The New American Homeless

The rise of the “working homeless,” and why housing insecurity in the U.S. is far worse than official stats suggest — PLUS: What the fight over means testing is really about. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

“If the term ‘working homeless’ has not yet entered our national vocabulary, there is reason to expect that it soon will. Hidden within the world of homelessness has always been a subset of individuals, usually single parents, with jobs; what’s different now is the sheer extent of this phenomenon. For a widening swath of the nearly seven million American workers living below the poverty line, a combination of skyrocketing rents, stagnant wages, and a lack of tenant protections has proved all but insurmountable. Theirs, increasingly, is the face of homelessness in the United States: people whose paychecks are no longer enough to keep a roof over their heads.” So writes our first guest Brian Goldstone, a writer and anthropologist who’s been writing a series of investigative pieces in a range of news outlets, focused on the rise of the working homeless — and why housing insecurity in the U.S. is far worse than government statistics suggest.

And later in the show… the 2020 debate — and in particular, competing approaches to addressing the student debt crisis — has reignited a decades-old debate over the concept of “means-testing,” or limiting eligibility for a policy or program on the basis of an individual’s financial status. For a look at the history of means-testing & the ongoing intra-party Democratic debate around the issue, Rebecca talks with Richard “RJ” Eskow, host of The Zero Hour, a senior fellow at Social Security Works, and author of a recent essay in the American Prospect titled: “What the Fight Over Means Testing Is Really About.”

This week’s guests:

• Brian Goldstone, writer and anthropologist (@brian_goldstone)
• Richard “RJ” Eskow, senior fellow, Social Security Works (@rjeskow)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Check out some of Brian’s recent reporting: “The New American Homeless” and “3 Kids. 2 Paychecks. No Home”
• Read RJ’s essay for The American Prospect: “What the Fight Over Means Testing is Really About”
• Editor’s note: We taped this week’s episode before the news broke of Trump finalizing his rule to take SNAP away from ~700,000 struggling workers (just in time for Christmas…) — so stay tuned for lots more on that next week.

This week’s transcript:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off-Kilter, the 2020 debate, and in particular, competing approaches to addressing the student debt crisis has reignited a decades-old debate over the concept of means testing. I talk with Richard “RJ” Eskow, host of The Zero Hour and a senior fellow at Social Security Works, who authored a recent essay in The American Prospect titled What the Fight Over Means Testing Is Really About. But first, “If the term ‘working homeless’ has not yet entered our national vocabulary, there’s reason to expect that it soon will. Hidden within the world of homelessness has always been a subset of individuals, usually single parents, with jobs. What’s different now is the sheer extent of this phenomenon. For a widening swath of the nearly 7 million American workers living below the poverty line, a combination of skyrocketing rents, stagnant wages, and a lack of tenant protections has proved all but insurmountable. Theirs, increasingly, is the face of homelessness in the United States: people whose paychecks are no longer enough to keep a roof over their heads.” So writes Brian Goldstone, a writer and anthropologist who’s been writing a series of investigative pieces in a range of news outlets focused on the rise of the working homeless. I spoke with him by phone. Let’s take a listen.

Brian, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

BRIAN GOLDSTONE: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

VALLAS: So, I feel like, in just having spent a lot of time rereading several of your recent pieces in preparing to talk with you, it just it strikes me that when people think of homelessness, they generally don’t picture people who are working, let alone working full-time. But the sort of major takeaway from your series of reporting is that that’s a big part of what’s going on, and particularly in America’s richest, most rapidly-developing cities. Talk a little bit about how you got interested in kind of talking about homelessness and writing about homelessness from this particular, and largely invisible, angle.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. So, I think that sort of burrowed deep in the American story is this idea that work is an exit from poverty and homelessness. And what I began to find as I began to report on sort of the crisis of housing instability and homelessness was that for an increasing number of people, far from being an exit from homelessness, work was kind of just an accompaniment to it. And that the stagnant wages or low wages that people are receiving simply weren’t enough to keep themselves housed any longer. And at first, I thought maybe this was just a kind of bizarre anomaly, you know, as I began to meet one person, another person who was going through this. And I think I started to find that, no, this is actually a growing kind of mass of the total population of people experiencing homelessness in the US. And that was just a totally striking kind of discovery for me.

I’ll also say that as I began to get curious about this term “working homeless,” I started Googling around, and I kind of expected, as a relative newcomer to the field, I expected that that term would be kind of part and parcel of the literature and research on homelessness in the United States. And on the contrary, aside from a couple of exceptions, there really has been this assumption that people who are homeless don’t have jobs and that they’re suffering from addiction or mental health issues. And while that’s certainly the case for some people, particularly those who are most conspicuous and those who we’re most likely to kind of encounter in our everyday lives, there’s actually this enormous, invisible group of people who don’t fit that stereotype. And I just sort of began to follow that curiosity, and it led me to this series of articles.

VALLAS: And one of your most recent pieces, it was actually from the summer and published in The New Republic. It’s titled The New American Homeless. You really take a look at how housing insecurity and this phenomenon, this increasing phenomenon of working homelessness is really rampant, particularly in America’s richest, most rapidly-developing cities. I want to pull actually a quote out of that piece. You write that, “unlike earlier periods of widespread homelessness and displacement, such as during the recession of 2008, what we’re witnessing today is an emergency borne less of poverty than prosperity, occurring not despite, but precisely because of the economic boom.” Talk a little bit about what we’re seeing in these rapidly-developing cities.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. So, I think we’re accustomed to thinking about homelessness as a kind of symptom of acute poverty, and in particular, a poverty that kind of belongs to kind of the urban core, the inner city. And in a lot of the writing about homelessness, homelessness was kind of this phenomenon that is separate from wealth. And we may hear statements like, “It’s a shame that wealth kind of coexists alongside this kind of poverty.” But what I found is that the new homelessness, the new sort of rising population of homeless individuals and families is occurring because of the revitalization of these urban cores, these urban centers. And there’s this really close proximity, or intimacy even, between what it is that’s making many American cities, not just places like San Francisco and L.A., which have sort of gotten the most attention, for their homelessness crises, but a really large number of mid- and large-sized American cities where what it is that’s making them attractive is precisely what is making it impossible for low-income individuals and families to remain in those cities. And once they get kind of pushed to the periphery of these places and can no longer afford housing close to where they work, for many people, the next step is just, you know, losing a home altogether.

VALLAS: You look at Atlanta as sort of a case study of this phenomenon. And as you point out, places like San Francisco maybe have gotten outsized attention as being ground zero of this phenomenon. But Atlanta, a place that I actually lived for a long time, a lot of my years growing up there, and I also went to college in Atlanta. And so, it really, really hit home reading your discussion and your reporting of how this city that has been sort of going through what’s been widely celebrated as an urban renaissance is now actually topping the list on a lot of the kind of worst possible statistics that one could catalog when it comes to housing unaffordability and homelessness. Talk a little bit about what you found spending some time in Atlanta and looking at the rise of the working homeless in that city.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. So, you know, Atlanta is not a city that one would immediately associate with a homelessness epidemic. And in fact, the official narrative that has sort of been trumpeted in the headlines of the local newspapers and sort of expounded by politicians is that homelessness is on the decline in Atlanta. That the city kind of has a handle on this. A question that I began to ask is, what happens if we widen the lens from homelessness per se, those who are sort of counted as literally homeless, what happens if we widen that lends to acute housing insecurity? And what I found is that, while the official sort of number on homeless individuals in Atlanta and families is, I think it’s hovering around 3,000 right now. And we can talk about how problematic and contested even that number is. So, but that’s like the official number on homelessness in Atlanta, and that has supposedly declined over the last several years.

The number of households that are spending at least half of their income on rent, and so, according to experts, are sort of on the verge of becoming homeless or at immediate risk of becoming homeless is 127,000. And that’s kind of a disparity between numbers that is repeated in cities across the country: in Nashville, in Charlotte, in Austin, in San Jose. And so, you know, what I’m kind of suggesting is that if cities like Atlanta don’t begin to take this seriously, this problem of housing insecurity, they are likely going to confront a kind of tsunami of homelessness like cities like L.A. have encountered in recent years.

VALLAS: And you really connect those numbers. The data that you’re bringing up come from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which puts out an annual report called The Worst Case Housing Needs Report, something that sounds incredibly wonky. It’s hugely important to understand because what you’re describing is the share of low-income folks, and the overall number as well, who are really, really cost-burdened by their rent, right? These are people who don’t get help from the government when it comes to housing assistance. A lot of folks might think, oh, yeah, but isn’t that why we have public housing? Answer: no. Only about one in four eligible people actually receive housing assistance, as your pieces really kind of point out and connect the dots on. And these are people who are spending a huge amount of their income, more than half of their income, on rent. So therefore, they are the people who are just on the brink, as you note, of homelessness, yet are going basically uncounted when we think about our official statistics.

You spend some time with a particular family in Atlanta. The mother of the household is Cokethia Goodman. She’s a home health aide. Talk a little bit about that family and their story and sort of how it serves as an example of what’s going on, and rampantly so, in Atlanta.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. So, one of the reasons I ended up focusing on this family is because they are really unremarkable when it comes to these issues. Theirs is not this incredibly dramatic, scandalous kind of story. It’s very kind of banal in its way. So, Cokethia and her kids were renting a house for about a year in an up-and-coming neighborhood in Atlanta. And they were kind of ideal tenants: never missed a rent check, kept the house nice and clean. And the children’s elementary school was within walking distance. Cokethia was able to get to work very easily using public transportation. And as their lease came to an end, their landlord sent them a letter saying she had decided not to renew it. And again, there was no really scandalous reason for this. She simply wanted to sell the house to make money. She had bought the house right after the foreclosure crisis at a rock bottom price and had sat on it for several years. And now, as the neighborhood, which is part of this kind of revitalization in Atlanta was becoming a very expensive place to live, she’d decided to make a profit.

So, Cokethia had 30 days to find a new place. And even in that one year’s time that she was renting this house, the prices in the area had so skyrocketed that there was really nowhere else for the family in the vicinity to sort of move into. And they ended up finding a house in an area called Forest Park, which is kind of out near the airport. It’s outside of the city of Atlanta proper. And there’s no public transportation or at least no train system that runs from this house that they began to rent to Atlanta. So, Cokethia had to begin driving, which raised their living expenses. And then within about a week, or I’m sorry, about three weeks of moving into this new house, the house was condemned by the city when Cokethia’s son was doing the dishes and got this really bad electric shock. It was discovered by the fire marshal that the wiring in the house was faulty. There was a pool of standing water in the basement. And the Red Cross came in when the house was condemned and gave her Cokethia and her kids about a week’s worth of vouchers for a local motel. And when those vouchers ran out, the family had nowhere to go. And that sort of began their slide into homelessness. And that’s about the time that I met them.

VALLAS: Yeah, and you’re describing, obviously, the profile of a person who’s working in what I think most people would consider to be a pretty good job, right? She’s working as a home health aide. She’s making $9 an hour. And part of her backstory that you describe in the piece is that she had actually fled domestic violence to make sure that she was providing a safe and a stable home life for her kids. But that was really what put them in a situation where that one income just wasn’t going to bee enough. And so, here things were pretty stable until they spiral downward. And boom, the family is homeless.

You also — and I want to bring in another place here, because Atlanta is a big focus of that one piece of yours-b-ut you also have a recent story that actually ran just a few days ago with the help of the The Economic Hardship Project, a really important reporting project that makes possible some reporting like yours on poverty and adjacent issues. So, want to give a shout-out there where it’s due. But you wrote a recent piece, the title of which was 3 Kids. 2 Paychecks. No home, which looked at a particular county in California that is often known as “the valley that feeds the nation.” Talk a little bit about that as sort of another case study about the rise of the working homeless and sort of some of the similarities, but also some of the differences.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. So, with this story, I actually didn’t set out to write about the working homeless, per se. I wanted to learn more about how schools were kind of providing a lifeline for families experiencing homelessness. Because what I learned in the article based in Atlanta was that for families like the Goodmans, the family I wrote about in the Atlanta story, they’re really kind of abandoned by the system tasked with addressing homelessness. A lot of these families aren’t considered literally homeless because they’re living doubled up with relatives or with others. They’re living in hotels or in cars. And because they’re not in shelters or on the street, they’re kind of rendered invisible by the system, and they’re locked out of really crucial housing assistance. What I found in the Atlanta story was that the children’s elementary school was sort of the only institution that was providing even a modicum of support, not really the support they ultimately needed, which was housing, but gas cards, food assistance, things like that. And so, I wanted to learn more about the role of schools in providing support to homeless families.

And it just so happened that the family I ended up focusing on in this article for the California Sunday magazine was a family where two parents were fully employed. And I asked myself, you know, during that process, am I biased here? Am I just looking for families or homeless folks who are working? And I realized that it’s actually more of a task to find homeless families that aren’t employed, the ones that are. So, I don’t think that it was this kind of bias of mine. But in any case, it ended up being an illuminating process for me because I learned both sort of about the regional particularities of homelessness and poverty and what it is that causes families like the one I wrote about in California to fall into homelessness. But also, again, the really, really fascinating, and I think overlooked, role of schools and school districts in providing a lifeline.

VALLAS: And talk a little bit about that family that you spent time with. I mean, you encountered them having the experience of all living in a van in a parking lot and being far from alone in that being their makeshift housing situation despite having two paychecks.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. I mean, for me, this was just a very…it was just a heartbreaking reporting process for me. Being with the family as it’s getting dark out, as the mother, father, their two boys and a little girl are getting ready for bed, one of their boys, Josephat, has a developmental disability. And so, the sort of really confined, tight space of that van is especially hard on him. And having to say goodnight to them and and meet them the next day was just, on a personal level, really, really heartbreaking. But yeah, I mean, again, this is just one of tens of thousands of families who are experiencing this on a daily basis. And the parents, Brenda and Candido, were working at a frozen burrito factory, a kind of organic vegan company in Northern California. And even though they were making, I believe, about $15–15.50 an hour, which sounds really good, the housing wage according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the housing wage to afford just a modest, median-priced two-bedroom apartment in Salinas, California, where the story is based is $29.62 an hour. So, even though that $15.50 may sound really good compared to the rest of the country or compared to other jobs, it was only half of what is needed to afford an apartment.

So, for a while, they were doing fine, but they were living with Candido’s mother in the housing authority housing. And one of their neighbors began to sort of take pictures of them entering the apartment each day and threatened to report them, because technically, the mother wasn’t supposed to be having other family members live with her. And just like with Cokethia, the woman in Atlanta, that one setback of having to move out of the mother’s apartment and the family having just recently purchased a used van to be able to more easily get to work every day, they just didn’t have the financial means to afford a first month’s rent and the security deposit to get into a new place. And because there’s only one homeless shelter that families can stay in, in Monterrey County, which because of an altercation that their son, Josephat, who has this disability, got into their first night, they were asked to leave the shelter. And then there was just nowhere else for them to go. And so, again, just a very ordinary kind of fall into homelessness that became, as time went on, a kind of chronic and intractable condition for them.

VALLAS: I’m going to pause you right there so we can take a quick break. Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter in just a moment after this short break. [hip hop music break]

You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. I’ve been speaking with Brian Goldstone. He’s a writer and anthropologist in North Carolina who’s been writing a series of investigative pieces focused on the rise of the working homeless. And Brian, we were just talking about your most recent piece in Salinas County, known as the valley that feeds the nation. And you were talking about a family that you spent time with there, living in a van in a parking lot despite having two paychecks. And you were starting to bring in some of the kind of broader context and some of the statistics that people may know, may not know, that really helps to connect the shortage of affordable housing that you’re describing and documenting in cities or places like Salinas County, like Atlanta, which we were talking about before to the other parallel and very connected problem driving this rise of working homelessness, which is stagnant and declining wages, particularly at the low end of the income spectrum.

So, to pull out a few statistics that help provide some national context here from your reporting, you highlight that the hourly earnings of high-wage workers rose 41 percent between 1979 and 2013. Those of middle wage workers grew by 6 percent during that same period of time. But when you look at low-wage workers, their wages actually fell during that period in real terms by 5 percent. When you look at the top 1 percent, by contrast, you point out, we’re talking about a 138 percent annual rate of wage growth among those people already at the top. And so, when you start to combine the trends that we’ve seen on wages with these unaffordable and skyrocketing rent trajectories in cities across the country like these places that you’ve been showcasing, but so many more that fall into this bucket, you start to get this incredible mismatch that the National Low Income Housing Coalition has sort of leveraged to do analysis that helps us understand what they call the housing wage: how much you need to earn to be able to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent in a given city. And so, they make the point a year after year when they put out this big report that rightly gets a lot of attention called their Out of Reach Report that nowhere in this country, nowhere in the United States can someone making minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment. A really incredibly stark thing to think about.

But you highlight the housing wages in the places that you’ve been looking at. And so, the housing wage in Atlanta, for example, is $21.27 cents an hour, right? That’s what you would have to earn to be able to afford that two-bedroom unit. So, that’s why somebody like Cokethia is out of luck, even though she’s got a decent job that’s just never going to pay enough, right? And likewise, the figures are even starker in Salinas, where the housing wage is something close to $30 an hour, which is why we’ve got this two-parent family with two paychecks not able to find a place that they can afford to live.

And one of the things that I just appreciate so much about your reporting is you make the point that it hasn’t always been this way. The scale and the nature of the homelessness that we’re now seeing on the rise in the way that you’re reporting really puts a face on is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. Tell a little bit of the story about how mass homelessness like we’re seeing it now didn’t always exist in the US.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. I mean, I was really shocked to find that what I…. I’m 39 years old. For as long as I’ve been alive, homelessness has been something that I’ve just kind of, like many people in the US and especially with my generation, we’ve kind of just come to assume that this is something that has always been there and that will always be here. And so, I was really surprised to find that mass homelessness as we know it today really emerged in the 1980s. And part of the story about this emergence is de-institutionalization, you know, sort of the closing down of the country’s psychiatric institutions. And what was supposed to replace those institutions was this kind of model of community mental health. And when that never materialized, you had a lot of people on the streets who might otherwise have been hospitalized. That’s a story that, it has some validity to it, but it’s also really, really problematic.

And something I discovered was that when mass homelessness really began to emerge in this period, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, all of the federal funding for research on homelessness was given to the National Institute for Mental Health. The government was kind of invested in this narrative that the reason we were seeing all these people on the street was because of this kind of progressive push toward closing the mental institutions. And that was only a very selective part of the story. What was left out of that was also that the budget for housing in the US was slashed by billions and billions of dollars by that same administration and by subsequent administrations.

And Jonathan Kozol, a journalist and activist who wrote a book called Rachel and Her Children, which was published in 1986 I believe, he looked at that landscape where people going to work each morning were just seeing these encampments on the street and people asking for money. He looked at this landscape, these shelters in New York City and other cities packed to the brim with homeless families. And his conclusion was that the reason that we are seeing this homelessness is because of lack of housing. It’s not because of addiction. It’s not because of psychiatric disorders. It’s because of lack of housing. And he makes the really important point that, you know, not too long ago, there was a time when even people suffering from these maladies were housed.

And so, it’s just really important to remember that this is a crisis that has a very, very particular cause. And that cause, again, is lack of affordable housing for people, both who are working, an increasing number of people who are working, but also people who have disabilities. And that’s a way of kind of bringing all of these populations together. I think it’s wrong to sort of pick out just those who are working for our kind of moral consideration. It’s everyone. Everyone who is unhoused right now could potentially be housed if there was a political and economic will to make that happen.

VALLAS: And as you note and as you mentioned, and I really want to come back to this, because how we measure, how we track what our data are, hugely important in not just how we understand the problem, but also how we seek to tailor our policy solutions. A big part of what’s going on as well that contributes to the invisibility of sort of the scale of the problem has to do with, as you point out, the incredible narrowness of how the government tracks and measures and defines homelessness. And you write at length in your reporting about this as really kind of a fundamental failure of government, which has to do with this incredibly sort of literal definition of homelessness that’s in use by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and which is what defines the scope of what’s called its Point-in-Time Count, something we’ve talked about on this show before, around the time of when that actually happens each year and which is the government’s main tool that it uses to count how many people are homeless in this country. Talk a little bit about the narrowness of that process, of that definition, and some of the critiques that are being raised by housing advocates about how it’s actually making the problem worse.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. So, the moment that this really came to my awareness was when I was sitting with Cokethia, the woman who I wrote about in Atlanta. I was sitting with her during an assessment at kind of the hub for homeless services in Atlanta, a place called Gateway Center. And the guy doing her assessment to determine whether she would be eligible for housing assistance, after a series of questions — it’s called a vulnerability assessment — he asked her, “Have you ever been in jail? Have you ever suffered any sort of psychiatric disorders? Do you drink? Do you have any source of income?” And to all these questions, she replied, “No, no. I’ve never drank. I don’t even smoke. I have a full-time job,” all these things she was really proud of. Gradually, it dawned on her that these things were actually making it impossible for her to get assistance. And what the guy doing the assessment ultimately said to her, he said, “I’m sorry. You just don’t fit the criteria for even being homeless.” And this is because Cokethia was, at that time, living with her children in this really decrepit apartment filled with bed bugs. It was the middle of winter. There was no room at any of the local shelters. So, this was the only place she could live with her kids in order to avoid being on the street. And yet, because she was with relatives, because she was doubled up, she didn’t even count as homeless. And then all of these other characteristics, like her having a job and having no substance use issues or anything like that, just kind of wrote her out of the entire story about homelessness and assistance for those experiencing homelessness.

That was the moment it kind of dawned on me that, whoa, this is kind of crazy. And I gradually discovered that, you know, this criteria is applied across the nation and that people like Cokethia are not, again, they’re not just these bizarre anomalies. They’re not just exceptions to the rule. They are increasingly the rule when it comes to homelessness. And yet, they literally don’t count in the annual homeless census, which only considers those living in shelters or on the streets as, “literally homeless.” And that phrase, “literally homeless,” is experienced by many in sort of the family homelessness advocacy community as a really violent phrase, because it basically says what you’re going through, even though your children are just as vulnerable to long-term sort of adverse health outcomes, educational outcomes, as kids, for instance, who are living on the street or in shelters, even though what you’re going through is as harrowing as it is, you are not “literally homeless.” And therefore, you don’t count. You don’t count as homeless, and there’s nothing we can do for you.

So, that is really the reality across the country. And it’s a question not only of who gets assistance, but it’s also a question of how we shape the story about homelessness in the United States. Because the fact of the matter is, homelessness, when we take into consideration all these families like Cokethia, like the family I wrote about in Salinas, the crisis of homelessness across the country is exponentially larger and more severe than even sort of the breathless headlines would lead us to believe.

VALLAS: And so, using that literally homeless definition, and on the basis of the Point-in-Time Count data generated in January each year, you point out that last year, HUD reported a 23 percent decline in the number of families with children experiencing homelessness since 2007. And that was something that folks may remember seeing headlines in newspapers about. And wow, it paints this really rosy picture of what’s going on, and the problem is getting smaller. And then you see policymakers such as those in the Trump administration using those kinds of numbers to fuel proposals for cuts to already incredibly meager and inadequate assistance for folks who are housing insecure or actually homeless, like our public housing and subsidized housing programs that provide federal housing assistance to just a fraction of people who are eligible.

But I want to lift up, you actually, just to sort of underscore this point, you actually spoke with some advocates in Chicago, including one at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who really kind of put some numbers to the huge gap between the reality of the problem and the way that we’re measuring the problem. They actually began conducting their own survey of Chicago’s homeless population, using kind of a more realistic definition that included families who were doubled up, right, like some of the folks that you spoke with for your pieces about Atlanta and Salinas county. And they found there was 12 times the amount of homelessness in Chicago that was being measured by that Point-in-Time Count: 82,000+ homeless individuals versus just under 7,000 who were counted as literally homeless, right? So, just huge, huge gaps between what’s really going on and what we’re measuring.

So, in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, and I wish I had all day, because there’s a lot more that I would love to talk with you about. And that means I guess we’re going to have to have you back on the show as you continue to report. But I would be remiss if I did not let you speak a little bit about some of the solutions that the research, the evidence, the housing advocates out there and people who themselves have struggled with homelessness are fighting for and that we’re starting to see gain some real traction among federal as well as local policymakers.

GOLDSTONE: Mm. Yeah, I mean, the solutions really are not that radical, even though they, at the moment, may seem radical from sort of the current vantage point. So, yeah. I mean, it’s not just about increasing the number of “affordable housing” units in the US. Affordable housing is now kind of a buzz phrase that even those on the right have picked up on. And it’s kind of an empty phrase if it isn’t taking into account low-income housing in particular and really ensuring that it’s not just that people making $60, 70 thousand dollars a year have a place to live in San Francisco. It’s that people like Cokethia, who are making $9.15 an hour as a home health aide, have a place to live in a city like Atlanta. So, increasing the low-income housing stock, the number of units in the US is one of the most pressing, I think, needs that we as a nation are currently facing. And the way to do that is, in many places, it’s through overriding the sort of current zoning laws that prevent the construction of high-density housing.

One of the ironies of the housing crisis is that often, it’s the most sort of progressive places, places like Berkeley, San Francisco, Seattle, even a city like Atlanta, which has a Democratic leadership where resistance to low-income housing and affordable housing has been just as stark as other places, red state places. And as the writer Randy Shaw shows in his recent book, Generation Priced Out, a lot of that has to do with just homeowners wanting to protect their investments. They don’t want their home prices to decline. And so, they oppose any kind of affordable housing being built, but particularly low-income housing being built in their neighborhoods. So, that kind of what’s known as NIMBYism, not in my backyard-ism, is definitely a huge barrier to seeing this epidemic ameliorated.

And so there are other very practical proposals that housing advocates have put forward: community land trusts where housing is sort of seen not as this commodity that should appreciate value for its owner, but as something that belongs to the larger community. I think that’s a fantastic idea. And even in a city like Atlanta, there are groups trying to get that on the agenda. And then just where homelessness is concerned, family homelessness especially, beginning to widen the definition of who counts as homeless. There’s now an act, a piece of legislation in Congress that it’s called, I believe, the Family and Child Homelessness Act, which would expand the HUD definition to include people like Cokethia, to include people like Brenda and Candido and their kids in who counts as homeless and therefore who is eligible for assistance. And something like that would be totally, totally momentous in beginning to get both and accurate picture of the sort of scale of this crisis, and also, beginning to get immediate emergency support to these families. So, yeah, those are some very feasible solutions that are definitely within grasp.

And I think the last thing I’ll say is just beginning to chip away at the invisibility of these families, of these working people who can no longer afford a roof over their heads. These are people that we sit next to on the bus every day going to work. They’re the people who work at our kids’ daycares, who serve us dinner at restaurants. And I think beginning to have an open conversation about not just wages, but also the nature of work, the gig economy sort of creating this increasing precariousness for a growing number of laborers in the US, beginning to have that kind of conversation. And also, just beginning to open our eyes to the fact that homelessness is not just the people we see asking for money on the street corner and far from it. That’s actually a very, very tiny sliver of those experiencing homelessness in the US. So, really changing the paradigm around homelessness, I would say, is ultimately the only thing that’s going to help us really begin to tackle this.

VALLAS: And I want to give a shout to another policy that you highlight in your reporting, given that it’s starting to gain traction, including in the 2020 debate, which is preventing evictions so that people can stay in the homes that they’re already in. And that a big part of that is about ensuring the right to counsel in eviction cases where we see tenants dramatically underrepresented, whereas landlords pretty much always have a lawyer. And maybe that’s my bias as a former legal aid lawyer showing. But wanted to make sure folks were aware of that as well.

GOLDSTONE: Oh, yes.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Brian Goldstone. He’s a writer and anthropologist in North Carolina. In addition to the series of investigative pieces on the rise of the working homeless, he is also writing a book about homelessness and housing insecurity, which will be published not soon enough, by my opinion, but in the next couple of years by Crown. Brian, I really appreciate you taking the time. I’ve really appreciated your reporting. And I would love to keep in touch and have you back on the show as it continues to move forward.

GOLDSTONE: Thank you, Rebecca. This was wonderful. Thanks for having me.

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

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You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The 2020 debate, and in particular, competing approaches to addressing the student debt crisis, has reignited a decades-old debate over the concept of means testing, that notion of limiting eligibility for a policy or program on the basis of an individual’s financial status. For a look at the history of means testing and the ongoing intraparty Democratic debate around the issue, I’m joined by RJ Eskow, host of The Zero Hour and a senior fellow at Social Security Works. He’s also the author of a recent essay in The American Prospect titled What the Fight Over Means Testing Is Really About. RJ, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

RJ ESKOW: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Rebecca.

VALLAS: And it’s been too long since I’ve had you on the show.

ESKOW: Yeah! Absolutely.

VALLAS: I’m glad we agree. [laughs] So, let’s back up for a second before we get into what’s going on in this particular moment, in the context of 2020. And I’d love to have you explain what means testing is and how it’s currently in use in US social policy.

ESKOW: Yeah, it’s a great question and an interesting one, Rebecca, because at its simplest, means testing of government programs simply means a test of a person’s financial assets, especially to make sure that they qualify, you know, means as in finances, that ensures that programs that are targeted to specific populations based on financial need go to those populations. So obviously, you know, anti-poverty programs: you want to ensure that a person is genuinely experiencing poverty before giving them the benefits and so on. But that was the original meaning. It was a way of targeting government assistance to certain populations. But it’s taken on another meaning too over time. We saw battles, especially in the 1990s, where fiscally-conservative groups wanted to means test access to Social Security and Medicare and perhaps limit their benefits. And to a certain extent, that was done a little bit, especially in terms of premium payments for Medicare. But it started to take on an additional kind of political and almost cultural significance, I would argue, for two reasons.

One, because of the overuse of means testing in certain contexts to cut back on longstanding social programs like Social Security and Medicare. And secondly, because I think people started to feel that the means testing process was getting overly complicated and losing contact with the electorate, making it harder to explain what these programs are about if they have elaborate screens and tests and so on. And if people don’t understand them, you can’t build political support for them and so on. So that now, as we come to the close of the second decade of this century, there are actually a lot of people, especially on the left, who have come to view means testing, especially when it’s discussed among Democrats, as a kind of signifier of an approach that they see as overly complex and not designed to build a kind of universality that, for example, Social Security or Medicare or even clean drinking water might provide. So, kind of a long answer to your question, but that’s the gist of it.

VALLAS: And the way you put that in a piece you wrote earlier this year about means testing and sort of this intra-party debate that’s happening within the Democratic Party as we speak, you write, “What started as a tool to target need has spread into an ideology that runs the risk of puzzling the public and overcomplicating policy.” And you continue, “It’s evolved from a tool into a conceit. It has become a worldview that says policymakers can technocraticly sort every American citizen into a mathematical unit deserving of only the proper amount of benefit. To the left, this conceit represents the political, perceptual, and policy failures of the Democratic establishment.” Talk a little bit about what you describe as the son of means testing, sort of where it’s gone to and where we’re finding this ideology now crop up.

ESKOW: Well, I’ll give you an example. When I started to become aware of it was in the debates leading up to the Affordable Care Act. And I do a lot of work in health economics. I would have meetings where — and we still see it in certain proposals — people would say, it became a kind of accepted wisdom, in fact, in policy and health economic circles, well, people should contribute 10 percent of household income to premiums, and we can adjust above that, give them help. And that’s just, that was it. That was when everybody sort of in the process agreed. And I remember thinking at the time, wait a minute. I’ve tried to raise a family on aggregate income of $60,000 a year. It was a while ago. But if you said to me, OK, you have to spend $6,000 of that money on premiums and then you’ll have a deductible of $1,500 and maximum out of pocket of $3,000 and so on, it would’ve been lethal, if catastrophic.

But I think that we have developed a culture that thinks these kinds of, a) these kinds of levels of assessment are okay and b) that it’s okay to set up programs with elaborate qualifying processes to them that say, well, if a family of four makes above $100,000, then it will kick in at a 10 percent level until they make $125,000, and then it will be X percent. And it becomes, you know, they make us an offer we can’t understand for the voters. And that leads to a group of people that is, sometimes in my view, hypnotized by its own cleverness and the sophistication of these ideas and proposals. But one, you can’t engineer that precisely. So, when you get that complicated, you’re probably going to miss the target you’re shooting for, in my view. And number two, it all seems very, very sophisticated and like a great accomplishment if you’re within that culture. But to everybody else, it’s huh? What did they just say? I didn’t follow that. So, I think it’s both. I think that insular culture —

And I think it did become an ideology, because I think when someone comes along with a proposal that says, let’s provide X to everyone, which in many ways was the norm in previous eras of American history: Social Security was for everyone. Medicare was for everyone over 65. Primary and secondary education, although that’s not primarily federally funded, for everyone. I think now, we’ve created an ideology that says, oh, we can’t make it for everyone. Because in effect, we believe in targeting, and targeting requires testing and elaborate methodology. Which, by the way, happens to be what we do for a living. So, I think that’s the trap we fall into. And I think it’s come to a head in some of the debates around recent proposals, for example, coming out of the Senate.

VALLAS: Well, and you note some of the kinds of arguments for it which maybe are obvious. There’s this kind of tautology about the benefits of targeting and things being well-targeted. People don’t even really describe anymore why something needs to be well-targeted. But that seems to be a positive adjective that gets thrown around and certainly in the poverty circles research and policy that I move in. But in addition to the complexity and the inability for the public to really be able to understand what the hell we’re even proposing when this stuff gets so complicated, you actually, you tell in this essay a pretty detailed story of how, with some pretty significant recent examples, including under President Obama, of how it can also contribute to just bad social policy. And you lift up HAMP at the height of the recession, which was an effort to help people stay in their in their homes as perhaps Exhibit A?

ESKOW: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the fascinating things to me about that entire discussion was that the debate was deeply constrained. And I tell the story or maybe I don’t tell this story there. But I had a personal face-to-face discussion with a senior Obama administration official about this, where the question was raised: why don’t we help underwater homeowners? We made enormous amounts of money available to the bankers who caused this crisis. Why don’t we help the people who were victimized by it? And the answer was given to me flat out: that would be rescuing the irresponsible. And we heard a lot about moral hazard. You can’t help underwater homeowners because you create a moral hazard risk for the future, without any discussion of that for a bank executives and the moral hazard there. So, the end result of that was Congress passed a law designed to benefit many millions of people. It wound up being targeted so finely that it helped less than one million. Remember that 40 million people at one point in history lived in homes that were underwater. So, you had a very targeted application of a program meant to help a wide swath of people with implications for the entire economy. Because when your home’s underwater, you’re not spending and so on. So, I think we sometimes, in our zeal to make sure we only target deserving recipients, we actually wind up cutting out a lot of people who do deserve the help. But we’re more concerned about eliminating the quote-unquote “undeserving” than we are in making sure everybody gets the help they need.

VALLAS: And you also note, and this is a frequent refrain among critics of means testing and particularly in the recent context of Medicaid, where you think about that program compared to, say, pushes for universal health care, but that it’s resentment. It’s sort of class war that can result wherein some people are getting help and other people who are very much in need of help are not because of how targeting can get developed and a line having to be drawn to decide, “who is in need and who isn’t.” So, I want to sort of set up the straw man here with you raising up all of these critiques and ask, how do you respond and how do other critics of means testing respond to the argument that we are hearing a ton of on the 2020 trail as we speak, that while we shouldn’t be helping rich people — millionaires and billionaires, they don’t need to have their student loan debt canceled, for example, or they don’t need Social Security — how do you and others respond?

ESKOW: Well, there’s a very simple response to that, which is if you are concerned that rich people are getting a free ride from social programs, then raise their taxes. That is not only the time-tested way to address wealth inequality and perhaps increase the government’s financial security, but we have mechanisms in place to do that. So, before we set up elaborate administrative procedures for determining if someone’s eligible for, let’s say, a student debt cancelation or tuition-free college, by the way, elaborate procedures that can and will be game, before we do all of that — same thing with means testing, Social Security, or Medicare — why don’t we address that concern about inequality and the wealthy getting a free ride by raising their taxes? It’s what we’ve done with primary and secondary education. It’s what we’ve done in the past with Social Security. And it’s simpler. It’s cleaner. It’s fairer. So, why not do that?

VALLAS: So, in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, back to the education and student debt context, this is a big part of what you’ve actually been working on in recent years. And you personally, alongside others in that progressive left, have been fighting for canceling all student loan debt along the lines of a proposal that we’ve seen from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ilhan Omar in the House. And we’ve seen varying approaches towards that same policy debated within the Senate and the House also now being debated on the campaign trail that are much more restrictive, that are sort of limited, that phase out at certain levels of income for the reasons similar to the straw man that I just raised up. Why is the Sanders-Omar approach the right approach? Why should we be canceling all student loan debt?

ESKOW: Well, student loan cancelation is a perfect microcosm of what we’re talking about. We should be canceling all of it because going forward, we should have tuition-free college education for everyone. So, we should balance the books for those that got debt because we haven’t done it yet, basically, number one. Number two, if it’s made universal, it will have a much larger stimulus effect economically, which will create millions of jobs for working people, working-class people, including people who never went to college. So, it’s a perfect example in that in trying to exclude someone we think might be undeserving, we’re actually hurting millions of people who have nothing to do with the college situation at all: bartenders and waiters and truck drivers and so on. So, I always say you’ve got to really, really hate somebody you imagine doesn’t deserve , some orthodontist in Long Island or something, you must really hate that orthodontist if you want to keep a million working people from having jobs, supporting economic growth. That’s why it’s a perfect example of why universality is often a better solution than elaborate means testing.

VALLAS: And people can find your essay What the Fight Over Means Testing Is Really About on our nerdy syllabus page. Because of course, they can. It’s in The American Prospect and ran this summer. And RJ, I want to close this conversation with some words from writer Meagan Day, who wrote a piece not that long ago in Jacobin called Why We Need Free College for Everyone, Even Rich People. And I feel like she sums up pretty well the argument that you’ve been making and that we’ve been discussing. She writes, “The political center’s purported concern about subsidizing the rich is sleight of hand. Means testing isn’t about advocating for the poor against the rich. It’s a time-honored method of placating both at once, ultimately at the expense of the former. The only way to fight for the interests of the working-class majority against those of the wealthy minority is to build universal programs that can withstand attacks for decades to come.” And we’ll have that piece on our nerdy syllabus page as well. RJ, thank you for your work on this and for taking the time to come on the show.

ESKOW: Well, thanks for having me.

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 by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪