SHUTDOWN

What happens in a government shutdown, a conversation with the only homelessness editor at a major U.S. publication, and another installment in our series of conversations with candidates and elected officials living with mental illness and mental health disabilities. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter, Rebecca talks with Alastair Gee, the only homelessness editor at a major U.S. publication, about The Guardian’s year-long series looking at homelessness in the US. Next, continuing our series of interviews with candidates and elected officials living with mental illness and mental health disabilities, Rebecca speaks with Representative Garnet Coleman who represents parts of Houston in the Texas legislature. But first, with the federal government teetering on the edge of shutdown, Rebecca and Jeremy Slevin talk with Sam Berger, a senior policy advisor at the Center for American Progress and a shutdown expert from his time at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

This week’s guests:

• Sam Berger, Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress
• Alastair Gee, Homelessness Editor at The Guardian
• Representative Garnet Coleman, of Texas’ 147th District

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read more about what happens in a government shutdown
• Check out “Outside in America,” The Guardian’s ongoing investigative series looking at homelessness in the U.S.
• Read Rep. Garnet Coleman’s essay on holding elected office as someone who lives with mental illness

This program aired on January 19th, 2018

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week I talk with the only homelessness editor at a major U.S. publication about a yearlong series looking at homelessness in the United States. Next, another installment in our series of conversations with candidates and elected officials living with mental illness and mental health disabilities. But first, with government shutdown everywhere in the news in case you missed it I’m joined by the Slevinator because I couldn’t do “In Case You Missed It” without him. What’s up Slevs?

JEREMY SLEVIN: What’s up?

VALLAS: And special guest Sam Berger he is a senior policy advisor at the Center for American Progress and back when he served in the Obama administration was among other things one of the lawyers at OMB, the Office of Management and Budget that was charged with overseeing shutdown stuff. Sam, thanks for joining the show.

SAM BERGER: Thanks for having me on I really appreciate it.

VALLAS: I got your title in the administration right, right? A lawyer in charge of overseeing shutdown stuff?

BERGER: Yeah it was, I mean getting the resume down was very tough with that title so I usually use an acrynym but that would be confusing for your guest so I think that was the right call.

VALLAS: It would, you’ve gone from acronym to acronym because now you’re CAP’s SPA, senior policy advisor which we learned this morning just before we started taping.

SLEVIN: I’m just going to call you shutdown master because it sounds like you personally were in charge of the shutdown so what a perfect person to have on

BERGER: I wouldn’t take responsibility for everything that happened.

SLEVIN: So Sam personally shut down the government and we’re having him on to talk about it.

BERGER: Sorry, everybody.

VALLAS: Jeremy, this is –

BERGER: Totally my bad.

VALLAS: This is how rumors start. [LAUGHTER] Also we’re going to see Off Kilter make it’s debut in like Breitbart or the Drudge Report where they take the headlines and say, “CAP admits that Sam Berger shut down the government.” So getting to fact, maybe we can make a transition to fact.

BERGER: Also, can I, so OMB does have a central role in helping agencies understand how to apply the rules of shutdown and kind of make sure things are uniform across the government so at OMB you see all the kinds of problems, challenges that arise, that sort of thing so it gives you a unique perspective but I don’t think we had responsibility, lay more with congress then and we can talk about who it lays with now.

VALLAS: Well this is a great segue, so Sam Berger, shutdown expert we will call him as opposed to shutter-downer of government, let’s make that small edit to my intro. So Sam, people are talking left and right about shutdown because as of Friday morning as we are talking right now and a lot could change in the hours ahead, flagging that as a major caveat for our listeners depending on when they’re listening, we are barreling towards the potential of a government shutdown for the first time in Trump’s presidency. So help us understand, how did we get here, how is shutdown looming large over us in this moment?

BERGER: I think the simplest way to view this is Trump has a choice. On the one hand, there’s a bipartisan deal that addresses a number of important priorities for folks. That’s reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, that’s protecting DREAMers, that’s ensuring that we have adequate funding to help with needs like fighting the opioid crisis, help veterans, early education and those sorts of things, as well as defense and of course supplemental appropriations to help folks that have been devastated by natural disasters. That deal is out there. On the other hand you have shutting down the government to make a political point and it’s as with all things with Trump, you don’t relaly have to guess at what’s going on, he’s told you. He said we need a good shutdown and then he talked about how a shutdown would help him politically. So it’s pretty clear what’s going on here, he’s choosing the path of bigotry, he’s choosing the path of playing to his base instead of reaching a bipartisan deal. We all watched him on television say if you have a bipartisan deal, I’ll sign it, whatever it is. Then people were like hey we have a bipartisan deal and he’s like I’m not going to sign it. So it doesn’t really get much more stark. This is a man that wants a shutdown for whatever crazy reason. And he’s going to potentially get it unless Republicans put that aside, focus on working across the aisle to just get the deal. The deal is sitting there if they’re willing to take it and if no they’re as complicit as Trump in this shutdown.

VALLAS: So Sam, I don’t know if you noticed this but Jeremy is raising his hand which is really effective on radio because people can definitely hear that he is raising his hand.

SLEVIN: The whole audience is like call on him!

VALLAS: That’s exactly what’s happening right now.

SLEVIN: Well so I was going to take, I think that was a great summary but taking it like three more steps back I think many people, including myself at times, are confused, there’s so many moving parts, they understand that DREAMers are on the table, that CHIP hasn’t been funded, but I think it’s hard to know the whole story of how we got here. Why wasn’t CHIP a bipartisan program that’s been funded regularly for two decades? Why all the sudden are we having a self inflicted crisis on DREAMers when we thought this was settled under the Obama administration? This isn’t something that just natural came up. These were steps that were taken to get us to this point.

BERGER: Sure, and I think the simplest way to think about it is Congress doesn’t have a lot of time and so the choice that they make on how to use that time shows you their priorities. And what congress decided to spend their time on doing was one, trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, stripping health care from upwards of 30 million people and two, the tax giveaway which is giving millions and millions and millions of dollars to corporations, to political donors and in some cases to the very people that are voting on the bill. That’s what they were spending their time on. So CHIP comes up and they said no, no, no, we don’t have time to deal with that, I got to figure out if I can get the $200,000 in this donors pocket.

VALLAS: 9 million children who need health insurance, definitely don’t have time for that is exactly what they said last fall.

BERGER: Exactly.

SLEVIN: That’s literally said, I remember during the tax debate he was like let’s work on bipartisan priorities, there’s agreement. And Sherrod Brown said OK, let’s start with CHIP we all agree and he’s like oh, oh, no, no. Stop talking about CHIP.

BERGER: Well, yeah.

SLEVIN: We’ve got to pass this tax bill.

BERGER: And it’s interesting, people at first thought they didn’t have the time, didn’t have the time which is one thing. Now we have an even more concerning possibility which is that they were actually trying to hold this program hostage. Just think about that for a second. They basically said look we all agree that children should have health care but we think Democrats care about helping children more. So what we’re going to do is hold on it, hold on it, hold on it, create a crisis and then try to use that to basically force through our own bills. It would sound crazy if we hadn’t seen them try to do things like this before and if they couldn’t be more clear about it. There is a bipartisan deal on CHIP, how many months ago? I’m not great at math.

VALLAS: Over 100 days ago.

BERGER: Yeah.

VALLAS: According to the little lobbyists who have been tweeting every single day about it.

BERGER: And so there was this chance, day after day after day after day but they were waiting until they thought there was a political gain for them. Not a policy gain for the children, for the families that would get that certainty, that they were going to have healthcare, that was going to know that that program was going to be there. That wasn’t what was motivating them but a political gain, an opportunity for them to profit, for them to get something out of it. And you know I think that really reveals at the heart of it the moral rot at the heart of the party right now. The Republican party doesn’t really seem to be helping them unless you write a big check, maybe you’re showing up at Mar-A-Lago party tomorrow. But other than that –

VALLAS: Which might occur during a shutdown which would be just amazing optics.

SLEVIN: What are the tickets, $250,000?

VALLAS: I think those are the bleacher seats. Those are the nosebleeds.

SLEVIN: But actually the levels are $100,000 and $250,000

BERGER: I mean if you look at what this congress has done and you say where are the chances to help people and those always get kicked down the road, kicked down the road, kicked down the road. And where are the chances to help donors? Pushed up, pushed up, pushed up, this has to happen.

SLEVIN: And in the case of DREAMers, it was self inflicted. Trump created this, right?

VALLAS: And this is an important point because so Jeremy, I’m raising my hand. My hand is up so I got called on! I got called on by myself, this is the best, this is why I love having a radio show. So, if you ask Republicans what is going on here, what you hear is something very different. They say, oh no this is Democrats forcing a shutdown because oh my God, they are wanting to put “illegal immigrants”, I’m putting that in huge scare quotes before children and that’s the line that you’re hearing from Trump and McConnell, Republican leaders, they’re trying to call this a Schumer shutdown. Is there any truth in that at all?

BERGER: No, I mean think about what happened. Trump starts by creating the problem by ending DACA. Then he turns around and says but don’t worry we’ll get a fix. Then he strikes a deal in September, a bipartisan deal, turns around and breaks that deal. Just what, last week, ten days ago he appears on television, he appears on television so we can all see and he says hey everyone, we need this deal. And I’m willing to support any deal you come up with. And so everybody, treating him like a normal function human being say OK, we’ll get together and form a bipartisan deal. As soon as he says it, no, no. And why not? I think that’s also important, why not. Not well, I really feel like we need to develop a better way of guarding the border. It’s like no, I don’t like this because it lets non-white people into the country. He couldn’t be any clearer. Again, with Trump there is no subtext it’s all text, or all caps text. [LAUGHTER] And that’s what we’re seeing again here. That’s what at the root of this. He doesn’t want a bipartisan deal because a bipartisan deal is going to help DREAMers.

VALLAS: So Sam, what happens if there is a shutdown? And folks may be listening as it is actually happening, folks may be listening after there’s been some kind of short term patch applied so that we’ll avoid it for a couple of days. No matter what happens, it’s always good to understand what actually comes to pass if the government shuts down and you as our resident not-shutter-downer but shutdown expert have a lot to share about what actually pays out if the government shuts down.

BERGER: When shut down happens, there are some programs that actually continue and there are some functions that continue. Things that protect life and property will keep going so the FBI will keep investigating things, the military will keep defending us. Things of that sort of nature will keep going. There are also programs that are funded separately. Things like Medicare and Social Security, those aren’t funded on an annual basis so those will continue. But a whole range of really important programs will stop and as time goes on this will get worse and worse and worse and worse. So take for example small businesses, they’re going to be buffeted in a lot of ways. They’re going to find it harder to get loans because those loans won’t be able to be processed. Private loans will also be an issue because IRS helps basically verify what people’s incomes are. If they are one of these businesses that are near a national park they are going to see a decrease in tourism, although now there is some claim that the Trump administration might try to illegal keep those open. If they are a government contractor, there are tons of government contractors, they’re not going to get paid. So that’s an issue right there. Let’s say that you’re someone who wants to go into an NIH clinical trial. Can’t do it during a shutdown, those people will be turned away. There will be labor inspections that try to make sure that workplaces keeping people safe, not stealing their pay, those will stop. EPA inspections, unless there is an immediate imminent threat to life will stop so inspections of hazardous waste sites, drinking water facilities, that sort of thing. That’s just a small part of what we’ll actually see.

We’re talking about a very large government that does a lot of incredibly important things and a lot of that stuff will get shut down. And it becomes particularly challenging as it stretches out. Because a few days, is still costly, I think we should be clear on that. It takes a lot of time on the front end for people to plan. Just think about what would happen in your own office if you had to decide who was staying and who was going and why they were doing that and making sure people know and figuring how to tell everyone to come back when it finally ends. So that’s a tremendous amount of effort. Things pile up over that time. And then when you start up again it’s slow there. So it’s a colossal, colossal waste and for Trump to do this when a bipartisan deal is sitting out there, it just reflects, he doesn’t really care about this stuff. He doesn’t really think about the impact of his actions on people.In one sense that seems obvious to say, in another sense seems incredible to say about the president. But I think it’s hard to argue anything else when you watch what he’s doing and how he’s treating both this shutdown but a whole range of policy issues that have a range of impacts on Americans.

VALLAS: Well, we’ll have to leave it there but a lot to watch in the hours and days ahead. Sam Berger is a shutdown expert as we have now learned. I literally learned this this week who is also a senior policy advisor at the Center for American Progress. The Slevinator is someone you know well who needs no introduction or outro. Don’t go away, after this more Off Kilter right after the break.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. For the past year, The Guardian has been conducting an investigative series on homelessness in the U.S. called “Outside in America”. I spoke with the series editor Alastair Gee, the only homelessness editor at a major U.S. publication by phone.

Alastair Gee, thank you so much for joining Off Kilter.

ALASTAIR GEE: Thanks so much for having me.

VALLAS: So just bring us back to almost a year ago when this series was launching. What’s the story behind this series “Outside in America”? How did The Guardian come to decide to launch a series investigating homelessness in America?

GEE: Well when The Guardian opened a San Francisco bureau about two years ago, I think the editors came here thinking it was going to be a story about what everyone expects. It was a story about technology and Silicon Valley and when they arrived here I think what they realized was the story was also this humanitarian crisis if you will of people living on the street. Everyday when we walked to our office there were people sleeping on the sidewalk right outside our office and so it was something that they were horrified by and felt that we couldn’t ignore. That was the true genesis of the series.

VALLAS: You’ve noted in some of your talking about the series and the newletter that you send out each month with the new content as it continues, you’ve noted that you as far as you’re aware are the homelessness editor at a major United States publication and I have to say you’re the only one I’m aware of too, so it’s not just you. How did you come to be the only homelessness editor at a major publication?

GEE: This was a topic that I have covered off and on before I joined The Guardian. And so it’s always something that as with the editors at the San Francisco bureau, it’s something that you can’t, there is no way to ignore it if you’re living in San Francisco. I have previously been a foreign correspondent in Russia and when I arrived here in the U.S. in 2009 I was just immediate struck by the incredible inequality, the socioeconomic disparity in the Bay Area. The beautiful, wonderful place which is unable to grapple with the misery, frankly, that’s on the street everyday and so it’s something that I was drawn to even before become homelessness editor and it’s just a topic that is still very, very important and very undercovered and I feel the need to cover it with something [INAUDIBLE].

VALLAS: One of the most recent pieces in the series is one of the ones that’s gotten some of the most attention. It’s an 18 month investigative reporting into one way bus tickets that cities use to move homeless people basically out of their cities. Sort of an out of sight, out of mind policy that many people have been incredibly horrified to learn about through this important reporting. Tell us a little bit about that particular article and the reporting behind it. Would love to hear you dig in a little bit.

GEE: Well cities have been running these kinds of programs for at least 30 years. And they have names like “Homeward Bound”, “Project Reunification” and the premise of these programs or how they are advertised is that homeless people, quite rightly, I’m going to rephrase that, I guess you can edit it.

VALLAS: Totally fine, totally fine. If you want to start the whole sentence again that makes it easy for Will.

GEE: Cities have been running these kinds of programs for at least three decades and the premise of the kind of program is that it can in and of itself be helpful for a homeless person to return to their hometown, the place they’re from, to go and live with families and that that can lead to housing stability. And so these programs, they have names like “Homeward Bound”, “Project Reunification” and so we wanted to dig in and understand well, these programs, that’s what they say they’re doing. Are these programs actually an exit from homelessness for many people? And actually some cities code [INAUDIBLE] to actually include the numbers of people that they’ve given the ticket to. It’s in the number, the official number of those who have been rehoused, they define it as an exit from homelessness. What we were surprised to learn as we dug into this was that actually cities saying that was somewhat unfounded in the sense that very few cities do any kind of long-term follow up with the people that give these bus tickets to. So it’s more or less impossible for them to actually say with any certainty whether this is the kind of solution that they say it is.

So my collagues began and I joined them 18 months ago making public record requests to dozens and dozens of cities trying to first of all just records just to understand how many people have been given tickets in the first place and then to try and work from there to understand the success of these programs. We got responses from about 16 cities and counties and that added up to around 35,000 journeys over the past decade, decade and a half. Some of these journeys, some of these records had the names of people still on them so we were able track some of these people down and to understand, ok you took this ticket from Sarasota, from New York, San Francisco, 2, 3, 5, years ago, where are you now? Did it work out for you? And we were able to show that while for some people it certainly was a really helpful thing.

A woman named Tiffany in Fort Lauderdale who said that I was an alcoholic on the streets, going back to my mom saved my life. So there were cases like that. But we also found a number of cases where people were either homelessness in a new city, they even ended up homeless on the streets of the city that they came from. We spoke to a couple people in Key West for instance where, not really where they were homeless back in Key West but as a consequence of taking the ticket they had agreed they couldn’t be able to return to Key West, they couldn’t use the shelter again. So these people haven’t returned to Key West, they didn’t work out, they were out sleeping on the beach. We found a number of cases where the promise that cities suggest would be the outcome, that it’s an exit from homelessness, we couldn’t back that up in a number of cases.

VALLAS: So it’s not just that incredibly staggering and eye-opening article that plays some of the out of sight, out of mind policies and practices that we see in communities across the country, there are others that have opened a lot of eyes and frankly were things I had never heard about even going back to my years as a legal aid attorney in low income urban communities and one in particular that jumped out to me was low income workers who live in RVs, in recreational vehicles being actually chased out of silicon valley. Really part and parcel of a whole thread of this kind of coverage and these kinds of practices that you’ve uncovered. How did you come to find out about that particular practice happening in the San Francisco area?

GEE: Well, with reporting in a lot of the areas that I do, it’s impossible to ignore. You just see these telltale signs, these very sad signs of an old rusty looking RV parked along the side street in San Francisco in these industrial areas and of course the city. You just notice there are people living inside them. I’ve lived here now for 8 years and that’s something I wasn’t seeing when I arrived but the numbers have certainly increased. The story we did in Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto there’s a stretch of road down there which borders Stanford University, it’s right on the edge of these beautiful, manicured grounds. It’s near this incredibly extensive shopping mall. It’s in Palo Alto, the headquarters of the big tech companies. And yet you have when I was down there last summer about 50 of these beaten up RVs lining one side of the street next to the university with people living inside of them. The reason I went down there that day was because they had received notices that they would have to move on. And so it was just the most astonishing, the most visceral visual display of inequality I’ve seen. The juxtaposition of this incredibly extensive university, these stores and all these poor people who have nowhere else to go. I remember I spoke to one guy called Frank and I’m still in touch with him actually and he was this very gentle sweet guy who struggled with addiction and it had led to the breakdown of his family and he is still out there. I spoke to him, he has to move on from Palo Alto because the city was enforcing these new laws and I spoke to him just last weekend. He’s still just in his RV going around in Silicon Valley from place to place grappling with the fact that communities have these quite stringent rules now about how long a vehicle can stay parked on a sidewalk so that’s his life now, a very itinerant, difficult life.

VALLAS: And that’s another theme that really plays out throughout this series of stories is the incredibly stark inequality that can exist across even one street or even several feet, that particular story is one example. Another is a woman living on the street near Facebook’s headquarters, yet another man died in an Amazon dumpster. So really an incredibly ability that this series has had to put a face on that kind inequality. I would love to hear you tell a few more stories about the people that you and the team that you’ve been working with on this series has met along the way.

GEE: Yeah well in that Amazon story, there’s one person who, one of my favorite people who I’ve met her name is Tygrr, that’s her street name and the reason I met her was quite a sad story behind it. I started investigating, well actually I didn’t, what happened was I was reporting late last year underneath some freeways in San Francisco and I remember this really rainy, dark night one night. It was appalling conditions. And I was chatting with these guys under the freeway and they just said you have to look into the death of this guy called Frank, he died in an Amazon dumpster. And they didn’t know anything more than that. They didn’t know his last name even, they just, they couldn’t give me the exact address of the dumpster even. And so I went home and I was googling “Amazon dumpsters” [INAUDIBLE] dumpsters, what is it? And couldn’t find anything online about amazon.com having dumpsters or anything. But eventually through a lot of leg work and through wandering through various neighborhoods in San Francisco, I worked out that what it was was there was an Amazon warehouse in this corner of San Francisco, completely unmarked on the outside and so I was, I discovered basically after wandering inside and doing some sleuthing that this was the Amazon warehouse and there are these unmarked dumpsters outside. And I was able to get police reports and information from the coroner showing that in fact the man had died in this dumpster.

And so the story was just working from there, trying to uncover the story of this man’s life. And in the end it was a very bittersweet story and the story that I wrote is the best place to read about his life but the person that I met through that story is that dead man, his girlfriend. And she was called Tygrr, and she really is a tiger. If you meet her, she has, she’s like a firecracker. She’s in her 40s, she’s full of energy. She has this bright red hair, flaming [INAUDIBLE] hair and she was incredibly upset about the loss of her boyfriend. She had photos of him in her tent when I met her she had planted a succulents and cactus garden near where her camp was. And she got a piece of driftwood and had written this is this man’s memorial garden. And she just was this wonderful, magnetic woman who had this very, very difficult life. She had left home when she was 12 or 13 after abuse, after dealing with abuse in her family. But I just wish that other people could meet her, or that she could be out there a little bit more because she, I don’t know. There’s just something where you meet someone that’s that magnetic and just full of joy and full of life in a place that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find it. Just a really rewarding thing just to meet that person so she was one of the people that I enjoyed meeting the most.

VALLAS: So what is, if you had to pick one thing after this year of reporting so far, what’s the most outrageous or horrifying or really eye-opening thing that you’ve learned or discovered through reporting on this series?

GEE: Well, I think the thing that’s sticking in my crawl right now is that I did a story at the beginning of the year on the San Francisco public library and I should mention, by the way that although I’m talking about a lot of our Bay Area stories, that’s just because that’s where I am. We’ve been covering the entire west, everywhere from Honolulu to Anchorage to L.A. to Denver but a lot of my reporting was here in the Bay Area. And so I did a story about what one of the city public libraries in the Castro neighborhood, an historic, wonderful gay neighborhood and has a lovely public library there. And a lot of homeless people tend to come outside that library and there’s been a lot of issues that have emerged because understandably the homeless people, it wasn’t a great situation for the people who were housed down there. It was also a bit difficult sometimes because of various complaints they had. And so the library, the site where this was all happening was in a bit of a tricky position. And so I went to a neighborhood meeting there about a year and a half ago and I reported on the meeting that the library, the public institution was considering building what an architect there, he was presenting at that meeting and described as quote, unquote “defensive landscaping”. They basically wanted to put in this hard-scaping that would make it hard for people to camp under the [INAUDIBLE] of the library. It was this rocky underlain ground, there would take out the soil, they would put in these posts and what not and so I reported on that I got a lot of angry pushback from the library afterwards who told me they didn’t see it as quote, unquote defensive landscaping or defensive architecture and they wanted to publish this rebuttal, et cetera, et cetera.

We didn’t deem that valid but I just went to the library which was actually my local library a couple weeks ago and I saw these changes that the library had been so insistent to me wasn’t quote, “defensive architecture” and it’s just the most, I felt so angry because they have these jagged shards of rocks sticking up from the grounds now and it’s just these sharply undulating pebble stones around these pinnacles of rock so it’s a very now uninviting place to hang out. And I just felt frustrated that a public organization has done this. And that they were also so adamant that it wasn’t what, in fact, it was.

VALLAS: So one of the things I loved about this series has been how much you have shown a light on people who are not the usual or the stereotypical face of homelessness, especially in media coverage. Was that something that you set out to do at the beginning of this series and you sought to find stories that help people understand that isn’t not just the homeless man sitting on the grate who makes up the population who are homeless or precariously housed?

GEE: 100%, I’m so glad that you mentioned that because that was completely what I was trying to do with the series. In the sense that I’m just so struck by, I don’t know if you can say the precipice but maybe just the I don’t know, how close so many people are to very, very [INAUDIBLE] and perhaps some of us. I’ve always been struck those studies put out by the Federal Reserve which show how many, what an astonishing percentage of Americans wouldn’t be able to afford say like a $500 emergency. It’s like 40% or 50%, if I’m not recalling it incorrectly. And it just strikes me that with a relatively weak safety net that homelessness is sure, there’s that stereotype of the homeless person, but many of us, many more of us are living in what I like to think of as the shadow of homelessness. So it was definitely my goal to really bring this subject and try I suppose make it seem more relevant to more people because it was just this thing that was affecting these half million people in any one night, that’s the government’s number for homelessness but it was actually affecting many millions more people.

And so for instance I did a story on adjuct professors. And adjust professors, they teach a very large percentage of college course, higher educational courses now, their numbers are growing and yet they are paid extremely poorly. And so many of them as I found were either on the edge of homelessness, some of them were even homeless. The lead example of that story was a woman who in a really desperate situation, she had to turn to sex work to fund her housing so she wouldn’t be evicted. We spoke to another woman in that story who was living in what she described as a shack on the Florida coast and these are all people who have, they all have Ph.D or higher degrees, they are all incredibly intelligent, smart, they thought that they were on a course that was going to lead them to stability but they what’s known as these precarious jobs, it’s called precarious employment, these jobs where the wages aren’t steady, there’s no, you’re not on a full time official contract, it’s just an independent contractor sometimes. And so that was really one of those stories where I just wanted to show that homelessness, that stereotype of homelessness is by no means all there is to homelessness in the U.S.

VALLAS: Another of the pieces that really jumped out to me as such a great example of how homelessness is everywhere around us, it’s even in the news outlets that are talking about it. You actually had a story looking at a homeless photographer who had sold multiple series to the BBC and yet was not making enough money to be able to live off the streets in supporting his work documenting homelessness.

GEE: Yeah, yeah, I’m still in touch with Ed actually. He, so we have this call out at the bottom of our stories, or we just ask people with experiences of homelessness, whether or not that’s a homeless or former homeless person or anyone just to write in and share their stories. And we got some, we’ve got some good stories that way and Ed is someone who wrote me and he had this really unusual email. I think he said something like I’m in the remote part of Australia right now that anyone can go to and I have dealt with homelessness all my life and I’m homeless right now. So what Ed’s story is, Ed is I think he’s in his 40s and as he said he’s a respected photographer published in major news outlets, had exhibitions but because of the nature of freelance photography, it’s another one of those jobs where it’s very, very precarious. And so he, in order to devote himself fully to freelance photography he’s not able to, he doesn’t earn enough essentially to live, have a home [INAUDIBLE]. But he doesn’t have a home so the way he makes it work is he travels around the world and he does these sort of long term photography projects in various places. He’s worked in everywhere from Canada to just all over the world really. And so he wrote to me from Australia where he had stationed himself for a period of months with an aboriginal community. He was trying to find the remotest parts of Australia and so I think that was [INAUDIBLE], west of Uluru I think and that’s his life. While he was there he was, he had a roof over his head, I think he’s done some sort of work, he was offering to do some volunteering somewhere and that was how he wasn’t sleeping outdoors at night but that’s essentially his life as a documentary photographer. He can’t afford anywhere to live and so he has to live outside.

VALLAS: So I want to talk a little bit about solutions because another feature of this series and sort of theme of this series that I’ve appreciated is the connection to public policy. All the time it feels that when media are covering homelessness and people who are experiencing homelessness, it gets described as a problem that’s intractable if only we could just figure out how to solve this problem. Your series really rebuts that myth and again and again one particular story that really goes to the heart of this actually draws the connection between the poverty level minimum wage in this country and the fact of people who are working and can often be homeless. You point out in some of your reporting and one story in particular that in only 12 counties in the United States can you live on the minimum wage in a way that you are actually housed and you can afford rent.

GEE: Yeah, I don’t think homelessness is something mysterious with this unknown solution. I think homelessness is, well I don’t want to sound too crass but it’s the product of public policy and there’s decisions that we make as a country or decisions the government makes what to spend on, what to prioritize. And so as you mentioned the minimum wage is one issue, one problem. Another story that we looked at we compared how much was spent on the mortgage interest deduction which as you know, most goes to the wealthiest, wealthier Americans. And I think the government tax break, [INAUDIBLE] something like 70 or 60 billion dollars on that a year. And we compared that to how much the government spends on Section 8 housing, the main form of rental assistance for low income Americans. And the government spends twice as much on the mortgage interest deduction for wealthier Americans than it does on Section 8 for the poorest Americans. In fact, 10 billion dollars of the MID goes to the top 1% of the country.

And so that’s just a reflection of priorities. That’s linked to the fact that only 1 in 4 Americans who need housing assistance actually receive it. And you can draw a link between that and spending priorities. And so in some sense, I don’t want to say that all homelessness is attributable to that, there are many other difficult factors related to it. There’s mental health issues, substance abuse issues, all those sorts of things that are a bit more [INAUDIBLE] but definitely the way we have apportion resources is a big part of it.

VALLAS: Another one of the types of solutions that your series lifts up is specific policies or practices that have started in kind of a local way and that have started to trickle out and become models. One of those that has received a lot of attention over the past couple of years in particular is the tiny house phenomenon.

GEE: Yeah, so states in the Pacific Northwest, it started in Washington, they’ve been leading on this as far as we can tell. And there are now these sanctioned communities of tiny homes. And they’re such a funny concept, aren’t they because when most people think of tiny homes, they think of these things that are boutique kind of very cheeky little things, this minimalist solution to a busy modern life or something. but of course they’re also very, very seriously considered a solution for homelessness. In particular in situations I think either when you have this emergency situation where you have large numbers of people who are living on the streets or technically they’re known as unsheltered or also for instance if you have a [INAUDIBLE] affordable housing and also maybe a very complex and sometimes hard to get quick planning commission and a long timeline, et. cetera. So one option is to do this emergency shelter housing of having people live in these tiny home villages. And I think our takeaway from that story was, well for starters there were definitely better and worse tiny home villages. Some of the ones that our reporter went to were little more than wooden sheds. And I don’t think had electricity or running water or anything like that. Could be very, very cold in winter, you might have kids living in them.

At the other end of the scale you might these very, very posh ones where they have various amenities. So there was a distinction in that [INAUDIBLE]. We also spoke to experts who were really worried about if we really got into these tiny homes villages and we really invested in them what that might mean in the long term. We spoke to the former head of the federal homelessness agencies and her great fear was that these might lead to eventually shanty towns. They might become so entrenched in the cities that are having such a hard time finding and building affordable housing that these tiny homes, while initially considered temporary measures they might be there forever. They might become the American version of [INAUDIBLE]. Nevertheless, they are continuing to be rolled out in San Jose and Silicon Valley. They have a massive plan to unroll this model in many neighborhoods and they’re encountering public opposition but that’s a way forward as they see it.

VALLAS: In the last minute or so that I have with you, the number or so conversations that I’ve had with people over the years who say you work on poverty, I would love to write a story about this but I just don’t know that my readers really care, this isn’t what people are clamoring to consume in a media environment that’s driven by clicks. I just don’t think I can persuade my editor that I can do a story on poverty. The number of times that I’ve had that conversation with reporters who want to cover these issues but who meet with obstacles along the way in the form often of editors and newsrooms that don’t believe that this is a set of issues that the public is interested in reading about. I can’t even begin to count. I’m curious to hear your message that you would have to folks out there who are looking to cover these issues, who are interested in surmounting those barriers. Are there people out there reading these stories and does this series bust that myth that no one is interesting in read about poverty in the news?

GEE: People care about this so much I can’t even tell you. The response to our series has been amazing. It’s just 100% to rebut that myth, it has been this continuing delight how engaged our readers are and how well these stories do and I think that’s because people see this around them. People aren’t blind to homelessness and I said, you can’t be in San Francisco and not see it and people want to understand it better. They want to know if there are ways they can help. They want to understand this phenomenon and I think people are also just inherently compassionate and so I think readers just respond to these stories in that way as well. And so it has not by any stretch of the imagination been a struggle to find the readership of these stories, in fact I think that’s actually the opposite.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Alastair Gee, he is the only homelessness editor at a major U.S. publication, at least that he’s aware of and that I’m aware of. You can find his series that his team has been working on for The Guardian called “Outside in America” at theguardian.com. Alastair, thank you so much for joining the show and our listeners can also find links to several of the articles we’ve just been talking about on our syllabus on Medium.

GEE: Thank you so much having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. As part of our ongoing series talking with elected officials and people running for office who live with mental illness and mental health disabilities I’m incredibly pleased to speak with week with Representative Garnet Coleman, he’s a state legislator representing parts of Houston in the Texas House of Representatives and he’s been living with mental illness since he was 17 years old. Representative Coleman, thanks so much for joining the show.

REPRESENTATIVE GARNET COLEMAN: Oh it’s my honor and thank you for asking me.

VALLAS: So as part of this series we’ve been having conversations very explicitly putting out there that it’s been almost gospel for as long as a lot of people can remember that people with mental illness are somehow categorically unfit to serve in elected office and even just ever having sought treatment during your life can actually be enough of a disqualifying factor that you can’t get people to take you seriously as a candidate when you’re starting to launch a campaign. I would love to hear you share your personal story of how you got to be where you are and how your mental illness has played a role throughout that process.

COLEMAN: Well, I’m diagnosed with bipolar disorder, not the most serious type of bipolar disorder. Mine manifested in depression, but if you have bipolar disorder you cycle along you have bouts of great energy and ability to go beyond the normal and then on the other side of it is you literally can’t get out of bed. People will think I mean sleeping, I mean no, hiding and that’s what depression does to you. So I come from a high performing family and I thought that the upside was just being part of that high performing family. I didn’t realize it was bipolar. So it’s important to me to have people know because making an excuse for not being able to do whatever it is my whole life since teenage years, it’s just been a burden. And that’s lifted in 1995 when newspaper stories and things were written here in Texas during my third term in the legislature.

VALLAS: So when people find out that you are elected official who lives with mental illness what are the responses that you usually get? What kind of questions do people raise with you when they find that out?

COLEMAN: Well people who have tried publically to do that have been slapped down. So a former colleague of mine said some very disparaging things and The Houston Chronicle wrote an editorial slapping him down. I think that most people believe, have said I appreciate your courage. And you are a role model for others. But I was, my social worker way back then in the ’90s said that was the best thing that I could do for people is to actually is to do that and make sure that they know and make sure that this illeness, these illnesses are manageable. So that’s the reality of it.

VALLAS: What kind of obstacles have you faced, particularly at the outset of your run for office because of your being a person who lives with mental illness?

COLEMAN: Well nobody knew then. And so when I was running in the special election in ’91 I didn’t say oh, I have bipolar disorder. It was after my father died in March of ’94 and at the time I was part of the Ann Richards campaign. And it sent me into a tailspin depression where I had to be hospitalized. And I went to [INAUDIBLE] clinic [INAUDIBLE] lucky when it was in Topeka, Kansas. You know at that time, everybody found out in 1995, well in 1994 but 1995 when the session started. So it wasn’t a running the first, it was revealed I guess you can call it in 1994.

VALLAS: So a lot of what’s been going on in this moment and the hook for this series of course as listeners know over the past couple of weeks has been the ongoing conversation about Donald Trump and his mental health, a lot of armchair diagnosis going on with people rushing to some kind of diagnostic labels that they feel explain his behaviors. What do you say to someone who says that people with mental illness can’t or shouldn’t or aren’t able to hold elected office and to follow through with the duties that that involves?

COLEMAN: Well first of all I do believe now that people should reveal or be very clear that they do have a mental illness. Yes, people can be in office with a mental illness but it depends on which one it is. And one of the things that we’ve heard about Trump is that he is a narcissist. That is an interesting diagnosis because if you can’t do anything about it with medication you can only do something like with Borderline Personality Disorder, these are not curable nor is this a pill for it. That’s a challenge.

VALLAS: But you yourself and you mention this before, you live with a mental illness, bipolar disorder that is manageable, it doesn’t mean that everyday is easy for you, part of what you were describing before got into some of those details. But are you somebody who you believe is able to hold elected office and is able to serve out those duties and what does that look like living with mental illness as you do?

COLEMAN: First of all mental illness doesn’t change your IQ, so let’s go there first. It doesn’t stop you from being smart. So there are things that I have to do with my staff. They have to be cognoscente of all of the illness, I tell everybody coming in what the deal is and how to work with me when I’m depressed. And not coming to office whether we’re in session or not. What things are stressors that trigger depression because that’s the most dangerous side of this and when I first came back from the hospital the speaker of the house who is one of my permitted persons to say hey, are you OK? So there are people who are part of my relapse prevention plan. So that’s a way that I’ve handled it since 1995. And it’s worked well through that whole time and what’s been even better is the fact that medications have become better and better and better than before.

VALLAS: What do you think the biggest myths are that persist in the 21st century about mental illness and mental health disabilities?

COLEMAN: Well, I think the biggest myth is that people can’t be productive and because of medications and good therapy and a better understanding of mental illness that it doesn’t effect your intelligence or your ability to do a job. And with good treatment and good medication the actual interference in work is minimal.

VALLAS: Are there any ways that you feel your mental illness actually makes you potentially a better candidate for office or better member of the state legislature than your peers who don’t have that experience or that lived situation?

COLEMAN: I know myself better than more people know themselves. I know exactly how to figure all that out in order not to create a trigger for depression. So I’ve studied me for a long time.

VALLAS: Oh, Representative Coleman —

COLEMAN: Mhm?

VALLAS: You’re breaking up just a little bit there.

COLEMAN: OK, sorry.

VALLAS: No, no, I know you’re on a cell are you walking around in a spot with less service?

COLEMAN: OK, am I better now?

VALLAS: Nope, still breaking up.

COLEMAN: I don’t know what the issue is.

VALLAS: Oh, that sounds better now.

COLEMAN: OK.

VALLAS: Do you mind if I ask you that question another time because you were saying things that we totally want to include.

COLEMAN: OK, I don’t mind at all.

VALLAS: Are there ways that you think that because you are a person who lives with mental illness you might actually be a better member of a state legislature or elected official than some of your peers? Are there ways that it gives you an advantage?

COLEMAN: Yes because I know myself better than most people do and I’ve spent a long time trying to understand what creates a problem for me. So I’ve studied and I’m very clear about that. Also, you know most people, I’m very plainspoken and I think that’s because of having bipolar disorder, I just don’t mince words and I think that’s important as well because when you’ve seen the abyss, I mean the rest of it is nothing compared to that.

VALLAS: And is there anything else that you want to say in this moment where this ongoing conversation about Trump and his mental health remains at the forefront of discussion in the media, a lot of social media, what is it that you want to say to people who are participating that conversation who are so laser focused on whether the president has some kind of mental health diagnosis?

COLEMAN: [INAUDIBLE]

VALLAS: Representative Coleman? Hello?

COLEMAN: [INAUDIBLE]

VALLAS: Are you still there Representative Coleman?

COLEMAN: Yes, I’m here.

VALLAS: Oh, now we can hear you, great. Do you want to start your answer one more time?

COLEMAN: Yes, I think it’s very hard to speculate what type of mental illness may have without clearly diagnosing them so I think that’s a challenge. So I would [INAUDIBLE] on behavior that just may be their behavior. But I do believe that he presents himself in a very different way than any president ever has because he’s decided to throw the playbook out which may make him look even more mentally ill because he just does it his way.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Representative Garnet Coleman, he’s a state legislator representing parts of Houston in the Texas House of Representatives and he’s been living with mental illness since he was 17. Representative Coleman, thank you so much for joining the show and for your courage in having this conversation at a time when it’s so incredibly fraught.

COLEMAN: My pleasure and anytime.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.