The Housing Hunger Games

Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens. The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide. Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels. “What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.” This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.” Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Transcript Laura Flynn: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Laura Flynn.  Living on a tight budget can feel like balancing on top of a metaphorical Jenga tower — one wrong move and the whole thing collapses. Maybe your hours are cut at work, or you lose your job, or your credit score is dinged. Maybe an eviction notice lands on your door. Suddenly, what once felt stable is gone.  When we think of homelessness in America, we often picture people living on the streets, maybe in tents or cars. But it can come for many of us, faster than one might imagine. As journalist Brian Goldstone writes, homelessness isn’t a fixed state. It’s a “point along a spectrum: in a motel today, on a couch tomorrow, possibly in a tent a year from now.” Here’s the thing: Homelessness in the U.S. is increasing. Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless — the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And those figures don’t capture the “hidden homeless”: the families doubling up in cramped apartments or living in motels.  Meanwhile, housing costs are rising while incomes, especially for low-wage workers, are not keeping pace. Nearly 10 million children live in poverty in the U.S. — that’s also a growing number. The precariousness people and families face are under even greater pressure today.  Donald Trump: We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve very dirty, very — got a lot of problems. But we’ve already started that, we’re moving the encampments away — trying to take care of people. Some of those people — we don’t even know how they got there.  LF: President Donald Trump is calling for encampment sweeps, implementing budget cuts to food assistance and health care aid, proposing changes that would make it easier for landlords to evict people in public housing or who are receiving housing assistance, and even limiting the amount of time someone can receive assistance.  To understand the realities so many face trying to navigate staying housed in America today, I spoke to Brian Goldstone. His new book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” captures the crisis with deep reporting and vivid storytelling. And just a note, I spoke to Brian a few weeks ago, before Trump’s latest attacks. Here’s our conversation.  Welcome to the Intercept Briefing, Brian.  Brian Goldstone: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you.  Laura Flynn: Your book tells the stories of five families, and I want to start with one of those stories. Can you introduce us to Celeste?  Brian Goldstone: Yeah, absolutely. So Celeste’s story begins in a really dramatic way. One day, she’s driving home from work with her children. She’s just picked them up from school. She’s left her warehouse job, and her neighbor calls to say that her rental home is on fire. And by the time Celeste makes it back to her rental, it has burned down. The street is closed off, and the family loses everything. The only possessions they have left are the few things that were in the kids’ backpacks and a few loads of dirty laundry that Celeste had thrown in her Dodge Durango that morning, intending to go to the laundromat after work. They’ve lost everything else.  And it’s later determined that an abusive ex who Celeste had recently taken a restraining order out on was responsible for the fire. And even though this fire was kind of the first domino that fell on Celeste and her children becoming homeless, I think it’s really important to note that it wasn’t the fire, it wasn’t even the domestic violence that led them to become homeless. What led them to become homeless ultimately was the fact that months after the fire, Celeste was applying for apartments and she was denied. She was told that there was an eviction that had been filed against her, and she said, that’s not true, I don’t have an eviction on my record.  Come to find out that after this fire took place, Celeste called her landlord, which was not just like a mom-and-pop landlord, it was a private equity firm called the Prager Group. They owned tens of thousands of rentals across the south. And when Celeste called to request that she be put in another home in their portfolio, they told her that in order to “terminate her lease” on this house that had just burned down, she would have to pay not only the current month’s rent — the fire had happened at the beginning of the month, so she hadn’t yet paid her rent — but an additional month’s rent as well. And she would lose her security deposit. And Celeste had hung up in disgust. But yeah, like months later, found out that after she hung up, they filed an eviction against her for nonpayment. In Georgia, a tenant doesn’t even have to be notified of an eviction in person. The sheriff was able to carry out what’s called tack and mail dispossessory. And when she actually drove to the house that had been burned down — it still hadn’t been repaired — in the mailbox, she found an eviction notice on which the sheriff had written “served to fire-destroyed property.”  So at this point in her story, Celeste realized that her chances of getting into an apartment were basically destroyed. And her credit score — this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to something as basic as a place to live — she realized her credit score would basically lock her out of the formal housing market.  In those proceeding months before she found out about the eviction, she had been calling on favors from every friend, relative, co-worker to allow her and her kids to sleep on a couch, to sleep in a basement. Many nights were even spent sleeping in her Dodge Durango. And those nights were terrifying for her because it wasn’t just having to wake up for work the next morning, despite lack of sleep and just the fear of someone maybe breaking into her car or hurting them. It was also that the cops would come. And that fear was founded. In Georgia, over a third of child removals are the direct result of “inadequate housing.”  So at that point, when Celeste realized that she was locked out of the formal housing market, she was desperate to get out of her car. And she did what scores of other homeless and precariously housed families and individuals in America are doing: She went to an extended stay hotel.  LF: Like you said, Celeste and her family went to a budget motel and like others in the book as well. And it’s this kind of place I would think of as on the edge of homelessness. I grew up in a place like this in LA in the ’90s. And I always thought of us as like, not quite homeless, but very close to it. And today, there is greater recognition that people and families living in motels and overcrowded homes do meet the definition of homeless, but often slip through the cracks of official counts. Can you walk us through how homelessness is defined and counted in the U.S., and how those definitions shape both our understanding of the problem and how resources are allocated or distributed? BG: It’s actually instructive just to continue following Celeste as she and her children move into this squalid extended stay hotel. Like many people, Celeste, up to this point, she thought that these extended stay hotels that she was passing by every day as a resident of Atlanta were hotels — just, you know, as we tend to think of them. Some people when they hear “extended stay hotel,” they think of places where traveling nurses or health care workers or business people will stay. “These hotels … are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. … They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live.” But these hotels — as Celeste came to discover — are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. They are places that are proliferating around the country. They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live. These are places that don’t require a credit score to get in. And so this entire underclass of Americans — who really make up what one journalist friend of mine calls the “credit underclass” — these are places where they are forced to go in the absence of family shelters or in the absence of any other accommodations. So Celeste, when she ends up at this place called Efficiency Lodge, there are nearly a dozen similar places lining the roads around this hotel. The weekly rent at this place was almost double what she had been paying for the rental home that had just burned down. So these places are not cheap, even though they’re called budget hotels. They’re actually much more expensive than a real rental apartment. And Celeste, after staying there for a few weeks — this place that she thought at first could be a refuge for her kids, kind of a temporary stopping point — she realizes they have to get out, that they’ve fallen into what people refer to as the “hotel trap.”  What also happens in Celeste’s story is she’s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer. So at that point, she’s been resisting the term “homeless” for herself and for her kids. She has this kind of “name it and claim” theology that says that if she puts that label on herself she will become that thing, she will become that in a very deep way. But finally, she fishes out a homeless resource list that a school social worker gave her. She calls the numbers and one number after another, they say, you’ve got to go to Gateway Center, you got to go to Gateway Center to get help. And she goes to Gateway Center, which is called the Coordinated Entry Point. That’s where people who are homeless in Atlanta — and every city in the country has their own version of Gateway Center — it’s where they go to access services. So Celeste, she goes there, and that’s where, as you mentioned, she finally encounters a definition of homelessness that locks her and her children out of help.  And you know, when she sits down with a caseworker, even though she has ovarian and breast cancer, she’s told that it doesn’t render her “vulnerable” enough to access resources — to access housing assistance. And then she’s told that she doesn’t even meet the definition of what the government calls literal homelessness. That’s a term that comes from HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development].  And even the Department of Education actually categorizes families and children living in these hotels as homeless, along with families and individuals or children who are living in doubled-up arrangements with others in apartments. They consider that homeless because school social workers and teachers saw over the years that this was just as volatile for children, just as precarious as being in a homeless shelter or being on the street.  So the Department of Education considers them homeless, but HUD does not. And the caseworker tells Celeste, “I’m so sorry. If you want to be considered homeless and therefore qualify for assistance, you have to go with your kids to a shelter.” But then the kicker comes in where Celeste says, fine, we’ll go to a shelter, and the woman says, wait, you mentioned your son just turned 15. None of the shelters in Atlanta allow boys over the age of 13. So he would have to go by himself to a men’s shelter. And of course, Celeste is not willing to do that.  The point in saying all of this is not that this was some bizarre aberration; this was just a tragic falling through the cracks. This is an engineered neglect. It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families just like Celeste, who are homeless. But they have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness. They literally don’t count. And one of the shocking things that I discovered in the course of working on this book and reporting it was that there’s this entire world of homelessness that is out of sight that we’re not seeing. And what that tells us is that as bad as the official numbers on homelessness are, the reality is exponentially worse.  “ They have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness. They literally don’t count.” LF: Your book focuses on working families, people hustling across multiple jobs, gig work, side hustles, and people are doing all this while also unable to actually make ends meet and are just one step away from an eviction and homelessness. And it’s a direct rebuke as you were alluding to this narrative we see so often in the media that fixates on street encampments, addiction, or mental illness, and portrays people’s homelessness as the product of personal failings and not societal failings. You outline these various factors that contribute to all of this, but I want to focus on one of them, which is working and the job market — what that looks like for the families you followed and how today’s labor conditions are feeding this crisis. BG: Absolutely. When we talk about this dramatic rise of the working homeless in America, that’s what my book is ultimately about, is this staggering, staggering rise of the working homeless that we attend not only to the homeless part of that equation and unpack that term. And as you mentioned, show the ways that this category confounds and really upends the myths and stereotypes that we as a society have perpetuated about those experiencing homelessness. And it’s become commonplace in discussions of the housing crisis and the homelessness crisis to talk about a growing chasm between what people are earning in their jobs and just what it costs to have a place to live — to keep a roof overhead. And that’s absolutely true. All of the people in this book, they are working and working and working some more. But their wages — which are effectively poverty wages — are not enough just to afford this basic human necessity. But I think it’s not just a matter of wages when we talk about the working homeless. It’s also that the nature of work itself has really changed over the last couple of decades. Work itself, labor itself has grown ever more precarious, ever more insecure. One of the people in the book, Cass, she works at the Atlanta airport, the pride and joy of Atlanta’s economy. She works an overnight shift cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors. And Cass’s employer is not the airport. It’s actually a third-party contractor who gives Cass 29 hours a week of work because at 30 she would be eligible for benefits like sick leave or health insurance. So she’s working. She’s making not much at all. But it’s also the nature of the work that she doesn’t have these benefits. Celeste, when she’s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, she’s having to decide, do I go to my warehouse job or do I go to my chemo appointment? Because if I go to my chemo appointment, I don’t get paid because I don’t have sick leave. And if I don’t get paid, me and my children go from living in this awful extended-stay hotel room to being on the street or being back in our car.  “Why have these myths and stereotypes about homelessness been allowed to flourish in the way they have?” And I think that gets back to the question of why have these myths and stereotypes about homelessness been allowed to flourish in the way they have? And part of it, I think, is that it insulates those who are benefiting from these conditions. It shields them from the scrutiny, the interrogation that I think we as a society would begin to demand if the reality of housing precarity and homelessness came out in all of its really brutal and ugly reality. LF: OK, when you argue that homelessness reflects societal failures, you’re challenging the dominant narrative of individual responsibility and meritocracy. How do you navigate conversations with readers or policymakers who might intellectually accept your premise, but maybe still struggle emotionally or politically with the implications that our entire approach has been fundamentally misdirected? BG: It’s helpful to remember that mass homelessness, as we know it, is a relatively recent phenomenon in America. It erupted in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration. And from the beginning, there was a concerted effort on the part of that administration, and the part of those in power at that time, to control the narrative about homelessness — to shape public perception. So even though at that time the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of 6, these ideas that homelessness is caused by mental illness, by alcoholism, by addiction, or as Reagan put it, by a “lifestyle choice” — a refusal to work. Those really became the dominant narratives in this country about homelessness.  By the end of the 1980s, the New York Times and CBS News conducted a poll asking New Yorkers at random what causes homelessness. And the number one answer was psychological problems. The number two answer was a refusal to work. Not a single person mentioned housing.  “There was a concerted effort on the part of [the Reagan] administration … to control the narrative about homelessness — to shape public perception.” Never mind the fact that the Reagan administration, as many listeners will be aware, ushered in this neoliberal experiment in slashing, decimating the social safety net, gutting assistance for housing, especially low-income housing. Researchers, scholars who wanted to study the effects of a legacy of racist housing policy or the gutting of the safety net on this burgeoning homelessness crisis, they were systematically not funded. They were not given grants. But scholars and researchers who wanted to look at alcoholism or addiction or mental illness in relation to homelessness, they were the ones who were funded. To the extent that the journal Nature actually had an article called “Reagan versus the social sciences” because of just how concerted that tactic was to make a certain kind of research and therefore a certain kind of knowledge possible. That attempt to control the narrative was very much successful. And I think we’re living under the legacy of that today. It is undeniable that most people who are suffering most visibly on the street, who are unhoused, are in the throes of mental distress. They are often in the throes of substance use and addiction. First of all, it’s important to note that those struggles are often the consequence of homelessness, not the cause. What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford. That is the variable. That is why we see huge rates of homelessness in places that are very, very expensive or where affordable housing does not exist, and we don’t see it in places that might have high rates of drug use, like certain areas of Appalachia, but housing is still relatively available. That is the variable, is not having access to housing that people can afford.  LF: You write about President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 and how that got the federal government out of the business of public housing. And now we have this patchwork system of vouchers and tax credits. Gentrification is obviously a major factor in driving homelessness, not just in Atlanta, but throughout cities, across the country for over a decade now. Can you talk a bit about how gentrification is played out in Atlanta specifically, because I feel like that is a particularly interesting story. And can you also explain the term “rent gap” and how it drives gentrification?  BG: So along with these myths and stereotypes about what causes homelessness, I think we also as a society have tended to think of homelessness as a problem of poverty — a problem of really extreme poverty.  Part of what I’m trying to argue in the book is that the current homelessness disaster that we are witnessing is less a crisis of poverty than of prosperity — a particular kind of prosperity. It’s the product, not of a failing economy, but a booming economy, a thriving economy. It’s just not thriving for the people I’m writing about.  “The current homelessness disaster … is the product, not of a failing economy, but a booming economy, a thriving economy. It’s just not thriving for the people I’m writing about.”  Part of the reason I base the book in Atlanta is because of how representative the city is. Over the last several years, Atlanta has undergone this much-celebrated renaissance, a wholesale transformation of its urban space and its city center. White flight into the suburbs has been reversed, and now white, educated, relatively wealthy people are flocking back to the very city that was abandoned years ago in the sort of post-industrial era. And that is a trend that we’re seeing across the country. Unemployment in a city like Atlanta has been at historic low. The signs of growth and corporate profits are everywhere, and yet the people I’m writing about in this book, they’re not just being pushed out of the neighborhoods they grew up in — formerly Black working-class neighborhoods — they are increasingly being pushed out of housing altogether. And that is a trend we see across the nation. So I think that it’s important, as you mentioned, that we really look at gentrification not just as this kind of aesthetic phenomenon, a phenomenon that sees cafes appear where empty storefronts were once standing. But what I’m trying to show in this book is that gentrification is planned. That it happens as the result of very particular decisions at the city level, at the level of urban planning and city policy. Before a neighborhood is gentrified, it first has to become gentrifiable. That is a process that begins not with individual homeowners or renters moving into a neighborhood. And you know, you mentioned this term, “rent gap.” Rent gap is a concept that comes from the geographer Neil Smith. And a recent book by Samuel Stein called “Capital City” flushes this out a bit more. But a rent gap is basically a gap that exists between the current value of a property and what it could demand or collect if certain conditions were met. In the case of Atlanta, one of the biggest rent-gap drivers, creators of a rent gap in the city’s history, is the emergence of the Atlanta Beltline, which is a 22-mile mixed-use trail that circles the city. Everything that the Beltline touches or is anticipated to touch, again, property values have just been skyrocketing in those areas and investors have been swooping in. That’s a classic example of rent gap. The wider the rent gap, the more valuable it is for speculators and profiteers, and it really is at the heart of why gentrification has been fueling not just this housing insecurity, but homelessness. [Break] LF: You also write about this cottage industry of predatory companies that have developed in this current environment where more than 30 percent of American households are considered “cost burdened,” meaning more than 30 percent of their income goes to keeping a roof over their head. So how have corporate landlords, private equity companies, and co-signing lease companies, for example, contributed to the housing crisis?  BG: One of the astonishing realities that I encountered in reporting this book over many years was the fact that private equity firms, Wall Street firms, they’re not just buying up vast swaths of America’s rental housing stock. That is something that I think has become familiar for many of us. But that in itself is shocking and the tactics that are employed once they take over this housing is really startling. One of the families in the book — Maurice and Natalia and their children — they end up in one of these apartment complexes owned by a private equity firm called Covenant Capital based in Nashville. And they are the victims of this automated eviction system where if you’re just a couple of days late on your rent, there’s no human to call and talk to. They tried to call. They only got [an] answering machine. Instead, an eviction is automatically filed against the tenant. Related Oakland’s Moms 4 Housing Were Evicted by a Giant Corporation That Runs National Home-Flipping Operation And this private equity firm that owns the property, they’re not really worried if this family gets evicted because the demand — the competition — just for a single apartment in these red-hot rental markets is so fierce that another family will take their place almost immediately. And also the court costs are put on the family that’s evicted. So that’s what happens to Maurice and Natalia. So it’s not just that these firms like Covenant Capital are making the housing that people currently live in evermore insecure and precarious. What was truly astonishing was that they’re also buying up the places where families and individuals are forced into once they are pushed into homelessness. Just to stay with Maurice and Natalia, once they become homeless with their children, they move to a studio-sized room at Extended Stay America. And they are paying more than double for the studio-sized hotel room, whose conditions — like with Celeste’s hotel room — are just abysmal. I mean, I spent countless hours in this room and saw roaches scurrying across the floor. I saw water leaking from the ceiling, bubbling up around the wall. They’re paying more than double for this room than they were for the two-bedroom apartment just down the street that they were evicted from. Related Supreme Court Ended Eviction Moratorium, but Pandemic Has Shown Road Map for Fighting Back What ultimately happens to this chain of hotels that Maurice and Natalia had moved into, Extended Stay America, is, during the pandemic when all other hotel chains, normal hotels were at like zero-percent occupancy, these Extended Stay hotels remained at like 80-90 percent occupancy. And Blackstone and Starwood Capital — these private equity giants — they noticed that and they noticed that Extended Stay America was bringing in revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars, and they bought the chain for $6 billion.  And many of us are familiar with the James Baldwin line about how in America, how extremely expensive it is to be poor. I think that the journeys of these families in the book, what they illustrate really strikingly is the flipside of that equation: how extremely profitable all of this precarity has become.  “How extremely profitable all of this precarity has become.” LF: It was Natalia and Maurice’s story, right, where before they ended up at the motel, they had to rely on a co-signing leasing company to get into an apartment, but they were limited by which apartments they could rent from and ended up in a “luxury apartment” that was roach-infested? Is that right?  BG: Yeah, and that’s actually the one that they were evicted from because it was owned by Covenant Capital. Even the way that they got into that apartment was because they had to go through this co-signing company, Liberty Rent. It’s just yet another example of how every single turn in these family stories, there are entire new business models designed to profit off their suffering and, I would argue, to ensure that their precarity continues.  LF: I want to shift a bit to the current political climate. President Donald Trump campaigned on deporting people to solve the national housing crisis. And then in July, he signed an executive order to make it easier for cities and states to force homeless people that are living on the streets off the streets — to where is unknown — and even forcefully institutionalize people without their consent. What do you make of this?  BG: There’s really no words for what we’re seeing right now under this administration. When I finished the book, when I finished the reporting, I really thought, “It can’t get any worse.” Surely we as a nation will turn a corner soon and begin to meaningfully address this catastrophe of housing insecurity and homelessness. What we’re seeing under this administration is gasoline being poured on this crisis and not just where housing assistance and the way that homelessness is treated is concerned, but with these massive cuts to the safety net more generally with Medicaid cuts, with cuts to food stamps. The families who I wrote about in this book, they and the millions of people like them, their lives will become worse as a result of these budget cuts and the sort of continuation of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an organized abandonment. Having said that, there’s a reading of this book that I’m really trying to resist where people read it and they encounter the stories of these working families who are working not just one job, but two jobs, three jobs, and it’s not enough. They’re doing everything right. They’re doing everything that as a society we’ve said you need to do in order maybe not to get rich, but to at least have a modicum of stability, and yet that stability is still out of reach. And when people read the book, they have sympathy for these families and they feel awful. But some people who read the book, they’re also saying, OK, well that may be true of the “working homeless” but those we see on the street, those are the ones we can banish. Those are the ones that we can criminalize. Those are the ones we can still continue to brutalize through ticketing them, through rounding them up, forcibly institutionalize them, through now under this new executive order that Trump put through. And that’s a reading I really want to resist, first of all, because we’re not talking about distinct populations here. We’re not talking about the working homeless on the one hand, and these people who are on the street on the other. This is better conceived, I would argue, as an entire spectrum of insecurity. Homelessness in America is a spectrum of insecurity. One day you could be in a hotel with your kids. The next night you might be in the car with them. A month from now you could be in a tent on the street. That is how quickly families and individuals can cycle through these conditions.  And one person in the book, Michelle, when we first meet her, it’s Christmas Eve, and she and her children are living in an apartment making Christmas Eve dinner for them and wearing a Santa hat. And by the end of the book, she is sleeping in a MARTA [Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority] station and could easily be mistaken in the grip of alcoholism — an alcoholism that has developed as a result of preceding years of housing insecurity from the time the book opens and all of the steps that were so avoidable, so preventable, where she could have remained stably housed but didn’t. Related With Sweeps of Homeless Encampments, Liberal Cities Wage War on Poorest Residents And so I really want to emphasize that this is not a distinct population. Those who we see on the street in a tent or in these encampments, they are just the tip of the iceberg of homelessness in America. And yes, the people I’m writing about in this book are those who comprise the much, much bigger portion of the iceberg that is under the water surface that is not just invisible, but that has been actively rendered invisible. If we just criminalize homelessness and we don’t address homelessness at its true root source — which is an unavailability and a lack of access, again, to housing that people can afford — then that entire world that’s under the surface is going to continue to spill out into the open.  LF: Well, that’s a great segue to my next question, which is, there’s a lot of debate about how to solve the national housing crisis. Are there solutions that you think are being oversold or even counterproductive? And if we’re actually serious about solving the homelessness crisis and the housing crisis, where do you think attention should be? BG: There are so many low-hanging-fruit policy solutions that can ease people suffering immediately, that can both keep them in the homes they already have and that can get them into new homes that they don’t yet have much easier, much quicker.  I just want to say that I have a background in anthropology. And as the anthropologist, one thing we like to do in Anthro 101 courses is say that the point of anthropology is to make the familiar strange, to take things that are part of our status quo and to force us to look at them with fresh eyes. And nowhere, I would argue, is that more urgently needed than when it comes to how we treat housing in this country.  It’s just taken for granted in this country that housing is a vehicle for accumulating wealth. That it’s basically a luxury that if you can afford it, you can have it, but if you can’t afford it, you are just left to fend for yourself in what a case manager in the book, Carla Wells, refers to as the housing Hunger Games. These housing Hunger Games are what the families in this book are forced to suffer through. And it’s what millions of people in this country are forced to suffer through because housing is not treated as just a fundamental human right. It’s not treated as just a basic human necessity.  You know, I remember during the pandemic in the early days, there were these two brothers in Tennessee who were widely and justifiably vilified for going around to all the Dollar Generals they could find, buying hand sanitizer, and putting it in a U-Haul truck. And then selling that hand sanitizer on eBay and Amazon for $80 bucks a pop, $90 bucks a pop. And there were calls for them to be prosecuted. I remember thinking at that time as I was following these families and their experiences, I remember thinking that is precisely what we’ve allowed housing to become. We’ve allowed for it to be hoarded up and in effect put into a giant U-Haul truck and then auctioned off to the highest bidder. But we don’t call that by its proper name, which is price-gouging — price-gouging amid a national emergency. We just call that supply and demand economics.  And I think until we encounter housing in this country with fresh eyes, until we are shocked out of the complacency of continuing to treat housing this way, this crisis will just continue to spiral. The true scale and severity of homelessness is, to put a number on it, actually six times greater than the official figures. So we’re talking about 4 million people right now in this country who have been deprived of housing.  “Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in most desperate need of a place to live — I think that that is misguided.” The reason I’m at pains to emphasize the true scale isn’t just to catastrophize. It’s to say, let’s no longer kid ourselves that these nibble-around-the-edges solutions — a few tiny homes over here, 20 percent units at 70 percent, 80 percent AMI [Area Median Income] over there — that this is meaningfully addressing this crisis at scale. Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in most desperate need of a place to live — I think that that is misguided. I think we do need all [the] solutions on the table. We don’t have the luxury right now of having this kind of Manichaean vision of, it’s either the market or government intervention.  I think we need it all, but I do think that we need to be clear-eyed about the true scale and severity so that we can say, and this is what I believe: Public housing redone, public housing done right — which many refer to as social housing — which would be not, again, hundreds of thousands but millions of safe, dignified, affordable housing units owned by the public, owned by the government, built on government-owned land. That is really the only way we are going to get out of this catastrophe.  LF: I’m so glad you brought up Carla, the case manager, because I thought her view of the problem was so clear-eyed about the failures of the systems developed to solve homelessness in this country. And your book is full of these gut-wrenching stories — these harrowing stories — of families trying to navigate this impossible maze, trying to find and maintain shelter for what should be a basic human right. Also includes stories like Carla and Pink, who are people in the community, whose generosity and openness brought a smile to my face as I learned about them. And before we close, any final thoughts?  BG: I think it’s easy in talking about these issues for words like homelessness to become a kind of abstraction, yet another social malady, a uniquely American social malady perhaps, that is divorced from just the visceral reality of what it looks like, what it feels like. And I think that if the book accomplishes nothing else, that is what I hope it will accomplish. I was recently in conversation with one of my heroes, the labor organizer Sara Nelson. And she said something that I think could almost be an epigraph for this project. She said before we can fix the crisis, we have to feel the crisis. And my hope really is that as readers follow these parents and their kids and just immerse themselves in the experience — the desperation, the anxiety, the depression, what public health researchers refer to as the toxic stress that these kids, these parents are exposed to the ways that this actually rewires their brains and opens them up to all kinds of disabilities down the road that basically choke their futures — that readers will encounter that in a very, very immediate and visceral way. And that even a term like homelessness or poverty, that these terms will be imbued again with the full force of the devastating reality that they imply. That is what I hope this book accomplishes because that’s the only way I think that it will truly be solved. It certainly won’t be solved when policymakers, even well-intentioned ones, wake up one day and say, we’re going to tackle this. It will be solved when the tens of millions of people in this country — tenants, renters, and their allies, those who themselves are right on the cusp of being pushed into homelessness — say, this is intolerable and we will not tolerate it any longer.  LF: Brian, there’s so much more that we could talk about, from how the families you followed navigated the pandemic to the failures of welfare-to-work programs like TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], but we’re out of time. And so I just want to say, if you care about understanding the roots of America’s housing crisis, not just through numbers but through lived experiences, you should read Brian Goldstone’s book, “There’s No Place for Us.” It’s urgent, it’s compassionate, and it’s a warning because if we don’t act, more and more people will find themselves in the same impossible situation and too many people already have in the wealthiest country on Earth. Thanks for joining us on the Intercept Briefing, Brian.  BG: Thank you, Laura. It was wonderful to talk to you. LF: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.  We want to hear from you.  Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at [email protected].  This episode was produced by Truc Nguyen. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave. Transcript by Anya Mehta.  Slip Stream provided our theme music. You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And obviously tell all of your friends about us, and better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us. Until next time, I’m Laura Flynn. Thanks for listening. The post The Housing Hunger Games appeared first on The Intercept.