare during the pandemic. She had the most difficult struggle while she was homeless, finally gets into this apartment, and she is saddled with these just insane electric bills for this tiny apartment,$600,$700 a month.

35:57And there's that moment where she has paid her rent on this apartment, but because her lights have been turned off, because she was unable to pay this crazy light bill, she is in her car running the air conditioner all night with the kids in the car as all of the food in her refrigerator spoils. She's paid the rent on this apartment, but she can't spend the night in it because it's too hot. And it's like the ways that that just tears away at her mental state is totally understandable. And it's the reason why in our discussions of homelessness and housing and solving the homelessness crisis, we can't just be talking about getting people into housing.

36:39We have to be talking about how to keep people in the housing they currently have, how to keep people in the homes they currently occupy. And that includes basic habitability standards, basic tenant protections, banning retaliatory evictions where if Kara had reported this to the authorities, the fact that she was being hit with these light bills, which was the fault of her property owner, the firm who owned this apartment complex, if she had reported them, she very likely could have been the victim of a retaliatory eviction where they just go and file an eviction, knowing that another four or five families are more than happy to take her place in this apartment.

37:20So this has to be part of the discussion is how to keep people in the places they already have.

37:27Elizabeth Spiers: So, you know, I want to talk a little bit on a brighter note. You also, toward the end of the book, you know, you have some prescriptive recommendations and you point to some really interesting solutions from Finland and Vienna, including the idea of social housing. Can you explain a little bit about what that is and how it works? Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, the reason why social housing even is part of the discussion for me is because, again, once you expand the lens to see just how mammoth this catastrophe is, we realize that just like nibbling around the edges and these technocratic fixes and a few tiny homes over there and a couple of units at 80 % AMI over there, it's just not even coming close to addressing this crisis at scale.

38:12And once we see the true scale and severity, we have to acknowledge that we need an equally massive public reinvestment in safe, permanently affordable housing. And a model that I've been really inspired by is what's called social housing. And it's basically public housing done right. It's public housing that hasn't been set up to fail from the beginning as public housing was here in America. It's public housing that isn't stigmatized and where you're not just warehousing the poorest of the poor in dangerous conditions. Social housing in Vienna, it's for people across income levels. It's not just the poorest of the poor.

38:57It's government-owned housing on usually government-owned land. It gives people the security of knowing that from one year to the next, their rents aren't going to be going up by 20%, 30%. In the same way that homeowners know that with their 30-year fixed rate mortgage, their housing costs are going to remain relatively stable and predictable. That's what social housing gives the people who occupy these units. And you mentioned Finland. Finland has effectively ended not just visible street homelessness, which surprisingly, a few decades ago, Finland actually had a really big homeless population relative to its total population.

39:38And Finland was able to end not just street homelessness, but all forms of homelessness through exactly building the social housing on government-owned land. And I think at the foundation of this kind of solution, of course, that seems sort of utopian to even talk about right now in light of what this administration is doing to just decimate the social safety net even further. It can seem just completely out of touch to talk about social housing. But I think that before we can even go there, we have to have as a society just a paradigm shift around what housing is and who it's for and what its purpose is.

40:17And we've tended to see housing as just a vehicle for wealth accumulation, as a kind of commodity or this thing that can be hoarded and then auctioned off to the highest bidder. And I think that until we see housing as just a fundamental human right, just a basic necessity that the wealthiest nation on earth needs to provide for all of its residents, just as a basic part of what it means to live in this country. I think until we get to that point, this crisis is just going to continue to escalate.

40:49Elizabeth Spiers: I'm not sure this administration thinks anything is a human right, at least nothing at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. Yeah. But I also think that we shouldn't, and I use we, I guess, advisedly here, I am speaking less, I guess, as a journalist and more as just a citizen. But I think that we shouldn't allow our sense of a just and, dare I say, equitable society to be determined by whatever this or that administration, whether locally or at the federal level, happens to be pushing at a particular moment. And of course, I think we have to be mindful and stay focused on the predations and just injustices right in front of us, like rounding up homeless people and putting them in warehouses or camps, which is what is actively being prescribed by the powers that be right now.

41:43But I think we have to be mindful of that while also keeping our eyes on kind of a North Star of what it will take to actually solve this homelessness and housing crisis. How much of this would require a drastic culture shift in the way Americans think about the American dream? Not just, you know, I think it's common, regardless of ideological bent, to stigmatize the poor in this country.

42:09Elizabeth Spiers: But another thing is that we value homeownership to an incredible extent that's not really explained by, you know, democratic ideals. In fact, in many ways, it works against it. But that's only increased in years past. The Clinton administration had a whole initiative around homeownership that gave people tax breaks for building. And some of this led into the 08 credit crisis. How much of that rhetoric around homeownership has driven a lot of this policy? Yeah, I think that, let's go back to Vienna, for example. In a place where social housing is thriving, homeownership isn't as important. But what you have in a place like Vienna is also you have a hope of being able to retire without being a homeowner, without needing to own a home as a means of securing some future wealth for yourself or for being able to put your kids through college or any number of other things.

43:05You have things like universal healthcare. And so we've really designed a society for ourselves where you need something like home ownership in order to just accumulate wealth that will allow you to live. We're not talking about most people in this country being homeowners in order to own second and third homes or being able to go on European vacations every summer. We're talking about just as a basic part of having a future for yourself and for your kids and grandkids. And so, yes, I think a culture shift would need to take place in order for home ownership to no longer hold that kind of status.

43:47And I think it is a real tension because in order to close the racial wealth gap, we have to close the home ownership gap that exists between people of color and minorities in this country and white people. That's real. But again, what we, I think, as a society should be working toward is where home ownership no longer has to be that primary means of accumulating wealth because we just have a society where people's needs are taken care of. But I think going back to even the subtitle of this book, Working and Homeless in America, it's not just a paradigm shift or a culture shift around housing that needs to happen.

44:27We also have to grapple with what work has become. And we have allowed millions and millions of people in this country, roughly 50 million workers right now are making under$15 an hour. And that isn't even close to what the housing wage is, which is the wage that's calculated to be able to afford the average two-bedroom apartment in this country. Right now, the housing wage nationwide is$32.12 an hour. Meanwhile, more than 50 million workers earn less than$15 an hour. It's wages. It's wages that haven't even been close to keeping up with the cost of housing and the cost of living. It's the nature of work.

45:10It's the fact that people don't know from one week to the next how many hours they're going to be getting. You're driving for Uber and Lyft and you're not classified as an employee. You're classified as an independent contractor with none of the protections that come with being an employee, with no sick leave and no health benefits. So we've allowed work to become something that doesn't even secure something as basic as a place to live. And I think we as a society have to confront that and we have to do away with some of the myths that we have about working hard in America.

45:44Elizabeth Spiers: that's a good place to wrap up thank you so much for being on thank you for having me i really appreciate it so that's it for money talks thank you to brian goldstone for joining and thanks to jessamine molly of seaplane armada for producing and we'll be back on saturday with our regular edition of slate money slate money is brought to you by charles schwab decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now.

46:28Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market. Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen.

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