>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. >> Carlos Lozada: It is my enormous pleasure to give you Matthew Desmond. [ Applause ] >> Matthew Desmond: All right. Hey. Hi. How are you? Oh my goodness. It's so good to be here. Oh, Carlos. I've never met Carlos but I feel like I've -- you know, he's been in my life for the last year and I remember reading your review. I remember the exact place I was when I read it. I read it on my phone. It was at a faculty thing and my editor was sitting right next to me. And it came in and we were just looking at it and we were amazed and you know, book critics have an incredibly hard and often thankless job. But you know, for kind of authors like me who have like, written other books but they've been for an academic audience that are trying to break out somewhere -- general audience, you know and you know, a critic that really does her job or his job right so thank you so much Carlos. Not only for pushing this book but for, you know, your amazing work at the post. And it's just good to be with all of you today. I donated, I got the sticker. If you donate you get a sticker. You didn't mention that. You get a sticker so I got one, do it. So, we should just get into it. So, we live in a weird country. We are the richest democracy with the worst poverty. That's who we are. And there's no other advanced industrial society that has the kind of poverty that we do or the depths of poverty that we have and that's always troubled me. And I know it's troubled a lot of you and I wanted to understand the role that housing plays in that story. And so I thought that looking at eviction, looking at families forcibly, physically removed from their homes was a decent way of going about that. So, I started this work the old -fashioned way. I moved into a trailer park on the far south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee's a city in America. It's in the middle of the country. It's our 30th most popular city. Anyone from Milwaukee? Any Milwaukee in the house? Over here? Love you guys. Can't make stuff up now, though. So I moved into a trailer park in the south side of the city and I lived there for about five months. And then I moved into a roomy house on the north of the city. That's Milwaukee's inner city. And I lived there about 10 months and form those neighborhoods I followed families getting evicted. And I went everywhere with those families. I went to eviction court with them, followed them into shelters and abandoned homes. I watched their kids, I slept on their floor, I ate off their table, I went to work with them, church, AA meetings with them. Several funerals, I was even there for a birth. Like there for birth. Carlos, have you been to a birth? Yeah. I know right, I know, yeah. It's intense. It's intense. So, I try to get to know these families as much as I could but I knew to really understand how the low-income housing market works, I needed to get as just as tight with the landlords doing the evicting as I did with the families getting evicted and so I did. And so I went to eviction court with landlords too and I helped them pass that eviction notices and collect rents. I saw them buy and sell properties. I understand why you would buy properties in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. I understand a little but more what makes landlords tick and what ticks them off. And I try to write a book about this incredibly complicated but central relationship when it comes to understanding inequality in America today, that between landlords and tenants. So, I was going about this work and there are these questions that kept springing to mind like "How often does eviction happen? Who gets evicted? What are the long-term consequences of getting tossed from your home?" But I went looking for some study release and data that would allow me to address those questions but I just came up empty. And so I said, "Okay, I need a -- I needed to do some things to collect today to myself." And one thing that we did was designed a survey because Milwaukee area renter study. We talked to about 1,100 people all over the city of Milwaukee. And we send interviews into some of the most distressed neighborhoods in the city. Those red dots and some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the city, those blue dots. I had an interviewer mugged. One was bitten by a dog. That's actually the same guy, Steve. Steve needs to work on his situational awareness. But you know, we worked really hard for this data. We got an 84 percent response rate which in nerd land is like really good. And we asked families like 250 questions about their kids and their housing and their health and their experience with eviction. I didn't stop there. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of evictions records that went through the civil court. We talked to 250 people right after they're evicted because we wanted to know "Why do you get evicted but you don't even though you owe your landlord the exact same amount?" Analyzing millions of 911 calls, hundreds of nuisance ordinances and I try to put that big data into conversation with the smaller data. My notebooks. Like the things that I was learning on the ground every day. Just living alongside tenants and working alongside landlords. And Evicted in that spirit is really a book that starts on the ground and it ends on the ground. It follows eight families through the process of eviction. You know, you meet Scott. Scott's in the book, you know, Scott was this kind of nurse that got hooked on pain killers and developed an addiction to heroin. And you kind of see him wrestle with that addiction throughout the book. Vanetta's in the book. You know, Vanetta's a single mom trying to raise three young kids. She's working an old country buffet and her hours got cut and she was so terrified of losing her home and maybe her kids to child protected services that she committed armed robbery to pay the rent. This is someone without any criminal record. And in that spirit, in the spirit of letting the folks that are on the front edge of this problem be our biggest teachers, you know, I want to share with you one person's story today and that's Arlene's story. So Arlene had a 14 year old son, Jory, and one day he was cutting up throwing snowballs at passing cars and he smacked this car. And it was like -- and this man jumped out. So, Jory and his cousin like hightailed it inside and they locked -- and he locked the door but the man followed them there and he kicked the door in. he kicked the door down. And thank God he left before anything else happened but when Arlene's landlord found out about that she decided to evict Arlene and her boy for damaging property. So Arlene took her two sons, Story and Jafaris, who was six, to the salvation army homeless shelter. Which everyone in Milwaukee just calls the lodge so you can tell your kids, "We're staying at the lodge tonight." Like it's a hotel. And from there they're on the hunt for another place to live and they found one on 19th street but there was often no water and Jory had to bucket out what was in the toilet. Arlene told me, "You know, it was 525 for a whole house and it was quiet and it was my favorite place." When we looked in that survey and we asked what happens to families after they're evicted, one big thing we found is that they move into much worse housing than they lived in before. So, if he want to know why some kids live with lead paint, and exposed wires, no heat, no water, one reason is their families are forced to accept those kinds of conditions in the harried aftermath of an eviction. So, the city eventually found Arlene's favorite place unfit for human habitation. They boarded up the windows and the doors and Arlene and her boys were on the hunt for another place to live. And she told Story like, "We take whatever we can get." Which is what moving looks like at the very bottom. Just like taking what you could get. And what Arlene could get is this drab apartment complex on Atkinson avenue but she soon feared for her boys because she learned it was like a haven for drug dealers. In face the whole block was drug soaked and hot. And she feared for Story because he was goofy and had this beautiful smile and would talk to anyone. So, in Arlene's case, why she moved, the fact that she was forced out of this place was really important for why she ended up in such a bad neighborhood. And we thought, "Can we test that statistically?" And we did and we found that you can control for a lot of different things and you still see the families who get evicted move from poor neighborhoods to even poorer ones, from dangerous neighborhoods to blocks with even higher level of crime. Eviction pushes families deeper into disadvantage. So Arlene moved out of Atkinson as fast as she could. She found this two bedroom bottom muted duplex on 13th street and Keefe. There's a big ol' hole in the living room window. There wasn't like a lock so Arlene had to lock it with like a plank she slit into brackets. The cargo was just filthy and ground in but she put on a good face. You know, she hung up curtains and she took a piece of clothing and she stuffed it in that whole in the window. So, the rent for this kind of place, which was located in a really poor neighborhood in Milwaukee, which is our fourth poorest city, was 550 dollars a month, utilities not included which consumed 88 percent of Arlene's welfare check. And she knew that some months she would have to sell her food stamps to make rent. And her and the boys would try to get by on oodles and noodles. You know, when you're paying over 80 percent of your income on rent, there's no extra money for anything. Like no money for clothes for Jory or toys for Jafaris. Jafaris had this like amazing ability to transform like a bucket or a bottle or a dog leash whatever he could get his hands on. And the soldiers and tanks, you know, engaged in warfare. So, here's the situation, you know, Arlene is not alone in spending the vast majority of her income on housing. For about 100 years there's been a consensus in America that we should spend about 30 percent of our income on housing costs. That gives us enough money to save, afford enough food, transportation but that is so far off in the realities of most renting families today. So, clicker, clicker. I see the light going on. We have pros on it. Are we -- I can go on. It's okay. I'm not like PowerPoint addicted. But kind of. [ Laughter ] I'm going to on and I'm going to let the pros handle. So, for the past 20 years the percentage of poor renting families spending 30 percent of their income or less on housing, our widespread standard of affordability has gone down and down and down. But the percentage of poor renting families spending at least half of their income on housing has gone up and up and up to the point that today the majority of poor renting families are spending half their income on housing costs and about one in four of those families are spending over 70 percent of their income just on rent and utilities. So, just imagine that, 70 percent of your income is just like gone in the beginning of the month. If you want a roof over your head or hot water under those condition you don't need to make a huge mistake or have a big emergency wash over your life to invite to evictions. Something as innocent as snowball can do it. So, for people like Arlene, eviction is much more the result of inevitability than personal irresponsibility. So, how do we get to this place? So, there's three ingredients to this recipe. One is the one we talk about a lot, which is for the past two decades, really the past four, the incomes of Americans of modest means have been plat. In some areas of the country they've fallen in real terms. But as families are watching their housing costs flat line or their incomes flat line, their housing costs were soaring. Between 1995 and today the median rent in this country adjusting for inflation has increased by over 70 percent. Cost of fuel and utilities have increased by 52 percent since 2000. And so, you have this like gap between what low income families are bringing in and what they have to pay for basic shelter needs. So, then we might ask, and this is the third ingredient, well, where's public housing? Or housing assistance of any kind? And the answer is it's there but it's only for the lucky minority of families that receive it today. So, only about six percent of poor families that live in public housing today, that's that little blue part of the pie, 12 percent receive a rent reducing voucher, which used to be called section eight vouchers. But the unlucky majority, the remaining 75 percent receive -- what's the technical term. Nothing. Nada, Zippo from state, local or federal governments. You know, I think that's be a situation that would be utterly unthinkable when it comes to meaning other basic needs. Imagine if we turned away three and four families that apply for food stamps. Like, "I'm sorry, we don't have enough for you. You have to go hungry." But that's exactly how we treat low income families searching for affordable shelter today. So, Arlene looked up looking for housing assistance a long time ago. One day on a whim she stopped by the housing authority and asked about the list and she was told by the person behind the glass like, "The list is frozen." Because on it were 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance five years ago. And that's not bad. I mean, the waiting for public housing in some of our big cities has not counted in years, it's counted in decades. So, I have two young children now and if I apply for public housing today in this city I would probably be a grandfather by the time my application came up for review. So, if Arlene wanted public housing this is what she'd have to do. She'd have to wait three or four years before the list unfroze and then she'd have to wait another five or six year until her name made it to the top of the pile. And then she'd just have to pray that the person reviewing her application would ignore all the evictions she collected while trying to make ends meet unassisted in the private market. When we think of the typical poor family today, we shouldn't think of them living in public housing or getting any kind of help from the government. We should think of Arlene because she's the average case. So, on 13th street, Arlene found this bucket of paint and rollers and brushes in the basement and she gave the walls a fresh coat but not long after moving in her sister died and she pitched in some money for the funeral. She didn't have the money but no one else did either and she gave out of love. The next month she missed an appointment with her welfare case worker because the letter announcing the appointment was mailed to 19th street or maybe Atkinson Avenue. And Arlene's case worker tried sending in the computer and Arlene's $620 a month check was cut, we call it getting sanctioned, and by that time she fell two months behind on rent and she got the pink papers. So, Milwaukee is a city of about 105,000 renter homes. Every year in Milwaukee landlords evict about 16,000 people. That's about 40 people a day evicted in Milwaukee. We've know crunched the numbers in Cleveland, in Kansas City, in Chicago, we found rates similar to Milwaukee's. New York city you see 60 marshal evictions every single day. It's estimated that renters in over 2.8 million homes think they'll be evicted soon. Now, the first time I crunched these numbers I thought they're wrong because they are so high. They're wicked scary, as we say in Boston. But these numbers only count formal court ordered evictions and there are other ways, cheaper and quicker ways for a landlord to get you out. So, Joe Prozinski, he was a building manager in the inner city, and he said, "You know, Matt, for every eviction I do that goes to the court, there are like 10 that don't." So, what Joe would do is say like, "Look, Carlos, you know, you're behind, man, and I just I need my money. I'll tell you what. I'll give you $200 and I'll let you use my van if you're out by Sunday." So, if you got to get evicted, that's not a bad eviction. I met another landlord that if you're behind, he'll just take your door off. There are a lot of ways to get a family out and we worked really hard in that survey to capture all those informal eviction that never go through the court. And if you had those up with formal evictions that are legally processed and if you count things like building condemnations, like what happened to Arlene's place on 19th street and landlord foreclosures, you learn that every two years in Milwaukee, one in eight renters is evicted, which is crazy. One in eight. Not one in eight single moms, not one in eight folks in deep poverty, just one in eight renters every eight -- every two years. And like poverty researchers and journalists like me, like for a long time we've written sentences like this. "Low income families exhibit high rates of residential insecurity." And we haven't said why and I think what we're learning is that poor folks are moving so much because they're forced to. And it's not just a rhetorical point, you know, we have a statistical model that shows that if you control for evictions, low income families don't move more than anyone else, which means if we want more family stability and we want more community stability we need fewer evictions. This is a problem that affects the young and the old, the sick and the able bodied, but the face of our eviction epidemic is just moms with kids. Moms with kids, if you go into any urban housing court around the country you just see like a ton of kids sitting there. Until recently the south Bronx, it's housing court had a daycare inside of it because there were so many kids coming through its stores. And low income African American women like Arlene and moms in particular are evicted at startlingly high rates. Among Milwaukee renters, one in five black women report being evicted sometime in their life compared to one in 15 white women. And I think that should trouble us. I think that should disturb us because it means that eviction is something like the feminine equivalent to incarceration. Now, we know that many of our poor, young African American men are being swept out by the long arm of the criminal justice system. They're being locked up. Many of our poor African-American women are being locked out and they're disproportionately bearing the brunt of the eviction crisis. This also isn't just a crisis that's on the north side of Milwaukee or the south side of Chicago. This is in poor white communities which I write about a lot in my books and Latino and immigrant communities. It's in expensive cities like this one and it's in inexpensive cities like Milwaukee and Baltimore and Huston. One in five of all renters in America now spends over 50 percent of their income on housing. So, Arlene went to eviction court and as is court custom in Milwaukee, she got to stay two extra days in her apartment for each of her two days, and those days came and went and she was ordered to be out on a day in early January. My Milwaukee friends here will tell you January is cold in Milwaukee and this January was especially cold. The weather men had said it would drop below 40 with the wind chill. But if Arlene waited any longer, you know, the landlord would call the sheriff and he would arrive within 10 days with a judge's order and a side arm and a team of movers and they would have piled everything on the side walk. And they take everything, like the meat cuts in the freezer, the shower curtains, the bible, the silk plants, Jarafis' asthma machine. And so, Arlene just struck out into the cold and after a lot of calls, you know, she finally found domestic violence shelter room 30 minutes away from Milwaukee. She just lied about being abused so she could get her boys a roof and she was once again on the hunt for another place to live. So, she called on or applied to 20 apartments, and then 40, and then 60, and then 80. I counted. She was accepted to none of them. Even in the inner city many were out of reach. And the place she could afford, if she basically tossed everything she had at the rent, weren't calling back either. And part of the reason, besides her poverty, was her eviction record. So, in Milwaukee your eviction is published publicly online for anyone to see and if it's not in your city there are literally hundreds of tenant screening companies waiting to sell landlords this information. And this is a big deal to landlords. You know, most land lords that I spent time with said, "We're not going to take anyone with an eviction within the last two or three years." So, this mark, this blemish of eviction that follows families is the reason they are forced into worse housing and into worse neighborhoods after they're evicted. So finally at the 90th landlord, Mr. 90 said yes. He had a one-bedroom apartment, it was $525. Arlene didn't much consider, like, the conditions of the place, what the neighborhood was like. "A house is a house," she told Story. So two months after their eviction court hearing, they moved in. And Arlene liked it. You know, all the lights worked, all the cabinets had fixtures. And when she and the boys had unloaded a bunch of the stuff, Arlene just like sat down on the floor and she found like a trash bag full of towels and leaned against it. And Story came over and, like, pitched his 14-year-old head into her shoulder, and Jafaris came and like snuggled into her lap, and they just stayed like that for a long time. So Arlene got her stuff out of storage. She hung pictures on the wall. She hung a sign over the sink to Story that said, "If you do not clean up after yourself, we are going to have problems." Do you guys remember what it's like to 14? Sucky and brutal. And it's especially hard to be 14 and experience long stretches of homelessness. Between 7th and 8th grade, Story went to five different schools. And at his new school, he started acting out a little bit, and one day a teacher yelled at him. And he got mad and he kicked her in the shin and he ran home. And the teacher called the principal but then she thought it would be appropriate to call the police, and when officers visited Arlene and her boys at the new apartment, and the landlord found out about that, he told her she had to go. It's kids. You know, kids are a big part of this story. They can prolong the time you're homeless after your eviction, and they sometimes are the reason for your eviction. In fact, when we look at that survey that we did in housing court, that survey where we were trying understand, "Why is it that you get evicted but you don't, even though you owe your landlord the same thing?" What we found was it wasn't race, it wasn't gender, it wasn't even how much you owed. It was kids. If you lived with children, the chance of you getting evicted tripled [inaudible]. What you're seeing in that finding is landlord discretion. You're seeing the landlord say, "I'll work with you but not with you." Because, you know, like, kids, like, use the curtains for superhero capes and they flush toys down the toilet. They cause some guy whose car's just been smacked with a snowball to kick your door in. They can test positive for lead poisoning, draw the attention of child protective services, the police. "Kids cause us headache," is what one landlord told me. Family discrimination is illegal, but we know from studies that many of us don't even recognize that as a kind of discrimination. So after that eviction, Arlene started to unravel a little bit. She told me, "It's like I got a curse on me. It won't stop for nothing. Sometimes I feel my body trembling or shaking. I'm tired but I can't sleep. I'm fixing to have a nervous breakdown. My body's trying to shut down." I recently published a study that show that moms who get evicted experience higher rates of depression two years later. It sticks with you. And we know that between 2005 and 2010, years where housing costs were soaring around our country, something else was going up to and those were suicides attributed to eviction. They doubled during that five-year timespan. Arlene told me, "Just my soul is messed up. I wish my life were different. I wish that when I be an old lady, I can sit back and look at my kids and they be grown and they, you know, become something, something more than me. And we'll all be together and be laughing. We'll be remembering stuff like this and be laughing at it." The home is the center of life. It's our refuge from work, the pressures of school, Minnesota streets. We say at home, we're ourselves. Everywhere else, we're someone else. At home, we remove our masks. In languages spoken all over the world, the word for home encompasses not just shelter but warmth and family, community, the womb. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for home, it was the same one for mother. So eviction causes loss. Families lose not only their homes, but often their schools, their community, your stuff. It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. An eviction can delete all that. An eviction comes with this blemish, which can cause you not to move into a safe neighborhood and to decent housing, it can also prevent you from moving into public housing, because many of our public housing authorities, even though they don't have to, count eviction as a blemish or a strike against an application, which means we're systematically denying housing help to families that need it most. So we push those families into slum housing and into bad neighborhoods. We have a study that shows that eviction causes job loss. I don't know if any of y'all in this room have been evicted, but if you have, you know why. It's such a consuming, stressful, drawn-out event. It can cause you to make mistakes at work, lose your footing in the labor market, and then there's the effect that eviction has on your soul, like Arlene would put it. Your mental health. Now, I think when we add all that up, we have to conclude that evictions, which used to be rare in this country, which used to draw crowds, they're not just a condition of poverty. They're a cause of it too. They're making things worse and they're leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation, which means we can't fix poverty in America without fixing housing. So how do we fix it? So imagine if every family in this country had a decent, affordable place to leave. If Arlene didn't have to give 80 percent of her income to rent, she could keep her kids fed and clothed and off the streets. We know from previous research that when families finally receive a housing voucher after years and years on the waiting list, when they finally receive this ticket that allows them to pay only 30 percent of their income on rent, instead of 60 or 70, they do one consistent thing with their freed-up income. They take it to the grocery store. They buy more food and their kids become stronger and less anemic. And they work. For the lucky minority of poor families that benefit from them today. But the vast majority of our pour families aren't so lucky, and their kids, with names like Jori and Jafar, aren't getting enough to eat because the rent eats first. And, like, if we can't afford the freedoms our country offers us without a roof over our head, like basic stuff, the freedom to better ourselves, to protect our children, to be part of a community, then shouldn't access to a decent, affordable home be part of what it means to be an American? >> Yes. >> We've affirmed -- [ Applause ] We've affirmed provision and old age and access to 12 years of education and basic nutrition to be rights in this country because we believe that human flourishing and vitality are impossible without those things. There is not an argument that says that you can go without housing and still flourish and be economically mobile. Housing should be a right in this country and the reason is simple. Without stable shelter, everything else falls apart. So then the question becomes, well, how do we deliver on that obligation? And there's a lot of good news here actually. There's a lot of good news. I mean, just a few generations ago, there were slums in our cities and babies were dying of tuberculosis and there were outhouses in the middle of Philadelphia when some of y'all were still alive. We took on a battle with the slum and we won. We won. And I'll be the first to admit, and I think the book is pretty clear out about this fact, that we still have a long way to go. When I lived in the trailer park, I didn't have hot water for most of the time, and I told the landlord, like, "I am a writer. I'm going to write about you and your trailer park." [ Laughter ] So imagine what my neighbors had to endure. But there's no arguing that we haven't made huge steps in the right direction when it comes to the quality of housing folks are living in today. It's just an important thing to recognize. Because sometimes when you talk about poverty, the problem can be -- fell so depressing and feel so entrenched. It can feel like, "We fought the war on poverty and nothing works." And that's just empirically false. When we want to take on big problems as a country, we have come up with big solutions. I also just take a lot of heart that there's organizations all around this country just putting in work, driving down eviction rates, preserving affordable housing, fighting family homelessness. So you can go to this website that we've started called just shelter, which amplifies that work, and you can click on DC or Baltimore, Virginia, wherever you call home, and you can figure out, "Who's working on this problem in my own backyard?" You can learn more about what it looks like in your own community. Maybe you can get plugged in with your time or your money. So what's the bigger picture? A problem as big as the affordable housing crisis calls for a big solution. We are bleeding out and it would be disingenuous of me to stand here before you and say a band-aid fix will do it. Because it won't. We need real bold political leadership here. We need real moral vision here, so one idea that would make a dream of affordable housing, a dream of a house for every American a reality, would be to take a program that we already have that works pretty darn well, the Affordable Housing Voucher Program, and expand it to everyone below the poverty line. So the idea is super simple. It's not even my idea. You take this program, and if you fall below the poverty line, you qualify for it. And you get a voucher and you can live anywhere you want, as long as your housing isn't too expensive or too shoddy, and instead of paying 60 or 70 percent of your income on housing, you pay 30. The voucher covers the rest. That would fundamentally change the face of poverty in America. That would make evictions rare again. That would drive down family homelessness. Families finally would receive that, that you feel when you're only paying 30 percent of your income on housing, and be able to buy enough food and save. So there's two questions here that we might ask. One, would that be a disincentive to work? It's a fair question. We in the research community have spent a lot of time on that question, and there are some studies that show that when families receive housing assistance, they also experience a slight reduction in work hours. I think they want to just spend a little bit more time with their kids. There are way more studies that don't find any relationship between those two things. Nerds like me call it a null relationship. And I think the status quo is a much bigger threat to self-sufficiency and work than any affordable housing program could be. I mean, families are crushed by the high cost of housing. They can't afford community college classes or job training, so they can get plugged in in a better place in the economy. A lot of them can't afford to stay in one place long enough to just hold down a job. And just think of all, like, the brainpower and talent and creativity that we just squander because we ask someone like Arlene to spend so much of hers trying to figure out how she's going to make rent from one month to the next, or where she's going to live after her kids and her are inevitably, predictably, evicted. Poverty reduces people born for better things. Arlene didn't want some small life. She didn't want to gain the system and eek out an existence. In fact, when she finally found stable housing, the first thing she did was start applying for jobs. She wanted to work and thrive and contribute, and a stable, affordable home would give folks like Arlene a shot at realizing their full potential. So the second question is, can we afford it? It sounds kind of expensive, a universal housing voucher program. It's totally expensive. We can totally afford it. So Bipartisan Policy Center crunched the numbers a few years ago and they found that the kind of program that I'm advocating for today would cost us an additional 22 billion dollars a year. 22 billion dollars. Raw number. Doesn't account for the savings we'd recoup by driving down homelessness, rates of depression, rates of asthma, things we already pay for, because there's two ways to spend. We can spend smart or we spend stupid. That's just the raw number. Now, 22 billion dollars is not a small figure, but it's well within our capacity. We have the money. We just made decisions about how to spend it. So, every year in this country, homeowner tax subsidies, especially the mortgage interest deduction, they far, far outpace direct housing assistance to the needy. We already have a universal housing program. It's an entitlement. It's just not for poor people. So the year that Arlene was evicted from 13th Street, we, as a nation, spent about 41 billion dollars on direct housing assistance to the needy, things like public housing in Section 8. That same year, we spent about 171 billion dollars on homeowner tax subsidies. That number, 171 billion dollars, that was equivalent to the entire budgets of the Departments of Education, Veteran Affairs, Homeland Security, Justice and Agriculture, combined. It's a rather large number. Most of that benefit goes to families with six-figure incomes, because if your income is bigger, your mortgage is bigger so your deduction is too. Most white families in America own a home with a mortgage. Most Latino and African-American families do not. It is hard to think of a social policy that more unblushingly amplifies our racial and economic inequality than our current housing policy does. So if we want to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent, at least when it comes to housing, let's just be honest about that. Let's just own up to that. Let's just be like, "Yes, this is the kind of country you want. This is our social contract." Instead of repeating this lie that the richest country on the planet can't afford to do more. If poverty persists -- [ Applause ] You know, if poverty persists in America, it's not because we lack resources. We lack something else. Okay. So it's one idea. Like, let others come. You know, one city has to build, another has to destroy. Our cities are different. You know, what works in DC is going to fail in Milwaukee. LA needs a completely different thing than Birmingham does. But I think whatever our way out of this mess, one thing for me is certain. Like, this degree of inequality and this level of social suffering and this just, like, blunting of human potential, this cold denial of, like, a basic human need, I don't -- like, this isn't us. Like, this doesn't have to be us. By no American value is this situation justified. There's no ethical code, there's no holy teaching, there's no piece of scripture that could be summoned to defend what we've allowed our country to become. Thank you. [ Applause ] We have time for questions. Thanks, sound guys, for getting through that technical difficulty. It's really great to see you guys up here. Thank you so much. >> Could you talk about how you established relationships that enabled you to be with the renters and with the landlords? >> Matthew Desmond: Yeah. So I think living in the community helped a lot. I think, you know, Scott and Lorraine and other folks that I wrote about in the book were my neighbors in the trailer park. And the landlords were really keen on just people understanding their work. You know, they were proud of their work. They often were, like, self-starters, you know, and built a kind of business up from nothing and they were interested in that. That doesn't mean it was easy all the time, and often, you know, tenants would not tell me things. They were afraid I'd tell the landlord. Sometimes the landlord would do the same. But I think just spending enough time with folks and really living there helped do it, yeah. >> This is a great book and I love the combination of quantitative and qualitative materials that you brought together. But I'd like to go back to your last comments here. Could you kind of recreate the historical context in which the original housing voucher program came about? And are those replicable in the near future? And it's not a negative question, but just how did it come about, first of all? >> Matthew Desmond: Negative questions are good too, you know? Negative questions are good. And so, but I don't see it as a negative question. That's a really important point. So the story of public policy toward housing is often a story riddled with, like, really big mistakes, or that's how it's read anyways. So, you know, we had a giant, like, social experiment called public housing, which was going to replace our sum communities. And we said, "Why don't we build giant towers in the middle of really poor, desolate areas of our city? Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. And so we built these towers up, and the thing that we often forget is, like, that was amazing. Like, when you read the transcripts of the first residents of those kind of public housing towers, they were like, "This is incredible. This is like Christmas." But we defunded it. We gutted the funding and soon, like, no one was picking up the trash and the elevators weren't working. And if you were a family that could move out, you did, and those towers descended into incredibly concentrated poverty and sometimes even, like, chaos. You know, Pruitt-Igoe, these giant towers in St. Louis, were destroyed 18 years after they were erected. So from those ashes, the Public Housing Voucher System started to emerge, and it has become the main way we provide affordable housing to families today. It's not a perfect system, but there's no study in the world that shows that you can offer families equal quality housing for a lesser cost than you can through a voucher program. So the problem that I always [inaudible] with when I was trying to conclude this book, like, what policy do I want to get behind, is the problem of scale. There's all sorts of awesome ways we can address this problem, but if we want to address it at scale, the voucher program's the best way to do so. >> [Inaudible] question. You made a distinction between men who are incarcerated and women who lose their homes, and I just wanted to point out that the rate of female incarceration is rising exponentially in the US right now. That aside, what could you tell me about the landlords that would surprise me, given my sense that these are, you know, bad people or something like -- what would, you know, something that would make me feel differently? >> Matthew Desmond: I hope the book does its best to try to capture both sides with their full complexity, and I think it's way too easy, you know, just to say, "Oh, these landlords are just greedy." Or, "Oh, these tenants are just lazy," depending on where we fall in the political spectrum. You know, from the sidewalk view, it's really hard. And so one thing that surprised me was when I started this work, I was like, "Why would you buy property on 13th Street and Keefe?" And when I finished this work, I was like, "Oh, why wouldn't you do that?" Because you can make a lot of money, quite a bit of money. And so, you know, the landlord of the trailer park that I lived in, you know, he let me copy his rent rolls, so I could account for vacancies and missed payments. I got his mortgage records, I got his water bill, I got his trash collecting records, I got his eviction costs. I'm telling you all this so you believe me, that, you know, the landlord of, like, the worst trailer park in the fourth worst city of Milwaukee, which is 130-trailers big, takes home about 470,000 dollars a year after expenses. That, for me, changed the way I think about poverty, because it means, like, poverty isn't just about low incomes. It's also about extractive markets. You know, there are winners and losers, and there are losers because there are winners. And that point isn't just about landlords. I think that point is about a lot of us in the room today, including things like our housing and our schools and our tax records. >> Hey, Matt. Thank you for this great, great book. I wanted to say a quick question about the writing of the book. Why did you choose not to include yourself in the book, despite doing the same kind of immersive journalism as a, say, a Nickel and Dimed or something like that? Did you give it thought? Did you think it would change the story? Or why aren't you a character in the book? >> Matthew Desmond: I gave it a ton of thought. You know, Nickel and Dimed is a first person because, like, that's the idea. Like, I went and I did this. And I -- it is a form of immersive journalism, or ethnography, but it's also -- I didn't want the reader to look at me. I didn't want the reader to care about me. Like, I am not the important thing in the story. Arlene and Crystal and Vanetta and Scott and Lorraine, they're the important people in the story. And so I didn't want, when something was happening, you thinking, "How's Matt dealing with this?" Or, "Where is Matt in the story?" I didn't want you to care, and so I erased myself. And I write about, like, the tradeoffs of that kind of approach in the end of the book. I'm being told by the bosses that I have to wrap it up. Thank you guys so much -- >> Thank you. >> For coming. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.