Factually! with Adam Conover - Poverty, the Housing Crisis and Lobster on Food Stamps w/ Matthew Desmond

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

Pulitzer Prize winning sociologist, professor at Princeton University and author of the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond joins Adam this week to discuss the physical effects poverty has on the people living in it, the lack of a national conversation about the housing crisis, and how the "American Dream" story is hurting us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually, the show for curious people who never stop asking questions. And let's start off light. America has one of the highest poverty rates of any rich country. We also have among the highest rates for childhood poverty. The World Economic Forum found that almost 20% of Americans below the age of 15 were food insecure.

And no, that doesn't mean they need a confidence boost about which fork to use from Antony from Queer Eye, all right? It means they go hungry often. Think about that. One in five American children goes hungry on the regular. In an elementary school of 50 kids, because let's be honest, that's how many kids we're jamming into a class nowadays, 10 of those kids are not getting the nutrition they need to be healthy or to even focus in class. That is not something we should be okay with. But think about it. When was the last time you ever heard anyone bring it up? It's a reality we almost never face. And the reason for that is, in typical can-do American fashion, we have built elaborate rationales to avoid addressing the issue of poverty head on. In America, we believe that all we need to do better than those who came before us is a little bit of gumption, grit, stick-to-itiveness, and never-quitification. And that's a wonderful thought,

not only because it makes you the hero of your very own Shark Tank segment, but because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it doesn't work, it doesn't mean the theory's wrong, it just means you didn't try hard enough, you lazy piece of shit. The dark side of the myth of American mobility is the conclusion that if you're poor, it's your fault. You slacked off and took too many handouts. You're a hillbilly in need of an elegy. You didn't learn to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Well, guess what? Have you ever tried pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? Go ahead. Give it a shot. I'll wait. It doesn't work. All that happens is you stretch out your nice boots. Come on, don't treat your footwear that way. Well, guess what? That's what the phrase originally meant.

When it was first coined in the 19th century, it specifically referred to an absurd and unfeasible attempt to better your own situation. As in, that's more useless than trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It was only decades later that we flipped the meaning. So consider this. When we tell the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we are literally telling them to do something that's impossible. All the thinking about poverty as some kind of moral failing accomplishes is that it allows those with means to tsk-tsk those beneath them. It doesn't help us address the problem. Hell, it doesn't even help us understand it.

But thankfully, we're not limited to this crappy way of talking about poverty because there is new research and writing coming out that's articulating the reality in much greater resolution. What we're realizing from this growing body of research is that poverty is not a moral or economic condition. It's a public health crisis. In the words of UCSF Dr. Tom Boyce, socioeconomic status is the most powerful predictor of disease, disorder, injury, and mortality that we have. Let that sink in. Poverty is so harmful to us as humans that it's almost literally a disease, a physical one. But that means, like many diseases, it can be treated. The New York Times recently published an overview

of the effects of an experimental miracle cure called the $15 minimum wage. Quote, studies have linked higher minimum wages to decreases in low birth weight babies, lower rates of teen alcohol consumption, and declines in teen births. A $15 minimum wage is an antidepressant. It's a sleep aid, a diet, a stress reliever. It's a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death, and it shields children from neglect. That is some powerful stuff. Well, those words were written by Matthew Desmond, and he is our guest today.

And I am totally honored to have him because he is one of the foremost voices and experts today on the nature and reality of American poverty. He won a Pulitzer in 2017 for his book Evicted. I just read it this year and it was one of the most stunning books I have read in a long time. It makes an incredibly stark case about the causes and effects of housing insecurity and poverty in our society. And it does it while reading as grippingly as the best written novel you have ever read. I really, really recommend it. It's an incredible book. He's also a professor of sociology at Princeton and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, which means he's pretty much won the scholastic equivalent of an EGOT. So I am totally thrilled

to have him on the show. Please welcome Matthew Desmond. Matthew, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate you being here. It's great to be here. So, look, I read your book Evicted in the last year. It completely knocked my socks off, both the thesis of the book and the way you went about the reporting. If I can just set you up to expand it on a little bit, the thesis of the book is that eviction as a social problem is a completely unexamined issue in American life that's almost an epidemic that is sort of stifling lives around the country, correct? Right, right. Yeah, I mean, we're in the middle of this huge housing crisis. You know, it's a housing crisis like the country hasn't seen in years and years. You know,

most poor renting families today spend over half of their income on housing. Yeah. And we've moved from a place, right, where eviction used to be strange and rare, and people used to come out of their homes to watch it, to a place where eviction is incredibly commonplace. And the book kind of centers on Milwaukee and kind of on the human wreckage of the affordable housing crisis. Families getting evicted and landlords doing the work.

Yeah. And I hadn't realized that about eviction specifically. I mean, on our show, Adam Ruins Everything, we did an episode about housing. I've done a lot of work on housing issues elsewhere in my work. But eviction specifically as an action that's taken was not something that had crossed my radar. And the specter of that as a form of housing, I mean, housing insecurity is one thing. Hey, you're paying too much for housing and your housing sucks. But then if you're always living at risk of suddenly being kicked out and having to find a new place to live and finding a new place to live being so difficult, that is such

an additional burden that is placed on a large number of people I had no idea about. Right. And if you look at evictions, instead of looking at rents or rising housing costs, you kind of see the housing crisis in a totally different light. So a lot of times we hear about New York, San Francisco and LA and Seattle. And you know, the story is it's really expensive to live in these cities. And it is. But if you look at evictions, some of the cities that have the highest evictions are not those places. There are places like Richmond, Virginia, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Albuquerque. Who's talking about Tulsa and Albuquerque when it comes to the housing crisis? We absolutely should be talking about

those places. So I think it's a new way of looking at the problem. And it's a new way of looking at how acute it is. By our estimates, about 3.7 million homes in 2016 received an eviction filing that year. That's an incredible amount of instability. That's so divorced from our normal, you know, I talk about the housing crisis a lot. You know, I'll talk about it on Twitter. And I live in Los Angeles. And so I'll, you know, I'll retweet something from the LA Times, you know, and say, hey, this is evidence of some new horrifying statistic I read. And someone will say, oh, that's just in California, because California construction prices are crazy. And da da da, California is a special case. And what people don't realize is this is everywhere in the country. That's right. I'm so amazed how confident people are on Twitter about what's driving the housing crisis. You know, I've been studying this thing for about a decade. And there are still these basic questions that I don't know the answer to. And so, you know, it's like, you know, there are two really complicated markets in America, the healthcare market and the housing market. But all the time you hear really overstating generalizations about what's driving a rinse up, you know, they'll say,

oh, it's just a lack of supply. You know, if we just need to build more homes. Yeah. Well, in a place like LA and in San Francisco, that makes a lot of sense. But you go to the middle of the country and you see cities with double digit vacancy rates, and they've still experienced a huge rise in housing costs. So I think there's a lot of mysteries out there with what's driving this kind of really acute problem. So I want to talk about the book specifically, because so much of the reporting that you read on this is the type that I mentioned a second ago about, you know, hey, the LA Times says,

you know, you know, half of people in the city are spending this amount of their money on housing, the numbers are really bad. Your book is specifically really intimate on the ground reporting with a small number of families. And it reads, it's one of those books where 50 pages into it, I was like, hold on a second, this is nonfiction, right? Like this is so, it's so, the narrative is so strong and moving and your writing is so intimate and well expressed that it really sort of crosses over what we normally expect from a nonfiction work. And so before we get to the topic of the book, one of the things that fascinated me about it so much was how you wrote it. Could you just describe that for us a bit?

So I started because I wanted to try to write a poverty book that wasn't about poor people. And, you know, we had all these accounts of poor places, you know, South Side Chicago or Appalachia, and all these accounts of certain groups of people. You know, you pick up a book about homeless men or single moms. And, you know, I learned a lot from those books. You know, I'm indebted to those books. But they were leaving something out, and that something was tension, other people, you know. And they kind of represented low-income folks like they lived in isolation from the rest of us. And they kind of represented low-income folks like they lived in isolation from the rest of us.

And so I wanted like a way to write about poverty and deprivation in America, but bring in a lot of different people. And I thought, oh, eviction does that. You know, you write about eviction, you write about the landlords and the tenants. You write about the sheriff and the social worker and the pastor. And a lot of people can be in that story. And so that's how I got into it. And so I started this work in 2008 and moved into a trailer park in Milwaukee. And I moved to Milwaukee and I was like, okay, how do I meet folks that are getting evicted? And I opened the paper one day and there was a story about a landlord who

had so many code violations that he was going to get his license revoked, causing a mass eviction. So I drove down and I said, you know, could I rent one of your trailers? He was like, absolutely. And so that's how it started. And so Tobin, the landlord in the book in the trailer park was my landlord. And then I, so I lived in his mobile home park for about five months. And then I moved into a rooming house on the north side of the city, which is Milwaukee's inner city. And I lived there for about 10 months. And just from those two places, you know, met families getting evicted and went everywhere with them and met landlords doing the evicting and tried to write about them just as close as I did with the tenants.

So that's kind of how it started. Right. And because you do that, you give a very round portrait of the place that they have in the structure of housing in America and the pressures that they're under that cause them to place pressure on their tenants. Right. And so if we're conservative, we might look at the tenants and say, oh, these tenants, they're just lazy.

And if we're more liberal, we might look at the landlord and say, oh, these landlords are just greedy. But I think you spend five minutes on the ground and you realize really quickly that the situation is a lot more complex than that. And I thought that it was my job to write about the landlords with as much complexity and humanity as I did their tenants. And so, you know, the book has come out a couple years ago, and I've been all around the country talking about it. And a lot of folks come up to me and they say, you know, I don't know how I feel about Sharina. And Sharina, of course, is the main landlord in the book. And she delivers tenants groceries.

She negotiates with them. She gives them breaks. She evicts a tenant right before Christmas. She refuses to fix basic housing needs. She's a very complicated character. And when readers tell me, I don't know what to think of her, I think, okay, I did okay there. You know, I kind of wrote a complex story because, you know, the world's complex. Yeah, because a real person is not someone who you necessarily know what to think about. Because if you know someone intimately, you know their good qualities and their bad

qualities, you see them at their best and their worst. And, you know, you have a complex relationship with them. And that's the kind of relationship that you established with her through getting to know her. And then you imparted that to the reader is how it felt. Yeah, she was my landlord, too. And, you know, I think she was proud of her work. You know, and when I met Sharina, she had been a landlord for only four years. Before that, she was a schoolteacher at a public school in Milwaukee. And she built up a small real estate empire that gave her family a very comfortable living. And I think she was proud of her work. She was kind of an entrepreneur in that way.

And so I think that my conceit with the book was that if you write about people's lives and you write about them honestly and with complexity, that is a chance to move the needle. And so when I go to Washington and, you know, when I testify in front of Congress or I meet with lawmakers, I bring statistics, you know, I do, but I mainly tell stories. And I think those stories are the things that we have to keep telling to elevate this issue on the national scene. Yeah. And I'll be honest, I want to move on to after this, talking about the issue more directly, but I'm just so fascinated by your process. One of my favorite parts of the book was the author's note at the end where you described how you went about writing it. And I'm just curious if you could speak for a second to, you know, when you're

living with the folks who you're writing about for a couple of years and, you know, creating friendships with them as you would naturally have to if you're spending about for a couple of years and, you know, creating friendships with them as you would naturally have to if you're spending that much time with folks. But you also know that you are, hey, I'm writing a book here. What is, what sort of conflicts come up for you and how do you negotiate those? That's such an interesting process that I'd love to see more of, but I can understand why it's so difficult. Well, one of the things that comes up immediately, right, is these are folks facing incredible adversity. And so they ask for help. And they don't ask you for help because you're an outsider. They ask everyone for help, you know? I mean, they need help. And so there are times in the work

where I said yes, there are times where I said no. You know, when you say yes to a big ask, you can't write about that, you know, in a way. It kind of contaminates what's happening in a way. Right. And so. If you cover someone's rent for a month, then that really changes the situation that you're writing about. Yeah. But there are times when it's like, man, what are you going to do?

You know, and so I remember this one time when, uh, Venetta, uh, she was a homeless woman that I met. Um, she had these three young kids. She was such a good mom, like an amazing mom, you know, organized Easter egg hunts in the homeless shelter for little kids. She kept looking and looking and looking for housing. And finally she found, she found an apartment and, um, she called me after that, and she was crying. She was really upset. And this was not like her. She's a very kind of stoic, you know, holds it together kind of person. And she had got into an argument with a neighbor, and the neighbor had reported her to Child Protective Services on the basis that there was no refrigerator or stove in the house.

You know, she found an apartment, but she still had to save up to get those two things. And so she was really scared. And so she asked if I can lend her money, you know, for those appliances. And I did, and she ended up paying me back. So there are times where that happens, you know, where the moral imperative just kind of, you put your pin down and you just kind of intervene. And, you know, I'm a sociologist, right? I work at a university. And so there's this idea in the university where you have to have objectivity to write about people's lives and you have to have distance. And I actually think we have a lot of distance, actually. Distance isn't the problem. You know, I think like you can fall in

love with people, you can become their friends, you can care about their kids deeply, and you can write about them honestly. And I think the book tries to do that. And so I'm still in touch with a lot of folks in Milwaukee. We call and text all the time. I know about their kids. We've started a little foundation to share proceeds from the book with them and have able to kind of intervene in their lives through that way as well. Another thing that comes up, right, is like people have an interesting relationship with the book that they're in. And so one of the main folks that I wrote about is Arlene. And, you know, when the book first came out, she felt a little, you know, like, gosh, you

know, there's a lot of details in here, right? She told me, I thought this was going to be a book about landlords and tenants. And, you know, it is, but, you know, there's a lot of details in here, right? She told me, I thought this was going to be a book about landlords and tenants. And, you know, it is. But, you know, there's details about her full life in there. And so she feels a little exposed at first and embarrassed. And we talk through that, you know, and what that's like. And then as she sees the book kind of pick up and she sees readers care not only about the issues but literally about her, you know, going around the country. And someone from Louisiana saying, how's Arlene? How's she doing? And I call Arlene that night

saying, someone asked about you. What should I tell them? You know, and, and, you know, she, she begins to feel pride, you know, and I think she feels pride around the book and in her story. And so, you know, there's this one time she was in a public library and she saw the book on display and she went up to the librarian and she said, have you read this book? And the librarian said, yes. And she's like, I'm Marlene, a librarian, like loses it. You know, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, this is amazing. It's like meeting a famous person, you know?

Right. And they have this really great conversation. And so that really, that's special. That means a lot to me, you know, that folks in the book kind of see their stories moving the dial and see their stories serving kind of a larger purpose. Yeah. And let me ask, by the way, I would also be starstruck if I met Arlene, because as a reader, you develop these close relationships with these folks and you really, I mean, your writing really helps us to care about them. And more importantly, helps you see the world from their perspective. Because

so often when we're talking about these issues, we're talking about them, you know, in the abstract or from our own points of view, and we only see, you know, the little slice or we see the abstractification of these folks. And so my next question is, what do you felt that you learned about the reality of housing insecurity and poverty in America from reporting on the book in this way? What perspective did it give you that you felt that you couldn't have gotten otherwise? you felt that you couldn't have gotten otherwise? Well, one thing is just how relentless the rent is, you know, and how much of a force it is in the lives of struggling families, you know? And so I knew that eviction was a problem when I started, but I had no idea how big of a problem it was. You know, like in the inner city of Milwaukee,

one in 14 homes are evicted every year. So what's that mean? That means you walk down any street in the inner city of Milwaukee and you look to your left and your right, one of those homes is gone by the end of the year. Incredible amount of instability. And then following people who have been evicted

and conducting all the statistical work on it too, it's, you know, you come to this really clear realization that, oh, eviction isn't just a condition of poverty. It's a cause of poverty. It's making things worse. It's pushing people into worse housing and the worst neighborhoods. People have an eviction on their record that follows them around. They can't get public housing because of that.

That can affect their credit. A lot of people lose their jobs. And if your listeners have been evicted, they know exactly why this is. It's just so consuming and stressful. It can cause you to make mistakes at work and lose your footing in the labor market. And then there's health effects, mental health effects. You know, Arlene once said, you know, I feel like I got a curse on me. You know, like it won't stop for nothing.

And that's the idea. You know, we published a study that shows that, you know, moms who get evicted experience high rates of depression two years after it happens. It really stays with you. And so it's fundamental to understanding what it's like to be a struggling family in America today. And I think that a lot of Americans, you ask them, where do poor folks live? They say they live in public housing. There's this idea that most poor people live in subsidized housing and get help paying the rent. But the opposite's true, right?

Only about one in four families who qualify for any kind of public housing, affordable housing assistance, only about one in four of those families receive help. And the unlucky majority receive nothing. And I think the stories in Evicted are about what that's like to be part of that unlucky majority. Right. I mean, I don't know people who believe that folks are living in public housing. I'm not sure what public housing they're talking about because so little has been constructed in recent years. It was like a trend that grew and then died. Like we murdered it.

Yeah. Right. It's kind of like we defunded so much of it. Like Reagan cut HUD's budget, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Reagan cut the budget by 60%. Wow. You know, so you cut anything by 60%, it's going to die. Yeah.

You cut the military by 60%, you know, we're going to have some problems. And so I think there's this idea, right, that public housing was like inherently bad, right? And that we failed, but we murdered it. We killed it. Yeah. And it was, and it was, it also died because of the sort of focus disparagement that was put on the very idea. It was almost a campaign of sort of slandering the

very idea, right? That, I mean, obviously I'm sure we, you know, we could go down a list of public housing schemes that were less than ideal that were, in buildings that are poorly designed or concentrating populations in ways that exacerbated issues and that those are mistakes that were made. But it sort of became this overall slander of the very idea of building housing for folks who need it. Right. And so there used to be a time in America where this is how the federal budget was. It was Department of Defense, number one spending item, then housing, number two. There was this big investment in housing from the federal government. And most of the public housing that was built, like early 20th century, mid-century, was for white families, public housing for white families. And when public housing started to be coded or viewed

as a benefit for African-American families, that's when that story started happening. That's when the disparagement started happening. And that's when we called, we started cutting the budget and calling public housing a failure and then dynamiting it, you know, not too long after erecting these tall buildings. So, you know, you're right. It was such an imperfect policy. And we did a lot of things wrong. But for a lot of folks like Arlene, Venetta, Scott, the folks that I wrote about in the book, you know, you asked them, what's the number one issue? You know, what's your number one issue? And I think they'd say, you know, look, I'm paying 80% of my income to rent. Yeah.

And I think they'd say, you know, look, I'm paying 80% of my income to rent. Yeah. You know, can you throw me a bone here? And so, you know, poverty is complicated, you know, but, you know, a stable, affordable home is this amazing foundation on which to give people like Arlene a shot at realizing their full potential. And we have so much less focus on that. so much less focus on that. I mean, I think when, you know, for folks who are, you know, folks of affluent means who are, you know, volunteering time or money to help the less fortunate, you know, they're thinking, okay, food drives, bring some cans down, put them in the box or donate a hundred bucks, you know, to the, to the food pantry, but no people, no one's spending 80% of their income on food. You know what I mean? Food is an issue. Um, and

you know, one that we can talk about, uh, but 80% of your income on housing, um, you know, food and housing are both equally necessary things to live. Uh, and, uh, only one of those is, has such a constricted supply. We've got tons of, we need healthier food. We need, you know, more available food, but, uh but housing is, is clearly the one that has the, we're in the worst situation with, but that we are proportionally spending. There's no national conversation about, about the housing crisis in America. That's what really shocks me. No presidential candidate has ever run on the housing crisis. It doesn't come up. Right, right, right. And so I think that, you know, food is a right in this country. You know, It doesn't come up. bill, you have access to help. But housing, no such access. And the waiting list for public

housing in some of our biggest cities now, it's not counted in years, it's counted in decades, right? So I've got two young kids now. If I applied for public housing today, like in LA or in Washington, DC, chances are I'd be a grandpa by the time my application came up for review. So that's our housing situation. So I think that we do need to start having a conversation as a country that asks, is housing a right? Like food is. Is housing a right? Canada just asked that question. They passed this incredible suite of bills two years ago that established the right to housing in Canada. I read a lot of books. I know you do too. But the coolest thing I've read in years

is the Canadian housing plan. It's amazing. It's inspiring. You know, it's about helping kids. It's about addressing gender inequality, indigenous rights issues, issues that disproportionately affect the gay community, the working class community. So it's just, you know, it was incredible, inspiring and beautiful. And we can think about that, having that conversation too. And I agree with you that housing has been getting the short shrift in the political debate. And I hope that changes 2020. You know, I love it when Elizabeth Warren goes to the town hall meeting and starts saying, yes, I do think housing is a right. I love it when I see Senator Harris or Senator Booker put out these housing bills that say, hey, you know, homeowners get a tax benefit just because they own a home, but renters are left out of that. Can we balance the scales a little bit? Yeah.

I hope that we see housing rise to're sort of forced to find what housing they can in this sort of very rapacious private market that's... and look, here's the thing I found sort of most shocking about your book. You know, in my early 20s, I was living in New York. I was trying to find an apartment. It was difficult to find an apartment. I had to pay too much money to a broker. You know, I couldn't get my landlord to fix things.

I was like, hey, this is pretty rough. I think I've had a pretty rough time of it. You know, I think I know what life in the city is like. The market that the folks that you write about are in is one that I did not really realize existed in America through a lack of my own experience until I read about it. And this sort of gets back to what I was talking about in the intro that, you know, our idea of poverty is, hey, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. There's a lot that you can, you know, hey, just work a little bit harder. But it's not until you realize the situation

of the folks who are actually, you know, that you're speaking to, that you realize how difficult that is. Because, you know, the view that your book gives of that market and that life is so stark. These folks are essentially going from apartment to apartment that are in terrible disrepair, that have plumbing that doesn't work, have sinks that are backed up with garbage where they have no recourse to get any of it fixed. They're likely to be evicted every six months or so, or they're constantly living under threat of eviction. And something that I didn't even realize existed is, and I'm very sorry for paraphrasing your own work to you, by the way. This is great.

But there's this pattern where a tenant will be evicted through no fault of their own. A family member or someone who lives nearby will get into an argument with someone. And the landlord says, well, now there's too much trouble. I'm kicking you out. And that eviction, you touched on this earlier, goes on their record. They actually have a record of evictions, which then follows them around and makes it harder for them to get an apartment, which is stunning to me because this is not a crime that's been committed. This is not a felony conviction that's being held at the courthouse or whatever, but it's still on their record and affects their life going down the line as though they had committed a crime. And that was a system that I did not even realize existed. And once you're, you know,

once you're tussling with that, that only multiplies how difficult it is to put your life back together after you've been evicted. Right. And, you know, wrapped around that is the idea of like, what's eviction court like? So, you know, if you get arrested in this country, you have a right to an attorney. You know, public defense is far from perfect, but there is a public defense. Yeah. There's no such public defense in civil court, right? So if you have an eviction notice facing you, you have no right to an attorney. And most folks that get an eviction notice don't show up to court.

And, you know, I have a PhD. I wouldn't show up to court if I had to face off with a landlord attorney. And so a lot of folks don't want to deal with that embarrassment and hassle, and they just leave. And when you do show up, it's basically an eviction processing plant. You know, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the eviction court commissioners have 100 cases to process an hour because they know that most folks won't show up. You know, boom, boom, boom, default evictions. That's almost to a minute. That's right.

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, a lot of these tenants that do show up, they're making deals in back hallways with landlord attorneys. The scales are just so imbalanced. And so, you know, if eviction court look like the courts on TV, right, where there's, you know, lawyers on both sides arguing with each other and, you know, some settlement is reached and kind of a fair hearing has been had, then you can kind of say, okay, we should have a record of this. kind of a fair hearing has been had, then you can kind of say, okay, we should have a record of this. But what eviction records are is basically records of this very unfair, unbalanced process. And I think we should ask ourselves, to what extent should they be easily accessible? And states have started asking that. So California is a leader here. I think California automatically seals all eviction cases so they can't follow you around. I think Oregon and Washington are considering bills to do exactly this too.

And this is a free fix. You don't need to spend any money on this fix. And there are things that cities can do looking deep inside their court systems to ask, how can the court system be rearranged to make life a little better for families facing homelessness? to be rearranged to make life a little better for families facing homelessness. But reading the account really made it clear how homelessness happens. Because what you describe is, you know, someone is evicted for any number of reasons. But then once they have that eviction on their record, it becomes much more difficult for them to find another apartment because every apartment says, you know, hey, no, I'm not going to let you in if you have an eviction on your record. And so you describe, you know, the folks you write about spend upwards of a month searching for a single room that will take them in the city in which they live.

Not that they can afford, just that we'll agree to let them stay there at all. And then of course, once they do, it's hideously expensive and takes all of their money. And you're reading this going, my God, if this person doesn't find the single ray of light, they're going to be on the street tomorrow. Right. And remember, this book is about Milwaukee, right? Yeah. It's not about New York City or San Francisco that have these vacancy rates in the single digits. This is a slack city, slack market city. There's plenty of housing. But there's a lot of landlords that say no.

And I met landlords that said, look, even if this person has a dismissed eviction on their record, you know that something happened and I'm going to say no. You know that something happened and I'm going to say no. So, you know, Arlene, I remember spending time with her after an eviction and she had to ask or apply to 89 places before someone said yes. You know, over and over and over again. I counted. It's exhausting. And so to go back to your point about bootstraps, I mean, gosh, she is working hard. You know, she's working her tail off trying to find just any kind of house that will take her and her two kids. And you've added that up to the fact that she's an African-American woman and is

facing racial discrimination and she has kids and she's facing family discrimination. You see the kind of the way it's stacked against her. And then to your point about why is she moving into a place she can't afford? And the answer is there's not that much cheaper housing in the city. She's living in a place she can't afford at the very bottom of the market. And it's funny because this grinds against how we kind of think cities work. We think like, oh, folks like Arlene live in these poor neighborhoods because that's all she can afford. But those poor neighborhoods aren't that much cheaper than other neighborhoods across the city. But those poor neighborhoods aren't that much cheaper than like other neighborhoods across the city.

And it's funny because when you read like urban history, you realize like, oh, it's been like this forever. Like if you read like How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Rees, you know, famous muckraking journalism, 1899 about New York City tenements. You're like, oh, the folks that are living in these tenements, these slum, terrible places, babies are getting tuberculosis, you know, people living in the worst housing in the city are paying more money than better housing uptown. So it's not just a financial arithmetic. It's that there are places in the city where folks like Arlene are allowed to be until they're kind of like inevitably evicted. Right. And, you know, she, when you say she's working hard, she is working as hard as anybody works at anything. But the thing that she is working hard to achieve is the basic necessity of a place to live. Like I'm working really hard on my, you know, new season of TV that's coming out. Right.

And maybe we're working the same number of hours. But, you know, I don't have to do that just to have a roof over my head, not to mention food or income, which are, you need a roof over your head in order to sleep so you can go to work. You can't work if you don't have a place to live. Exactly. And so any kind of policy to spur mobility, to give kids a shot at reaching their full potential in school, to reduce crime, to tackle healthcare costs. Like whatever our issue is, whatever keeps us up at night, the lack of affordable housing is somewhere at the root of that issue.

And when you read stories like Arlene's or Vanetta's or Scott's, you know, you realize how much like human potential and beauty and like intelligence is just like squandered, right? Because we asked those folks to spend so much of theirs just trying to figure out how they're going to make rent from one month to the next. Right. Let me ask, just because you brought up Jacob Rees and that period in the late 19th, early 20th century, I've read some accounts of that as well in sort of the

history of New York, the tenements that, you know, there was an awareness at the time in the city that, hey, this is untenable as a situation that we've got block after block of people living in the worst conditions, you know, and something needs to be done. And my understanding is it's that awareness that sort of eventually led to the first public housing that we, you know, people,

God damn it, People just need roofs over their heads and the government just has to build a lot of fucking units. Right. Um, uh, that it was, you know, every problem in, you know, often it seems the only problems, the only way problems get solved in a place like New York city is when it's so bad that, you know, uh, people on the Upper West side notice too. Um, and say, my God, we just have to give people a place to live. Do you feel that we're anywhere close to that sort of awareness happening or that sort of change occurring?

It seems that bad again. It seems that bad again. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because it's often change feels very far away until it's not, right? Yeah. And so I think that we're seeing two things happening. One, we're seeing the problem spread and touch folks that didn't have to think about this problem in the 90s.

So parents of adult kids, right? That matters to them because their kid who got a good job in New York City can't afford apartment. Right. Yeah, they're living with six roommates in a closet in a terrible apartment. Yeah. That's right. Or they're living with their parents. Right. And you know, the media tells us, Oh, this generation doesn't want to move out of their parents. This generation can't move out of their parents' basement. You know, so it's reaching those folks. You know, I went to, I was in a meeting in Pittsburgh a few years ago and it was with housers, you know, so the usual suspects are there, tenants, landlords.

And then there's public sector unions there, teachers, firefighters. And I was like, what are you guys doing here? And they're like, well, we can't afford to live in this city anymore, so this is an issue for us. You talk to pediatricians, you learn that the top 5% of hospital users consume about half of all health care costs. Yeah. So gosh, wow. Who are they?

Well, they're people like Arlene who are unstably housed but have severe medical conditions. So I think that we as a country, more of us are waking up to this problem that a lot of folks below the poverty line have known for a long, long time. So I think that's what's happening. And then I think the other thing that moves the dial is when communities organize. And I do think we see this resurgence these days of a renter's mobilization,

the right to the city, tenants groups. I think that those groups are getting organized. They're gaining members. They're gaining a platform and they should be taken very seriously. And so I think that we're seeing that as well all around the country. Yeah, I've noticed even here in Los Angeles, local politics are a lot more about housing issues than, well, you know, I haven't lived here that long, so I can't say what they were about 10

years ago. But I've noticed a lot of, you know, in local politics, folks talking about, hey, the impact of Proposition 13, which is, you know, a tax bill here folks talking about, hey, the impact of Proposition 13, which is, you know, a tax bill here in Los, you know. Insane, insane. I don't know. I got to figure out how to do an episode on this because it's one of the most shocking facts,

but it's only about one state and we've never done anything on our show that's only about one state. But basically we have in California a proposition that was passed in the 70s that's essentially rent control for homeowners, where if you once you buy a house, your property taxes can never go up. And so people stay in their houses for 50 years and pay shockingly low. You're paying like 50 cents a year in property taxes to the local school where people it's it insanely privileges and prioritizes homeowners rather than renters.

And it's a big part of the conversation of why is housing so expensive in California. And it's been a total sacred cow in California politics for over 40 years. And now it is finally something that's being talked about again. You feel it bubbling up. Hey, this needs to be reexamined. And it feels like maybe something is starting. See, I feel like this is a national story too because this is the crux of the matter

about a lot of folks that call themselves regressive get a bit of catch in their voice when it comes to sacrificing something off their plate. And I think that's the crux of it. And so if we come to like, okay, we need to fix the housing crisis, how can we do that? Well, we can expand housing voucher program. We can build more affordable housing. We can incentivize affordable housing development in new ways. Those things cost money, right? So where's the money going to come from? Well, one place it could come from is homeowner tax subsidies, right? So every year we spend way, way more on homeowner tax subsidies, like the

mortgage interest deduction than we do on direct housing assistance to the needy. Like we already have like a universal housing program in America, universal entitlement program. It's just not for poor people. Yeah, it's the mortgage deduction. That's right. Nancy Pelosi refers to it as a middle-class deduction. And this is where the politics get really tricky because a lot of our democratic leadership are in high-cost cities. And so in New York, it's San Francisco and LA, and where the mortgage introduction is

kind of a middle-class benefit. But in most areas of the country, it's not. Most families who claim the mortgage introduction are families who have six-figure incomes. Most white families own a home in America and are eligible for one of the sweetest deals in tax code. Most black and Latino families, because of our history of racial discrimination, don't. Yeah, and redlining, yeah. Right, right. And so it's just really hard to think like, what's a social policy that does a better job of amplifying our racial and economic inequality than our housing policy does? And so I feel like Prop 13, the mortgage interest deduction, homeowner tax subsidies, they're all about this. You know, like if we aren't willing to give up a little bit, to sacrifice a little bit, do we get to call ourselves progressives?

Well, on that note, I want to take a short break. We'll be right back with more Matthew Desmond. I don't know anything All right, we are back with Matthew Desmond. I want to pivot to talking about poverty more generally. You had a wonderful piece in the New York Times that I quoted at the top of the show about the physical effect that poverty has on those who are living under it and on the physical effect that poverty has on those who are living under it and on the physical

effect that higher wages can have for them. Can you elaborate on that a little bit, please? Yeah. So, you know, minimum wage debates, right? So for the last 50 years, the minimum wage debates have been all about the labor market, right? Like, is it going to drive up unemployment? You know, is it going to drive up prices? Is it going to cause employers to cut your hours back? And, you know, those are really important questions. But what a lot of folks just weren't asking was just like, okay, if you're a worker and you go from making $9 an hour to like 15 or 13 to 15, like, how does that affect your life? And so, you know, recently there's been this small kind of resurgence of public health workers and health economists

that have been asking that question. And what they're finding is that even pretty small, modest increases to your wage can make a world of difference in your body, on your health. Yeah. You know, there are studies that show that it decreases smoking, massive effects on smoking. And so, like one economist I talked to said, when are studies that show that it decreases smoking, massive effects on smoking. And so, like one economist I talked to said, when are you going to quit smoking?

You know, if you're a student, you know, are you going to quit during finals week? No, right? And that's how it is when you're feeling like the stress of a poverty wage. You know, this kind of like you don't have the mental capacity dedicated to kind of kicking that habit. It has been linked to reductions in child neglect. You know, if you have more money, you can afford to keep the lights on and the fridge stocked. Decreases in teen pregnancy,

increases in exercise and sleep. It just has this massive effect on your health and well-being. So, I mean, for me, the big take-home is, you know, a $15 an hour wage or a healthy living wage isn't just something that, you know, addresses poverty. It's actually something that kind of saves lives. Yeah. I mean, just the effect of stress on your body of, you know,

if you're having to work longer hours or having to stress over not having enough money, you know, if you've got to go, you know, drive for Uber for four hours after you finish work or et cetera. I mean, I've, you know, in my relatively comfortable life, I have experienced stress to the extent that it's made me physically unwell because of the amount of work I've put on myself. And that's something that I've had to manage.

And again, I live an affluent, comfortable life. If you are, you know, facing that while your food's insecure, housing insecure, I can only imagine the toll that it would take on your body and the positive effect that it could have to have any sort of physical relief from that. Right. And that, I mean, one of the folks I talked to for that story, he was working two full-time jobs. So he'd work eight-hour shift at McDonald's, he'd have a two-hour break, and he'd put another eight-hour shift in with a Tim company. And it just took this massive toll on his body. And he told me the story about one day when he was walking through the grocery store,

he just fainted from exhaustion, passed out. He's 24 years old. Wow. And so, you know, the idea of working your way out of poverty, you know, really just being able to put in the hours to get ahead. For a lot of Americans, they're putting in the hours. They're often working double what a lot of us are working, and they're not getting ahead. About a third of the American workforce works for $15 an hour or less today. So there's so many of our neighbors and folks we're coming in contact with that are working, working, working, and are just kind of keeping their head above water. Yeah. One thing that we have touched on on Adam Ruins Everything

is that it's expensive to be poor, that you literally have to spend more on daily necessities. And because, you know, just the simple example being like, hey, if you've got less dollars in your pocket, you can't buy the in bulk toilet paper or the, you know, et cetera. You've got to buy the single, right? Because you don't have 10 bucks, you only have five bucks. So you need to buy a single roll of toilet paper and it costs more per unit, right? You literally end up spending more money. But there are so many other ways in which having, being so strapped for money can lead you, can force you to make those choices that you get criticized

for making where people say, oh, well, poor people are just making bad choices. They could make, they could choose better things. You know, it's their fault for smoking, right? It's their fault for spending money in a way I deem extravagant when really it's the condition of poverty that leads you or forces you to make that choice. Right. And so one of my brilliant colleagues here at Princeton, Eldar Shafir, is a psychologist. And he's done all the experiments to show how poverty taxes the mind, literally taxes

the mind. And they're experiments like this. You know, you and I would go into a room and you would be asked to memorize a two-digit number, you know, five, seven. And I'd be asked to memorize a seven-digit number, you know, five, seven, two, one, two, three, seven, nine. And we would be led into a waiting room and sat down on a couch and in front of us are snacks, right? And there's a chocolate cake and there's fruit. The better decision is to eat the fruit, right? Yes. But the folks that get the long number are like 50% more likely to eat the cake because so much of our brain is just focused on what's

that number, what's that number, that we lose the kind of capacity to resist making the kind of impulsive worst choice. And that's how poverty is. When your brain is focused on, how am I going to pay that bill? Gosh, my kid's got a court date today. Or, guys were shooting on my block last week. I wonder what happened. You know, when your brain is just taxed with the relentless, exhausting questions of poverty, it can make you make worse decisions. So folks aren't poor just because they make worse decisions. They make worse decisions because they're poor. And the clear policy implication is like if you raise people's standards of living, you'll see returns on what they do with their behavior.

And we see things like this in the earned income tax credit, for example. So, earned income tax credit, big program, comes out once a year in February, mostly to working parents who are just around the poverty line. So, when folks get this kind of injection of cash, you know, it could be like $1,500, $2,500. What do they do with it? A lot of them pay off debt and save, you know, invest in their kids. You know, we see really great returns on that kind of thing because we stabilize and relieve that stress and we kind of expand their bandwidth tag, you know, their bandwidth that they have to make those decisions. Yeah. So, you know, I wrestled with this when I was working on Evicted. You know, there's a chapter in Evicted called Lobster on Food Stamps. I remember this. And, you know, I wrestled with this when I was working on Evicted. You know, there's a chapter in Evicted called Lobster on Food Stamps.

I remember this. And, you know, it's about my neighbor Lorraine in the trailer park. And to celebrate an anniversary she had with a deceased boyfriend, she took her entire allotment of food stamps and she bought, you know, lobster, king crab, lemon meringue pie, Pepsi, you know, and she ate it all in one sitting, you know, it was very special dinner for her, expensive dinner. And so, you know, when I learned about that, I was pissed off, you know, I was, I was incensed. I was like, Lorraine, what are you doing? Like, how can you, you know, what are you thinking? And she was so expecting that kind of response from me. You know, she was ready for that kind of response and she didn't apologize. And she said, I wanted to have a special occasion.

And, you know, it was my way of, she kind of prompted me to think like, your job isn't to apologize for me. Your job is to understand this. And so, you know, Lorraine was, you know, grandma receiving social security income. She was living in a trailer that the city considered an environmental biohazard. And if she saved like a third of her income, right, she would have enough money at the end, which would be a huge lift. How many of us save a third of our income? Right.

You know, if she did that, she would have enough money at the end of the year to buy like a bicycle. Right. And that would come with like, you know, she'd have to skip prescription drugs and food and clothes and hot water. And so when there's so much space between where Lorraine is and just like stable poverty, you know, like, what do you do? Do you pinch every penny?

Like, no, because it wouldn't matter. You try to live a little bit, you know, like, what do you do? Do you pinch every penny? Like, no, because it wouldn't matter. You try to live a little bit, you know? And so I think like Lorraine is not poor because she does stuff like that. And she paid the price for it. You know, sometimes she went hungry that month and went to food pantries, but she does things like that. She did things like that precisely because of her social situation. Right. And I think that, you know, a lot of readers, a lot more readers ask about that moment with Lorraine than they ask about this moment with Sharina when she just spent a lot of people's rent monies at a casino.

Yeah. You know, it's kind of like we're more outraged by Lorraine's kind of humble solo act than we are with Sharina, who has literally taken most money out of people's pockets and gambling it away. And that, I mean, I think that raises a moral question for us too. That's exactly the point that I was about to make, that we, none of us make good decisions all the time, right? Like I'll blow money on shitty food, you know, I'll, you know,

I used to smoke and drink, right? In my life and spend, you spend, when I was in my leanest years of my life, right after college, before I had found stable work. And that was my limited two-year experience in my entire life dealing with having to manage money in that way. And of course I had the backup of, of, you know, a family and support network who, you know, I had that backstop. Right. And in those years I, you know, bought alcohol and cigarettes and, and didn't necessarily manage money well because that's part of what being human is. But I was in a social position where that was not a punished, you know, I was still able to make a life for myself despite doing those things. Right. And B, no one was sitting over my shoulder going, Hey, this is why you're poor. Right. Um, and that's a very bizarre judgment. You know, I had a conversation with a friend and we were talking about homelessness in Los Angeles, um, which is a huge issue. And he was saying, well, you know, so many of these people, they don't want help

and they keep doing drugs. And, you know, they go into one of these, even when they get put in a home, they keep getting drugs, doing drugs and they get kicked out. So that's their own fault, right? And I explained to him, hey man, you know, actually the best way to treat, you know,

homelessness we're learning is to put people in supportive housing where we don't monitor what they do where hey if they do drugs guess what you don't lose your home because of that and he says that doesn't seem fair and i said hey man you know you can do drugs in your home right maybe you do i don't know the difference between you and these people is you don't get kicked out of your house when when you do it right like you actually have that amount of slack. You're not punished for making a single mistake. Right. You don't have all of society wagging a finger at you. And it's just part of life for you. But we treat it when, you know, for folks who we see as below us on the social ladder as being, hey, I'm allowed to do this, but you are not. And that's fucked up. But you're not. And that's fucked up.

Yeah, it's like privilege is defined as like the amount of space you need to fall after you make a mistake to land on your backside. Right. And a lot of us, there's a lot of space between to be careful about turning poor folks into like moral superhumans, like asking them to be the Mother Teresa at the bottom of our hierarchy and kind of dangling that kind of moral justification out before we provide them kind of meager benefits. It's a real American way of looking at poverty too, your friend's way, you know? And so, you know, you go to France, you go to the Middle East even, you go a lot of places around the world and they look at those homeless folks and they say, how has my state failed them? How has their family failed them? You know, but America, we say, how have they failed?

And it's a very, you know, it's our way of looking at this problem. And I think that's one of the reasons, like, why we're the richest democracy with the worst poverty. There's no other advanced industrial society that has a kind of poverty that we have and a level of poverty we have. And if we kind of subscribe, right, to this individualistic idea of poverty, oh, you know, poverty just, it's a moral failing. You know, everyone has equal opportunity in this country. If we subscribe to that, then we have to come to this logical conclusion that our people are made of worse stuff than other people. And I don't think we believe that, you know? I don't think we believe that.

That's true. think we i don't think we believe that you know i don't think believe that that's true i mean if we yeah if we take our own philosophy literally and then we say well but poverty exists uh then the the natural conclusion is well a very large number of americans are are extremely uh uh lazy and we're not the most industrious uh hard-working people on the planet like we think we are and we don't want to believe that about ourselves. It's true. I don't believe that about, about Americans. Um, but it's such a contrast with the story that we tell ourselves. I mean, you know, I watch a lot of shark tank, um, which is funny because you do. Yeah. It's contrary. You know, the, the, what that show puts forward is contrary to so much of, uh, what I, this

conversation that we're having right now but god damn it it's one of the best shows on tv it's so fucking fun to watch um i i can't get enough of it and but they sell so hard that story right of you know when they're interviewing the person tell us your story well i was the child of a single mother and I, you know, grew up in a refrigerator on the sidewalk. And, uh, but I managed to, I found a pair of boots on the street and I put them on and then I pulled them up. I pulled on the bootstraps so hard that, you know, I went to Harvard, uh, but I didn't get a scholarship. I, uh, raised all the money myself by selling lemonade on the street. Uh, that's how I raised the $200,000 to go to Harvard.

And then I created my own business and here I am today. And then all the billionaires go, oh my God, you are our favorite person we've ever met. They applaud for them. And then they usually say, I'm out, but I love you. They usually say, we're not actually going to invest in your dog walking robot or whatever, but we really love your story, but that story is, it's almost the, the Joseph Campbell or myth of America, uh, in, in, it doesn't even feel strange that, that, that they're putting it forward because it's so much this, you know, deep down American story,

but it's not true, right? Uh, the, the folks that you write about are working just as hard as that, you know, not take anything away from the story of the person who's on Shark Tank, if that story is true, but, you know, the people you write about work just as hard, but they don't get the same results. And we never confront why that is. Shark Tank or anything else on television never covers, hey, here's why you can do that. And 99% of the time, it actually won't work. And here's what we need to change about that. Yeah, it's like, so I've got kids, right?

And so you tell your kids, hey, work hard. You know, put your back into it. You know, you'll get ahead. You want to instill these values in our kids. These are good values. But that's not a theory of life, right? That's not a social explanation. And so it's kind of like the story we've told ourselves to motivate our own selves. So we pour that extra cup of coffee, so we put in the hours. The things we tell our kids when they're excelling in sports or in school is like internalized for an explanation for where we are today, which is just wrong. And so I think that, you know, I think we got to be

cautious about that. And the thing that's kind of funny to hear when you hear these kind of, I've worked hard stories is like everyone's social position has gradually gotten better over like a couple of generations, right? better over like a couple generations, right? Like a couple generations ago, there weren't cell phones, you know, things were like, we have modern conveniences that are better than they were a couple generations ago. So you could tell yourself like, look, when I was growing up, you know, I had to work this job and I didn't have a car and I didn't have a cell phone. It's like, right. No one did. And so the kind of like the just general like trajectory of a society, like more advanced, you know, kind of advancing kind of also allows that story to be told even if you didn't start

out very low. So like, you know, Donald Trump tells that story, right? Like when I started out, my dad only gave me a million dollar loan and I built my empire from that. That's it, just a million dollar loan. That's all I had. I was basically on food stamps. And so the story is just available to all of us, you know, kind of no matter where we started. But the interesting thing is, I wonder, that makes me wonder if for the younger generation, and I mean younger than myself, if that story might not flip a bit, because I think so many people,

actually, I do include myself in the generation. I'm just on the older side of it. You know, grew up in a time of great plenty, you know, the pre-911 years being obviously lots of problems, but, you know, sort of the halcyon days for the American economy to a certain extent. but, you know, sort of the halcyon days for the American economy to a certain extent. And people are now, it is the trend of everyone doing better than their parents is seemingly ending. I forget the exact figures, but I've read them that it is now much less likely that you'll

do better than your parents. And I think we may, I wonder if we'll see a generation of people saying, Hey, I'm, I'm 35 and, or, you know, I'm 30. And when I would, when my parents were 30, they, they owned a house that I lived in and now I can't find work. And, you know, I've, I guess I've heard people put that on themselves. Oh, I'm such a fuck up that this is true about me. But I wonder if we're starting to see a consciousness change that there's a problem with the way that we've organized our economy and our society that has caused that. And that, I don't know, hopefully might lead to some social change. And we've been in positions like this before, right? And so after World War II, right,

folks came back and there was a new deal. And there was a GI Bill. And it's hard for us to get our heads around the size of the GI Bill. It was enormous. It took something like 15% of the federal budget. It was huge. And it built the American middle class, mostly the American white middle class, because black and Latino veterans were kind of cut out of the benefits. But, you know, a couple of years after World War II, about 40% of all mortgages in America

were veteran mortgages. You know, this thing kind of powered homeownership and it powered security. And I think that a lot of young folks seem to be drawn to political arguments and our policymakers who are thinking on those scales. And when I started working on poverty, it was kind of about how to improve existing policies, what works, what doesn't. And now the students I'm teaching are like, what about the universal basic income? What do you think about that? What do you think about Medicaid for all? What do you think about that? They're thinking on a different scale than we thought about just a few years ago. think about that. They're thinking on a different scale than we thought about just a few years ago.

Yeah. Well, oh man, that's such a good point about the GI Bill as well, because that prosperity was, to use a negative way of putting it, was the result of a massive government handout that had really positive results. And I think about my own family benefited from that. My grandfather was a World War II veteran and the stability that my mother had came from the stability that was given to him. And then when I look at his grandkids, when I look at the span of my family, that stability is not there. That was something that his generation got

that we all benefited from that we have not had to the same degree, that we haven't supported the middle class. We have not had the active programs that created that middle class for over a generation now, and we're seeing the resulting fallout of that, perhaps. And it's been an unnecessary fallout, you know, because it hasn't because of our economy is slow. We haven't been in an economic slump. Our economy has been doing awesome. You know, there's been this amazing rise of productivity throughout the last 50 years. But that productivity hasn't translated into broader social uplift. It hasn't even translated in

a broader social uplift for most American workers, not just for low-income communities or folks that don't go to college. A lot of folks that do go to college, even go to a graduate school and get advanced degrees are left out of this bargain. Most of that is really going to the top 5%, especially the top 1% of income earners. And so I think it raises like huge questions for us. And I loved your point about your grandfather and your mom, you know, because it shows like these things are still felt today, you know, they're not too long ago. And so, you know, most folks who buy a home today get help with that home from their parents.

And a lot of those parents get help by refinancing their own home. And a lot of that is because their grandparents, who benefited from the GI Bill, refinanced theirs. Right. And so, you know, these kind of like generational advantages that we accrue need to be part of the situation. Excuse me. These generational advantages, some of us accrue and some of us don't, need to be part of this conversation too. Yeah, absolutely.

And I don't mean to imply that everyone in America received that advantage that my grandfather did, right? Yeah. But it's interesting to see how it's almost a, you know, it's a ripple, right? It's a ripple that travels through our generations. There's a ripple that's dissipating to a certain extent because his grandkids don't have that GI Bill mortgage, right?

They've got the advantage that their parents are passing on to them, but it's dissipating slightly, right? So I'd like to end on this sort of thought. When we're contrasting this true story with the shark tank story of America, uh, with the individual, uh, you know, pulling himself up by his bootstrap story, the thing that always strikes me and the thing that makes me concerned as a, even just television content creator, right? as a even just television content creator, right?

When I'm watching, you know, we have an episode coming out in 2019 for folks who are listening, maybe you've already seen the episode if you're listening to it far enough in the future. But it's about this issue. It's about the myth of the American dream and the idea that anyone can make it if they just work hard enough.

And we told that story as well as we could in the time that we can make it if they just work hard enough. And we told that story as well as we could in the time that we had allotted. But when I, you know, and I'm proud of that segment, but when I go and watch Shark Tank on a Friday night, I'm like, man, that story is better. Maybe it's fun. That's why I watch Shark Tank is I like that story. It is fun to watch. It's moving, right? We know the beats. It feels great. We all want to believe of ourselves that the harder we work, that if we just work hard enough, we can advance in American society.

We want to believe that about America. And we want to believe that about ourselves personally. We don't want to believe that we're the victim of our circumstances and that we, you know, our possibilities are constrained by where we grew up and, you know, where we live and the opportunities available to us. And so I'm often concerned that, man, is it possible for the true story to win

when the false story is so much more fun and so much more something that we want to believe. And what I love about your work is that I feel that you've really been able to make the truth compelling. But I wonder how you feel about that obstacle in your own work. that obstacle in your own work? So one thing about our American story, our Shark Tank story, is this comfort we get, but also we pay the price for this every day in America. We feel scared, we feel anxious, and we also just are confronted with completely broken systems that more equitable societies don't have. So I remember being in Switzerland last year and you just get on a train and it works like on time all the time. You know, like sometimes they check your ticket. Sometimes they don't, you know, you don't have to go through

like a quasi, you know, prison thing to get on the train. You have to go through the cheese gravy in New York. Yeah. Right. And so like so, like, this is what inequality does to a country, right? It makes us fearful. It makes us kind of try to, like, circle the wagons, like, clutch on to what we have. The great sociologist Charles Tilley called it opportunity hoarding, which is a great, amazing phrase. And it causes us to have worse schools and worse roads and a worse criminal justice system and a worse legal system than countries that are more equitable. So it's not just like even if we're at the top or the middle, it's not just like, okay, I'm going to be here at someone else's expense. It's also like being there in America comes with certain costs and fears too, you know? Yeah. Perhaps the way to change that conversation is to just enlighten folks to the way that that story that we tell ourselves is not helping us, but hurting us. And that if we can find ways to support each other more than just ourselves, we'll fare better, I suppose. And there's science behind this, right? Yeah.

Folks that are more happy, they're the more generous folks. They feel more agency in their life. And so the more we feel like trapped in these systems, stressed out, thinking we have to work all the time and save half a million dollars for our kids' college tuition, these kind of things, the less happy we're going to be. Or we could just send everyone to Switzerland. I don't want to do that. I like America. I want to make America better. So if the American dream story, the Shark Tank story is hurting us in that way and making us

less happy, what is the alternative story? I've read your book and I can sort of detect a story in there, but is there a meta-myth, you know, alternative that we can describe to people and focus on and show them that's better than the bad wrong story? Yeah, I think that there's a story about historical reckoning. You know, there's a story about sins of our country that we haven't atoned for, with slavery and racism being the biggest one. Yeah. And I think that, so I think there is a story of accounting. And I remember being in Australia a few years ago, and they open every kind of public event with a recognition of whose land they're standing on. Simple, simple thing. But I think it really serves a very heavy kind of symbolic purpose. And so I think asking really hard moral questions about that reckoning

seems to be on the table. And it's not because we have a personal responsibility. seems to be on the table. And it's not because we have a personal responsibility. It's like, no, I wasn't there. I get it. But like, it's because we have a civic responsibility. It's like, you know, personal responsibility is about like our connection to the problem. You know, I stole your lunch. I should probably buy you lunch tomorrow. Civic responsibility is our connection to the solution, our power, you know? And so it's like when there's a flood that breaks and the water comes rushing to the city, you don't ask, am I personally responsible for the flood? You're not.

But you have a civic responsibility. It's not the dam, but the sandbag that has your name on it. You know what I mean? And so it's like, so I think that that's one way that we can address this. And the other is, you know, there is something special about being in deep community. And there is something special about seeing our government as not just, you know, an outside force, but something that we all contribute to and that we should all benefit

from. And that's okay. You know, and that makes a lot of from. And that's okay. And that makes a lot of sense. And that also means seeing how benefits that we often don't think are from the government, like mortgage interest deduction, are, and asking questions about that. So when I published Evicted and I went on book tour, I thought I would just be fighting all the time, you know, just like, you know, kind of talking and re-talking about this old story of blame and the undeserving poor. And that just wasn't my experience. You know, it wasn't my experience. And I don't just give talks in Berkeley, California, by the way, too. I've gone all over the country. Right. And I feel that the American public is ready for a different kind of conversation when it comes to inequality. And the American public is ready for something that goes beyond these old, tired tropes of working, not working, deserving, not deserving.

We just don't have a narrative for that yet. I completely agree because these are issues that touch almost everyone, you know, or, and, and everyone's, everyone's family, you know, and especially as you said, across the country, these are, these are issues that are simultaneously national and local. Well, I really thank you for doing your part to shift that story and you've changed the way I think about these issues. Uh, and it's been an honor to have you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. Well, thank you once again to Matthew Desmond for coming on the show. I hope you love that interview as much as I did. Uh, if you did, please leave us a rating or comment wherever you subscribe, Apple Stitcher, whatever podcast app you might use. us a rating or comment wherever you subscribe, Apple Stitcher, whatever podcast app you might use. You can find me on Twitter at Adam Conover and go to adamconover.net for my tour dates and

to sign up for my mailing list where you can learn all about the brand new things I got coming up for you. Thank you to our producer, Dana Wickens, our researcher, Sam Roudman, and the party god, Andrew WK for our theme song, I Don't Know Anything. Check it out on iTunes or whatever. We'll see you again next week for another episode of Factually. Thank you so much for listening. That was a HeadGum Podcast.