The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Solution For the Chronically Homeless, and Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

About 1.2 million people in the United States experience homelessness in a given year—you could nearly fill the city of Dallas with the unhoused. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing—providing not only a stable apartment, but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. The New Yorker contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals as they transitioned into a new supportive-housing building in Brooklyn. She found that this housing model works and argues that it could be scaled up nationally for less than the cost of emergency services for the homeless. But “no one,” Egan notes ruefully, “wants to see that line item in their budget.” Plus, Joe Garcia, an inmate serving a life sentence for murder in California’s High Desert State Prison, reads from his essay “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison,” recently published by The New Yorker. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. By one measure, something like 1.4 million people end up in homeless shelters every year, and many thousands more are living on the street. You could nearly fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused in this country. The problem seems gigantic and tragic and absolutely intractable. But homelessness, in fact, is not intractable. There are solutions.

No one solution is going to work for every person or every city, but we could greatly reduce the scale of this tragedy. That's the good news and the bad news, according to Jennifer Egan. And she's been reporting on the issue for The New Yorker. Hey, how are you? I'm good. What an amazing piece. What an amazing piece.

Oh, thank you so much. Jennifer Egan is best known for her many novels. She's the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Jen, I have to make an admission. When I started out as an editor, I had this fantasy, maybe from my childhood of reading,

Esquire in the 70s or Rolling Stone, that I would get these novelists to write nonfiction. They'd go out into the world like Norman Mailer covering the march on the Pentagon or things like that. And in fact, very few novelists seem to want to do that very often these days.

but you have been writing about homelessness for on and off for a couple of decades, at least. How did you get interested in this? And why did you want to pursue it as a writer? I think my longstanding interest in homelessness is partly because I'm old enough to remember a time before modern homelessness. I mean, I grew up in San Francisco. I wandered around the city all night as a teen. And I had never, by the time I left for college, seen a person sleeping outside. That might be incredible to someone who lives in San

Francisco now, but that is the city I grew up in. So I know that this is relatively new. And so in 2002, I wrote a piece about homeless families in New York, and I just wanted to understand why this problem still existed. And what was interesting about that era was that enough data had emerged and people had come to conclusions that seemed like they might be able to solve the problem. Like we had sort of learned how to deal with this, it seemed. And yet, here we are, you know, 20 years later, and the problem is clearly not solved. Well, how 20 years ago did people think we could solve it and why did it fail? Well, I don't think it has failed. I should just say that. It may look that way. But in fact,

the number of homeless people really did decline. There have been improvements. The revelations that I think came along in the early 21st century were an understanding of how to analyze the homeless population and how to deal with the different parts of it. And a lot of this comes from one research named Dennis Colhane, who teaches at Penn. He's a sociologist. And what he basically discovered was that there are two kinds of homeless people. Of course, there are many, many more, but two categories. One is homeless people who are homeless for a relatively short period of time, basically have fallen through the cracks financially and just need some short-term help to get back into housing. And then there are people who are what are known as chronically homeless, who tend to be homeless for long periods.

And what distinguishes the two groups is that the chronically homeless tend to have some sort of disability, either addiction or mental health problems or most often both. And so what was learned at that point was that by giving short-term homeless people money for rent for up to two years, that short-term homelessness could be alleviated and usually solved. And for the chronically homeless, something known as supportive housing was also incredibly effective. And what that meant was rent subsidies plus on-site services to help people deal with the problems that were causing them to be unable to stay house. So if the numbers went down, as you say, what happened that made them shoot back up? Because I think any resident of San Francisco where you're from, Los Angeles, New York to some degree, Philadelphia, and go on and on and on, and not just big cities, has to recognize in all kinds of neighborhoods that there are more people on the street.

Well, there are few things to say there. One is the cities in which this is true tend to be pretty affluent cities. So with the exception of Philadelphia, all of the cities you mentioned fit that description. And it really comes down to rent. When median rents reach a certain point that is beyond the reach of the average person, you start to see a rise in homelessness. The other thing is mental health care. It's egregiously inadequate in this country.

I mean, the Times just reported recently that only 20% of people with opioid use disorder who are trying to get medication-assisted treatment have gotten it. You know, we know that we have an epidemic of opioid use in this country. That feeds directly into homelessness. And, in fact, many of the subjects that I worked with over the past year had that as really the cause of their homelessness. Jen, talk to me a little bit about how you go about a project. of writing something as large and sprawling and complicated as homelessness, whether in New York or anywhere else. Usually you're spending your days glued to the desk and glued to your own imagination and the problem in front of you on the page. Now you're going out into the street.

How do you begin? Where do you go? What are you looking for? So tackling homelessness is so broad and amorphous as to be kind of impossible. So I needed to find a focus. For me, I began researching in July of 2022, and I quickly learned that a new supportive housing development, meaning a building where people live and whose rents are subsidized and they have services on site. So chronically homeless people being housed, I learned that such a building was opening in Brooklyn in September. So it was empty and would need to be filled. And I thought that sounds perfect. So I talked to a lot of people who were moving into this supportive housing building, which is called 90 Sands. And I followed a number of

them over many, many months. And one of them is a man who is nicknamed Speedy. It's my first time being in a journal, like in New Yorker. Yeah. That's my first time. Who is striking really in part for his youth. He turned 30 right before he moved into 90 Sands last September. So he's younger than a lot of the people who live in the building. The first time I was home. I was 23 going on 24. Like, I suffered from bipolar disorder and PTSD disorder. And Speedy has spent most of his young adulthood cycling in and out of shelters, jails,

street homelessness, and psychiatric hospitals. And so how has it been moving in here? How is it different? Talk of a little bit of the, you've been here about two months. The view is nice. Oh, the view is nice. They get free Wi-Fi. They give you a lodgment that's $1.50.

They give you on-site, therapist, psychiatrist. They give you the work shit. They take care of everything for you here. All you got to do is part of my language, don't mess it up. Just don't mess it up for yourself. He's now been there a year, and he just signed a new two-year lease. And so he, you know, his life is getting going. He loves to deliver things, hence his nickname.

So he's been working a lot. He's planning to go back to school. He's working on all kinds of things like dental hygiene, which is a massive problem for people who have lived on the street. I feel like crying right now. I can't cry right now because I'm happy at the same time. But sometimes you cry when you're happy. I cry a lot, so I understand.

But I just say I'm happy because it just hurt sometimes when you be around people and they don't know what type of situation you're going through sometimes. So I just... Of course. I'm just thankful that I have a home. I have a home now. Then I'm thankful that I got people that's watching me still. So it just...

Is it easy to bring people with these kinds of difficult histories into one place within the span of eight months? No. Does it work? From what I have seen, the answer is yes. I mean, a year later, not one unit has been surrendered. Now, I'm not saying everything has gone great. People have passed away. There have been a number of drug overdoses. But the statistics on supportive housing are excellent. In fact, the most recent study showed that almost 90% of chronically homeless people who are placed in supportive housing remain housed two years later. The problem is it's expensive, and yet it's much more expensive to leave these people on the street. So I do think, yes, this is a solution to chronic homelessness. When you say it's more expensive to leave people on the street, you mean that financially or humanly? Well, humanly, there's no question, but I also mean it financially. So to a single mentally ill person living on the street costs an estimated $70,000 a year.

And I saw this vividly. I mean, many subjects I worked with had spent during their street years, sometimes over a year in the hospital, dealing with flesh eating diseases, heart problems. These are people who are in ambulances, you know, sometimes multiple times a month. You know, this is incredibly costly to a municipality. But even in New York City, an expensive place, at the high end, supportive housing tends to cost. about 36,000 per person per year. So it's practically half. It's half as much to house somebody at 90 sands than for them to be sleeping on the street and the costs of hospitalization and emergency rooms and ambulances and all the many other things.

It's double. That's incredible. That is incredible. And that doesn't get into the human cost that you just mentioned. Without doubt. I mean, this is a miserable situation for everyone. So how much would it cost to scale up this program so that we would see a really

visible difference on our streets and above all for the homeless themselves, for the unhoused themselves? There's no clear answer to that, but I think for a back of the envelope estimate, there's really only one person I would trust to give me that, and that is Dennis Colhane, the sociologist at Penn, Dennis estimates that $10 billion a year, meaning $5 billion for rapid rehousing for short-term homelessness, $5 billion to up the amount of supportive housing for chronic homelessness, would do it. So that's a lot of money, $10 billion a year, but you have to put it in context. We are hemorrhaging money at this problem, but we're doing it piecemeal, publicly, privately, this funding stream, that funding stream. So the good news is

there's a solution, and we know what it is. The bad news is it requires unity at the federal level to enact it. And unity, of course, is what we lack. I think, in fact, in Build Back Better, which was the initial Biden administration plan, there was significant new investment sketched in for housing to the tune of, I think, hundreds of billions of dollars. And that collapsed. But do you have any... Exactly. What impact would that have made?

It sounds like would have made an enormous difference. Everyone I've took to have said that it absolutely would have made an enormous difference and we're incredibly sorry to see it go. And as you say, you know, it didn't make it to the finish line because of an unwillingness to spend money. But I think the problem is that no one wants to see that line item in a... a budget, but we are already spending it in all of these diffuse ways. So I know you live in New York, so there's the convenience of that, so you have proximity

going forward, but also you chose to write about New York as opposed to Los Angeles, San Francisco, or the rest. How is New York in particular different or not from those other cities? So New York has a number of interesting features. The chief among them, the fact that it is the only city in America that guarantees shelter to every homeless person who requests it, whether an individual or in a family. It's the only place like that in America. And while it may seem that we have a lot of visible homelessness here, it is really nothing compared to what you see in a place like California. And to give you a statistic, fewer than 6% of homeless people in New York are living outdoors, and more than 70% of those in California are.

That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah. Now, how do you rate someone like Mayor Eric Adams in New York who has proposed various fixes in voluntary confinement of homeless people with mental illnesses, for example, or using at one point he wanted to use an abandoned airfield to house migrants, which is an acute problem?

All of these seem to be shot down by advocates for the homeless. First of all, the asylum-seeking situation in New York right now is very specific. And because what I'm writing about is chronic homelessness, meaning people with disabilities whose problems have kept them on the street for years, in a way, the asylum-seeking situation doesn't overlap very much with what I'm doing. I will say that in terms of the involuntary commitment, you know, that to some degree that already exists. you know, if you see a person who is a danger to themselves, themselves or others, they can be

treated involuntarily, and I think always were to some degree. So I'm not sure how new some of that was. My sense is that the big change in New York in the time I've been working on this story is definitely the migrant crisis and the, you know, literally now, I think something like 100,000 asylum seekers in the city. So, you know, that is a crisis that is going to have to be managed separately because just one interesting thing is that a person who is undocumented cannot get supportive housing. So none of those people will be in the population that I was working with. And in fact, my sense is that, you know, these are not people with disabilities. These are people seeking a better life. Jen, in a way, I hate to ask this question, but I can't help it.

You, my understanding is have a brother who has had a brother who has had. mental illness challenges, and I'm guessing, I'm guessing that this might have been some impetus for your deep, deep interest in this problem. Absolutely. I mean, when I, I, I not only am not alienated by obvious psychosis in people around me, I am actually drawn to it because my brother committed suicide in 2016, so he's not here. But, you know, know, I feel an affinity for people who are struggling mentally because I feel like I have some sense of what they might be going through because he was so open with me and we were very close. And I also know that if he hadn't had a family that worked tirelessly to try to help him

and keep him stable, he absolutely would have been on the street. And so it's, I guess it's just a way of feeling of trying to work against what I think happens very easily, which is that we just feel a kind of alienation from people whose lives seem to be so far from our own, not just living outdoors, but seeming to be responding to stimuli that aren't there, whatever it may be. I don't like that feeling of alienation. I want to cross that distance. And it's deeply satisfying to me to do that. Jennifer, you know, I'm so grateful to you for revisiting this deep problem and for the piece that you just published in the New Yorker. Thanks so much.

Thank you, David. A journey from homelessness to a room of one's own is the title of Jennifer Egan's new report in The New Yorker, and you can find it at New Yorker.com. You can also read some of her fiction and essays there as well. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, we recently published an essay of fascinating one in The New Yorker by a man named Joe Garcia.

Hello, this is Joe. Oh, Garcia. I'm a prisoner in the California. Garcia is 53 years old. He's from California. And he's serving a long sentence in high desert state prison. A window, it's like a small window that looks out into the yard. And I'm just in a completely concrete cell. It's about five feet wide. The PC road is called Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison.

Garcia read from the essay for the New Yorker Radio Hour, over the phone from his cell. The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Garris would hand out precious copies of the LA Times and they would be passed from one reader to the next. I'd look up from a picture of Swift's wide-eyed face

to see gang fights. She had an album called Fearless, but how fearless could any little blonde fluff like that really be? In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I wrote a bus to Calapagetria State Prison. Triple-digit temperatures and cracked orange soil made me feel as though I'd been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries like a television. Here and there, I kept Swift on Ellen or Fallon, and will be able to be in the chaos.

surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn't tell anyone that I thought she was talented. The brilliantly talented Taylor Swift, and one thing about Taylor is most of her songs, you write all of your songs, right? And your songs are written mostly like under 30 minutes. Is that what I heard? You just write a song. Yeah, usually it kind of happens fast. Okay. In 2013, I got transferred and my property was lost. For months, my only source of music was a borrowed pocket radio. At night, my cellmate and I would crank up the volume and lay a pair earbuds on the desk in our cell. Their tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of top 40 hits. We heard tracks from Red, Swift's fourth studio album, virtually every hour. I was starting to

enjoy them. In her voice, there was something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness, or at least the possibility of happiness. We When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I'd left behind. Whenever I heard, we are never, ever getting back together, I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years before prison. I remembered bittersweet times when she had visited me in county jail. It didn't seem fair to expect her to wait for me. But we didn't ever use the word never.

My next prison was the California men's colony. I started to hang out in a cement workout area with some of my Asian homies. When they asked me what kind of music I liked, I confessed that I was anxiously waiting for a Taylor Swift album. Everyone laughed. Oh my God, we've got a Swifty on the yard. Lam, a muscular guy told me, you in touch with your sensitive side? Are you gay? He especially loved to heckle me in front of his buddy Hong, who spoke little.

and laughed almost silently. When Red arrived, I found out why Lam had been clowning me in front of Hung. Red was the only Swiss CD that Hung didn't own because he considered it a misguided pop departure from the country greatness of fearless and speak now. Eventually, Lam outed himself as a Swiftie 2. For six months, the three of us would work out and debate

which album was best. Then Hung transferred out of the prison, taking his CDs with him. When I landed at San Quentin, I started working at San Quentin News, the in-house newspaper, for a quarter an hour. Around that time, the California prison system started allowing a vendor to sell us MP3 players for $100, and charging $1.75 per song. I asked my family to order one and would call my cousin Roxanne with requests. What's up with all the damn Taylor Swift, she'd say, during phone calls?

By the time Swift released her album, Lover, in 2019, I had almost every song she'd ever released. Seven months after Lover came out, the California prison system shut down all programming because of the COVID pandemic. By the end of June 2020, hundreds of us were testing positive and getting sick, including me. I lugged all my property to an isolation cell in a quarantine unit where I shivered and sweated through a brain fog for two weeks. I followed San Quentin's death tallies on the local news. Would I die alone in this cell, suddenly and violently breathless? I made a playlist of Swiss most uplifting songs listening for the happiness in her voice. Alone in a prison cell, it's virtually impossible to avoid oneself.

As my body and mind began to recover, I started to question everything. What really matters? Who am I? What if I die tomorrow? I hadn't been in touch with my sweetheart in more than two years. now, though, I wrote her a letter to see if she was okay. A week after I mailed my letter, I received one from her. Prison mail is slow enough that I knew it wasn't a response. We had decided to write each other at the same time. The lockdown has afforded me plenty of time to reflect on all sorts of things, her letter said.

I've been carrying you with me everywhere. She was single again, and we started talking every week. In lockdown between paltry dinner trays, I did push-ups, lunges, squats, and planks in the 22-inch-wide floor space of myself. The 20th year of my incarceration was approaching. In 2020, the California legislature passed a law that made anyone who served 20 years and was at least 50 years of age eligible for. parole. I'm 53, and I'll get my first chance at release in 2024. I've been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night, Swift sings, and now I see daylight. These days, I call my sweetheart as often as I can. She tells me that it's complicated and confusing for her, speaking to the ghost who disappeared 20

years ago. But just recently, she told me, talking like this over the phone so much, I think we've gotten to know each other way better than before. One morning in October 22, I turned on Good Morning America and heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar chorus. It's me. Hi, I'm the problem. It's me. The anchors were giddy to announce Swiss new album, Midnight. A couple of times. A couple of A couple weeks later, I read the liner notes. What keeps you up at night? Swift writes. For the past two decades, sleep has not come easily to me. I can still see the grieving family members of the man I killed

staring at me in the courtroom at my trial. I'm guilty of more than murder. I abandoned my parents and my sweetheart, too. There's no way to fix this stuff. Taylor Swift is currently the same age 33 that I was at the start of my incarceration. I wonder whether her music would have resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words, I'm the problem. It's me. In karma, Swift sings, ask me what I learned from all those years.

Ask me what I earned from all those tears. A few months from now, California's Board of Parole hearings will ask me questions like that. What have I learned? What do I have to show for my 20 years of incarceration? In the months ahead, when these questions keep me up at night, I will listen to midnight. The woman I love says she's ready to meet me on the other side of the prison wall on the day that I walk out into the daylight. recently she asked me if you could go anywhere, do anything that first day out,

what would you want us to go do? That question keeps me up at night too. That was Joe Garcia reading, listening to Taylor Swift in prison. A longer version is at New Yorker.com from our series Weekend Essay. Taylor Swift's reissue of a record, 1989, comes out next week. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for

for listening to the program today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton,

Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keith line, Michael May, David Gable and Alejandra Decker.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.