I discovered that that has roots in the emergence of mass homelessness in the 1980s. There was a concerted attempt on the part of the Reagan administration to control the public narrative and perception of this mounting catastrophe. They systematically limited research on homelessness to studies that focused on mental illness, alcoholism, addiction. Researchers who wanted to study what, at that time, was the process of the administration’s shredding of the social safety net, of funding for public housing and housing assistance for low-income families, were not funded.
It’s all connected. Throw a dart at any one of the many things that make this country exceptional when it comes to not providing for the most basic needs.
This effort to shape public perception really was successful. As I point out in the book, surveys showed that most Americans, by the end of the 1980s, attributed homelessness to laziness, addiction, or mental illness. Nobody mentioned housing in the surveys, and nobody seemed to realize that the fastest growing segment of the homeless population was children under the age of six. If you can drastically limit the magnitude and scope of a crisis, or even deny the existence of a crisis, you can more easily claim that you’re tackling it. This has profound effects on who’s able to access resources and assistance. [According to Goldstone’s reporting, the true estimated number of people deprived of housing in America would be well over 4 million, roughly six times the “official” number.]
Throughout this book, we see how structural problems exacerbate each other. Two of the examples I keep thinking of are Natalia seeking support for postpartum depression and the delays on short-term disability payments costing her family over $3,000. Then, Kara’s DoorDash dasher account is deactivated, with the company citing “lateness” as the reason, while she races around Atlanta with her children. Can you speak about how so many structural problems—with childcare, with work—tie back to housing?
One of the benefits of this kind of long-term immersive reporting is really getting beyond a superficial explanation of why people are experiencing this precarity, and showing how there’s a whole range of interlocking systems and structures that make their suffering possible. You mentioned Natalia’s inability to access therapy quickly, and lack of 100%-covered short term disability pay because she had to take a pay cut, and how that was one of many dominoes that fell that made her and her family homeless. Another big one is Michelle’s inability to access subsidized childcare for her daughter, Sky. Kara, later in the book, is trying to find a therapist, and because Georgia didn’t expand Medicaid under Obamacare, she was only eligible for contraception, so her mental health continued to worsen.
Though none of these are about housing, per se, it’s all connected. It’s like, throw a dart at any one of the many things that make this country exceptional when it comes to not providing for the most basic needs—lack of universal health care, lack of universal and subsidized child care.
Having said that, I’m wanting to push against what I hear sometimes in public discussions of homelessness: Well, who’s to say what caused it? While all of these systems are leaving people bereft, and are causing harm in their inadequacies and the draconian requirements that attach to these systems, at the heart of all of this is a refusal to treat housing as a fundamental right for every person in this country.
While I was reading, I also thought about how the dominant American narratives around work ethic and ambition help allow institutions to thwart responsibility.
That’s why, even now, after years of working on this project, the phrase “working homeless” is still shocking to me. It’s not just those who are working jobs—sometimes two or three jobs—and still unable to have a roof over their head, that they aren’t an exception to the rule, but are increasingly becoming the rule. The reason that phrase, for me and I think for other people, is so shocking is because it exposes the cracks in our prevailing assumptions about work and homelessness alike. It’s a myth as old as America itself, that if you work hard, maybe you won’t strike it rich, but you’ll at least find a modicum of stability. This idea that your trajectory in life is limited only by your own ambition, and then, there’s a moral narrative that says earning a living isn’t just practical, it’s moral.
I cite a study in the book that shows that roughly half of those in shelters in America, and about 40% of those who are unsheltered or living on the street, have formal employment—that “working homeless” category doesn’t fall along lines of those who are hidden and those who are visible. There are a lot of people who are visible on the street who are part of the growing ranks of the working homeless. The point isn’t that people with jobs are somehow more deserving of housing. Rather, it’s this: What does it say about America as a country when even those who are working, working, and working some more still can’t secure one of life’s most basic necessities?
I also think it’s important to say that a lot of people who are not working used to work, and are now disabled. Disability is a really important ingredient to add to this mix. Even if you get S.S.I (Supplemental Security Income), it’s not enough to afford housing anywhere in America.
But I’m not at all interested in privileging wage labor. Labor takes many forms. The privileging of wage labor is what happened during welfare reform, because people—especially women—were already engaged in all types of labor, whether that was domestic labor or taking care of a sick relative or your children. It’s only to undermine the claims that America makes for itself: If you do join the formal labor force, you will have certain rewards, and that simply is not the case.
As your reporting shows, there are solutions—you write that we need the will to act. What solutions should be especially highlighted right now?
The north star has to be housing that is safe and permanently affordable for everyone. Right now under the Trump administration, [it] seems absolutely utopian to even talk about a basic right to housing when we’re trying to resist people being rounded up and put in camps, or just the utter decimation of an already threadbare safety net. In the face of that, it can seem very idealistic to talk about a right to housing, but that has to be what we’re moving toward.
Solutions fall into two broad categories. The first is keeping people in the homes they already have. Eviction defense is absolutely crucial, strengthening tenant protections, right to counsel in eviction cases, rent control and stabilization, habitability requirements. The other is ending homelessness, getting people who have already fallen off the edge into homes. There are immediate steps, like expanding the definition of homeless so that the families I write about are able to access the limited resources that exist.
With rent gouging after the fires in Los Angeles, there was so much outrage—rightly so. That’s a more exaggerated version of what people are experiencing every time they apply for an apartment: being forced to pay fees that are only going toward bolstering the profits of those who are fortunate enough to own property. There’s no purpose for it, except to gouge people and to prey on their desperation.
Ultimately, the only way to meaningfully address America’s homelessness crisis at scale is with a deep public investment in social housing, which is basically public housing done right—well-funded, well-maintained, and free from the engineered neglect that shaped its past failures. What would it have looked like if public housing in America hadn’t been set up to fall apart? If it hadn’t been systematically defunded and allowed to deteriorate?
That’s the promise of social housing—public housing that avoids the mistakes this country made out of racism and contempt for the poor. If those forces hadn’t shaped our housing system, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We simply wouldn’t have a homelessness crisis.
What else would you like to emphasize to readers?
We need to dissolve the line between “us” and “them”—because many of us are ourselves at risk of being pushed into this precarity. I think that radically undercuts the notions of charity that tend to shape even the most well-meaning responses to homelessness. What matters, in other words, isn’t empathy or charity but justice and injustice. By framing poverty and homelessness in terms of charity, we neutralize their political significance. Part of what I’m trying to do in this book is restore to this crisis its profound social, political, and economic implications.
