Book Review: Poverty, by America
A book that's been on my reading list for years is Evicted by Matthew Desmond. I made the mistake of purchasing it on audiobook a while back and found that I wanted to make too many notes, but I've yet to go back and get a print or ebook copy to read through. This feels ridiculous to admit as someone who has spent years working on homelessness (I feel similarly guilty for the unread copies of The Color of Law and Homelessness is a Housing Problem on my pile). But, before my series of jobs pulled me into the homelessness niche, I was interested in the broader view of poverty.
This is perhaps why I gave a giddy yelp to see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir's Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, cited in Chapter 1 of Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. Scarcity came out in 2013, but I learned of it while walking down West Oregon Street in Urbana, Illinois, walking either to/from the School of Social Work to/from the Foreign Language Building. I was listening to a podcast called Hidden Brains (link to episode). I remember at the time I was trying to figure out what to do for a semester-long project for my History of Social Work class. Years prior, I had discovered Erving Goffman's Facework theory while sitting on the floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago's undergraduate library. Scarcity spoke to the same part of my brain - the power of our awareness of ourselves and others and the choke of finances on those thoughts.
This is why I like one of the overall themes of Desmond's new book - scarcity as a fabrication. Desmond calls attention to the political habit of mourning how little our country has: "How can we afford it" (page 121, for just one example where Desmond's pen is particularly bloodthirsty). One of the most common questions I asked when thinking about new community programs was - who will pay for this? I know, on paper, that there is plenty of money out there in the budget if only it were allocated in ways that emphasized equity and poverty elimination. But I probably would have put myself more in Desmond's "wow, our military budget sure is huge" group. From pages 121 to around 128, Desmond details various ways that the IRS does not and is prevented from going after big tax cheats - facilitating their robbery of funds from the public. Funds that, Desmond argues, could essentially eliminate poverty by his draft calculations.
It's a diagnosis that is hard to argue with and frustrating when you have the names of folks who have been homeless for years floating in your brain.
A few years ago, I presented the homeless service system I helped lead to a large hospital's provider grand rounds. From what I recall, about 700 doctors and other medical staff were on the call. I discussed our coordinated entry system, the network of shelters and rapid rehousing providers, our (rather immature, pre-Emergency Housing Voucher) relationship with our local housing authority, and who was at the table in our meetings (which did not typically include physicians). After all this, a doctor asked the first question: "when a homeless person comes up to us on the street asking for money, should we give it to them? Would it be more helpful to give them toothbrushes and things like that instead?"
It's a question I heard my seventh-/eighth-grade science teacher answer in class one afternoon, though I can't remember why. I remember Mr. Mack said he always carried a few fives or tens when he went into the city in case he was asked for money. He would give it freely. A student asked how he felt about them buying drugs with the money. His answer is mine: what folks do with the money is none of my business - the giving is my business, nothing more. I wish I had been a little more gracious with the doctors because all those years later, my answer started sarcastically: "well, they often don't have sinks." I then shared that I give money when I have it.
When I have it. How often does one have cash these days? I often think about this, walking around D.C., where the unsheltered and street homeless population is so visible. Almost every day I go outside, I am asked if I have any cash. I think it hurts us to say no - I think it hurts us to see our people sleeping outside. It hurts us to see people bent over and dangling, the "dope fiend lean" often observed in those using heroin. Ignoring them hurts us. Why don't we do anything about it?
When I think about this wounding - the harm seeing others' injured by society causes us - I think about moral injury. I primarily associate moral injury with veterans, particularly combat veterans or others who have witnessed atrocities. Jonathan Shay writes memorably of moral injury in his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character:
"The moral strength of an army is impaired by every injustice, whether it personally touches an individual soldier or not."
Shay describes moral injury as occurring at the confluence of three factors: 1) betrayal of what is right, 2) by someone in a position of legitimate authority, 3) on a high-stakes issue (this summary taken from https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/1/5/healing-the-wounds-of-war-moral-luck-moral-uncertainty-and-moral-injury).
Desmond describes living and striving in America as participation in a series of "morally fraught systems" (page 155). I am not sure that the cost of our collective injury is well understood. Desmond's articulate reduction and analysis of how tax cheats rob our society, how landlords abuse systems to exploit poor renters, and how politicians abuse language to protect the status quo: all of these feel true to my experience, and they feel powerful. Desmond is frothing angry when he retorts how can we afford not to? Of course, there is the straight fiscal argument, the straight economic argument, and the straight social progression argument. Interweaving all of these is the straight moral argument: we hurt ourselves when we fail and refuse to fix these systems.
One wonders where our societal self-harm comes from and how it persists. Desmond talks a little about how the well-off are so thoroughly engaged in local zoning board meetings and how labor unions are so thoroughly undermined in our country today. I am also interested in our country's apparent hatred of the poor. I wish I could remember where this comes from, but I remember reading or hearing a discussion where someone pointed out that we don't really have an Old Poor Wise Man trope in the U.S., as is somewhat more common in other countries/cultures. We seem to think of the poor as stupid - "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
The Bible has a tale about a wise old poor man, in Ecclesiastes 9:14-18. It wasn't one I heard much of growing up going to a Southern Baptist church, though. Even there, 9:16 is "Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard" (KJV). Even in that story, where the poor man's wisdom saves the city, he's forgotten.
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Later in the book, Desmond starts talking about carrots and sticks - those two simplified levers of governance. I found the description of George Romney's drive to stop the subsidization of segregation shocking - but more evidence that folks attend their local planning meetings when they want to keep people out. But, regarding the carrots and sticks, an earlier passage in the book awakened some dormant memories from the middle days of COVID relief efforts. From pages 64 to 68, Desmond explores how landlords profit from the very poor. Variously:
"Landlords must charge more just to earn a decent rate of return. Must they? How do we know? … rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. … Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs. … poor people—particularly poor Black families—don't have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do." (page 65, emphasis Desmond's).
"To see if hard data supported this idea, I worked with Nathan Wilmers, now a professor at MIT, to gain access to the restricted version of the Rental Housing Finance Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. … These data allowed us to estimate landlord profits by deducing their expenses from their revenue. We found that landlords in poor neighborhoods earn roughly $300 a month per apartment unit after regular expenses are deducted from rent. Landlords in middle-class neighborhoods take home $225 a month per apartment unit, and landlords in rich neighborhoods take home $250 a month per unit after regular expenses" (page 66, emphasis mine; the RHFS: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/rhfs.html).
We often prefer incentivizing doing what is right rather than punishing what is wrong. Desmond puts this line of thought clearly on page 138:
"We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants' wages rise, or banks and payday loan outlets that issue exorbitant fines and fees" (page 138, emphasis mine).
This awoke a complaint I had with the COVID relief programs muted by its incredible utility at the time: landlord incentives. In my community, lease-up was often a significant barrier because we had few landlords (and even fewer landlords with quality housing) willing to rent to folks experiencing homelessness. Many landlords already charged unbecomingly high rent for the housing they were offering - and some COVID relief programs began offering landlord incentives to induce landlords to take a chance and rent to folks, even though their rent was already guaranteed by government assistance. This felt like such a waste of money to me. We're paying people to do the right thing? We're paying landlords hundreds - sometimes thousands - in incentive bonuses so we can find them tenants and then pay their rent, too?
For example, the Emergency Housing Voucher program included a service fee to public housing authorities (PHAs) that amounted to $3,500 for each voucher (though this amount was not actually tied to each voucher). The idea was that PHAs could collaborate with their local homeless Continuums of Care to establish a "menu of services" that could be paid for through these funds to get folks into housing. They could pay for various things, including housing search assistance, application fees, deposit assistance, and various other eligible activities. I was over the moon about this - money to pay application fees? Money to help folks find housing? Cash for "tenant readiness"? Money for household items (so many of my clients had empty apartments - do you know how demoralizing it is to get an apartment and then sleep on the floor?)? Renter's insurance??? (the EHV Notice: https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/PIH/documents/PIH2021-15.pdf).
Do you know what ended up being one of our most significant use cases? Landlord incentives. Sometimes as much as half of the overall service fee went straight to the landlord. Not for providing any bonus service but just for the honor of them signing a rental agreement stating the PHA would pay the tenant's rent.
It would be hard to imagine a situation in which landlord incentives aren't effective - why wouldn't they be? It's paying people to make money. It's more money aimed at poor people that poor people don't ever get to touch.
As an aside, some of my favorite historical trivia (echoed by undergrads everywhere, I'm sure) is that Adam Smith —essentially the founder of capitalism—loathed landlords. A selection of Smith's Greatest Hits:
"As soon as the land of any country has become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
"[The landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
If Smith dreaded landlords in 1776, what on Earth would he make of the gigantic, multi-State, multi-national landlords of our time? (Out of curiosity, I googled "largest private landlord" and found the National Multifamily Housing Council's list of 50 Largest Apartment Owners. #1 is MAA, owning just over 100,000 units across the country. They are publicly traded (NYSE:MAA).
I found some parts of the book stunning from a solutions point-of-view. Particularly around pages 143-147, where Desmond describes "Commoning" and the influential role that land banks can play in supporting affordable housing. I was particularly stricken on page 143: "Imagine if those families could choose between renting an apartment within reach on the private market, moving into public housing, owning their own home, or joining a housing cooperative collectively owned and managed by tenants themselves" (page 143, emphasis mine). What an idea! How much further could dollars for permanent supportive housing or rapid rehousing vouchers be stretched if the target was a body with a vested interest in keeping rents low, not maximizing profit?
As someone who has worked locally and heard the experiences of folks with far more experience in the housing sector, some of these ideas depressed me on a second thought. "These sound great on paper, but they'd never work," or "how many years would it take to implement," or "could they ever last?"
That's the danger of getting too deeply integrated into a system - you confuse historical barriers with rules of reality instead of attitudes to change and practices to repudiate. Desmond speaks directly to this at two points in the book.
"When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does. We risk imagining the future only as more of the same. We risk giving in to despair, perhaps the most exculpating of all emotions, and submitting to cynicism, perhaps the most conservative of all belief systems" (page 135).
Further, in the closing pages, Desmond describes a protest from One Fair Wage, an advocacy group gathering in front of the New York statehouse protesting for higher wages. Another descends upon the group - the red hats and white men and women of the Make America Great Again movement. They arrived not by design but by happenstance. Did the protestors clash? No. The MAGA folks learned that the OFW folks were protesting for higher wages, and the groups shook hands, and the MAGA folks joined alongside.
It is a little depressing that this can be described as a refutation of cynicism. I am from a deeply conservative part of southern Illinois. The town I grew up in is dying, perhaps nearly dead already. Main street is littered with empty buildings, liquor stores, and gaming venues. The folks living there hope that someday, maybe, they will be hired on permanently instead of being forced to work as a temp in a factory. The problems they face are not so different from those faced by the inner city's poor. And yet, we have been effectively called to disagree so vehemently over politics, faith, science, and everything else that we see what Desmond calls the taking and the robbing as a fait accompli. This tale, and so many of the dreams written in this book, should tell us it isn't. We can do better.