[inaudible conversations] >> coming up, matthew desmond on evicted. look at housing and poverty. and then conners and phil harvey on the cost of labor. and then "naked money" and a look at how cities in the u.s. and europe have revitalized their economies after loosing manufacturing jobs. next, matthew desmond on his book evicted that explores

poverty in america and the role that evictions play in those on the spiral of the downward edge. ... and it drawn comparisons to behind the beautiful forever is another powerful work in immersion reporting about party.

"the new york times" has called this an extensively researched vividly realized and above all all -- book adding that after "evicted" it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing. desmond is the winner of a 2015 macarthur genius grant. he is also the author of several other books including on the fire line in which he chronicles the experiences of a fire crew in northern arizona or he is currently the john l. loeb associate professor of social sciences at harvard and he's the codirector of the justice for poverty. please help me in welcoming matthew desmond. [applause] >> you get the nice chair. that's how works. if such an honored to be here in this bookstore which is so special to the city and special

to people who love books. it's really an honor to be here. thank you everyone for coming out. it's so good to see some people that i love an audience and friends. i really appreciate you guys taking time out of your super busy schedule to hear me out on this book. there are two chairs right here erie there are two chairs. they are empty. they are for you i believe. let's do it. let's just do it. where are you making a difference. we are already solving problems. so this book is based on in-depth fieldwork that i started doing in milwaukee wisconsin in 2008 and when i was living into very poor neighborhoods in that city. i was spending time with people getting evicted from their homes and their landlords doing the

evicting today started by moving into very poor trailer park on the far south side of the city. i ran to the trailer there lived there for about five months and then i lived in a rooming house in the inner city traditionally in the african-american poor neighborhoods of milwaukee. lived there for nine or 10 months and from the two neighborhoods i embedded myself in the line of folks facing extremely hard situation. i went to that sugar with people and shelters and abandoned houses. i went to funerals with them a a meetings counseling sessions trying to immerse myself as deeply as i could into their everyday lives. i knew if i was really going to understand this connection between housing and poverty i also had to spend time at landlords doing the evicting. i watched them by property, sell property come and deliver groceries to tenants, a bit tenants and collect rent. now when this is happening i was coming up against questions like

how often does eviction happen? ordered the long-term consequences of this problem so i looked for a study that would help me answer those questions and found basically nothing. no real good data that would allow me to get a handle on that so i decided to get that data myself. we ended up serving over 1000 renters in the city of milwaukee. i analyze hundreds of thousands of eviction records millions of 911 calls and put that information in concert with what i was seeing on the ground to kind of figure out what's going on at the very bottom today and i think all those methods and formed my perspective in kept the others on this. this book involves a family swept up in the process of addiction. some of them are white, some of them are black, some of them have children, some of them don't. my neighbor at the trailer park was a grandmother who had to decide between paying her rent and paying the gas bill so she could take a hot shower.

we then meet omar who is this gregarian role model in the neighborhood. he is a disabled single bed and tries to work off the rent with his landlord. we meet a mom of three kids who never had a criminal record, had a working job and her hours were cut and unless desperate to keep her family housed and participated in a botched armed robbery to hopefully get the money to pay the landlord. i can't tell you about all the stories today but i'm going to tell you about one. i'm going to tell you our lean's story. it'd been a difficult year for sense -- joey packed a tight one and threw it and this man jumped out and he and his cousin ran inside and locked the door and a man came in and broke the door down. thankfully he left before anything else happened but when

arlene's landlord found out about sheet of thick and thin. she took her two sons to the salvation army homeless shelter. you can till your kids i'm staying at the lodge tonight like at the hotel and from there she started looking for another house. she found one on 19 straight. there is no water. it was quiet and her whole house was my favorite place. we know from a story in the survey we did the families that get evicted relocate to substandard housing which has a real bad effect on kids help. the city eventually found our lean's favorite place unfit for human habitation and hardheaded men removed her and her poison aboard that the windows and the doors and she again was on the hunt or another place to live.

she told joey we take whatever we can get. that is what the neighborhood housing selection looks like taking whatever you can get. what arlene could get was a drop apartment complex on mackenson avenue. she soon learned it was a haven for drug dealers because she was terrified for boys especially for tory who had this beautiful smile and would talk to anyone. hungry to prove himself just like you did with that snowball. so why she moved was important for understanding why she ended up in such a tough neighborhood and tested that with typical day then found evicted people move from dangerous neighborhoods to even more dangerous ones. arlene moved out as fast as she could but she found a two-bedroom duplex on 13th street. there was a hole in the window. the door had to be locked with an ugly wooden plank and they carpet was still being granted to the store.

she stuck off in the window of hung ivy curtains. it was $550 which would take 80% of arlene's welfare check. just 80% of the beginning every month, gone. arlene is not alone in spending the majority but she has on housing. we have reached a point in this country where most low-income renters are paying most of what they have on housing costs in one form renting families are spending 70% of their income to pay rent and to keep the lights on. under these conditions eviction is not always the result of personal irresponsibility that inevitability. in the 2000 housing costs soared while incomes of the bottom or stagnant and many of us who

don't live in trailer parks in the inner city don't think the typical low-income family benefits from public housing or some other kind of housing but the opposite is true. only one in four households are qualified for any kind of housing in this country receive it. one in four. that arrangement would be unthinkable with other soulful soulful -- social services. magically turned away three out of four families applied for food stamps but i'm sorry you were going to have to go hungry but that's how they treat housing in this country and the city or nation's capital the waiting list for public housing is not been counted in years it's counted in decades. fewer single-parent and you apply for public housing today you might be a grandparent by the timer application comes up. most poor renting families are getting nothing from the government and living unassisted in the private market. so on 13th street's arlene

found paint and brushes and rollers in the basement and she painted the walls. she put on a fresh coat that non-long after she moved and her sister died. the sisters not in a biological sense but a spiritual sense. they were close friends and arlene decided to can she be due the family. she would have felt ashamed of herself that she didn't pitch in. the next month she missed in she missed in plymouth with her welfare caseworker because the letter announcing the appointment is mailed to 19 straight. her caseworker type something into the computer and a 628-dollar a month welfare check was cut a were two months behind and arlene got the pink papers, the eviction. milwaukee is a city of 105,000 renter households and in that city landlords evict 16,000 people every year. that's about 40 people a day if

it did in the milwaukee. these numbers up on the screen, they are only former court-ordered evictions. these are fictions to go through the court but there are other ways cheaper and quicker ways for landlord to displace a family. the landlord will pay you $200 yet does let you use every of your art by sunday. we worked really hard on the survey to capture all those things, to capture those informal addictions that they'll go to the court, the form of evictions that do. landlord for closures and building condemnations, what happened to arlene and when you add up all of those every two years wanted ed renters in the city of milwaukee is evicted. it's an incredibly high number and the number is similar in kansas city and cleveland and chicago and other cities that i looked at. according to the most recent data from the american housing survey renters and over 2.8

million households in the united states thought they would be evicted. infection affects the young and the old, the second able-bodied and this country's eviction epidemic belongs to -- you will see well after row of moms and kids and low and, african-american moms like arlene are evicted this at starting -- startlingly higher rates. among the lucky one in five black women report being evicted some time in their lives, one in five. that's a startling number and the play but i think about it is if we have this incarceration because incarceration has become this typical critical problem and the lives of african-american men. if fiction is reshaping the lives of low-income

african-american women. but the problem is widespread as well. in fact white folks and immigrant communities and if something is going on all over the country. one in five of all renters regardless of their income report paying 50% of their income on housing costs. in eviction court the court commissioner gave arlene two extra days to stay in her home for each of her two dependent kids. those days came and they went and arlene had to be out on an early day in january. milwaukee is called in this day was cold. the weatherman had been working and they said it was going to be the coldest day in a decade. they said temperatures would bottom out at 40 below with the windshield -- when chilled windchill but if arlene waited longer the landlord would call the sheriff who would arrive but the sidearm and pile all of her things on the sidewalk

so she took her boy said she left to a homeless shelter and once again look for housing and she called on her applied for 20 apartments and then 40 and then 60 and then 83 guy counted. she had been accepted to none and even in the inner city most were out of reach. the landlord's who she couldn't afford wouldn't accept her either. a lot of them had to do with her eviction record. in milwaukee the eviction record is published on line for anyone to see and rejects anyone with the recent conviction and that's why -- can -- finally number 90, the 90th landlord that arlene

approach in a one-bedroom bedroom apartment for five and 25. a house is a house so two months after her eviction court hearing she moved into her new place and they brought their things up. she liked it. all the cupboards had handled some of the lights had fixtures. it was nice. she gathered her things things up and unpacked them a once everything was inside she sat down on the floor and she found a garbage bag that had towels and clothing in it and she leaned against it. arlene got her stuff out of storage and hung pictures on the wall. she liked being made so she had to sign put up over this think that said if you don't clean up after yourself we are going to

have problems. soon jory started acting out of school but it's hard to be 14 is hard to be 14 and experience long stretches of homelessness. between seven and eighth grade jury had been to five different schools would. one day a teacher snapped at him and he kicked her in the shins and ran home. instead of calling the principal she called the police and when they followed jory home and the landlord found out about that he told arlene she had to go. she told me after that, i've got a curse on me. sometimes i find my body trembling or shaking but i'm tired but i can't sleep. i'm fixing to have a nervous breakdown. my body is trying to shut down. recently published a study that found that mothers who are evicted experience higher rates

of depression two years after the event and we know that between 2005 and 2010 rent in the country were going up-and-up suicides contributed to eviction foreclosure doubled. i wish my life were different. i wish when i am an old lady i can sit back and look at my kids and they would be grown and they would become something. we would all sit together and be laughing and we would be remembering stuff like that and laughing at it. the home is the center of life. it's our refuge from work. it's our protection from the menace of the streets.

we stay at home and we can be ourselves. everywhere else where someone else. at home we take off our masks. in languages spoken all over the world the word for home encompasses not just shelter but warmth, a safety, family, the woman, but if ficon which used to be where in this country which used to draw crowds is coursing being american cities and it's not just a condition of poverty, it's a cause of it. we cannot fix poverty in this country unless we fix housing. so what shall we do about it? i think a light think a way to answer that question requires us to address another which is do we believe that housing is a fundamental right? do we believe that part of what it means to be an american is to have access to safe and decent housing?

we have affirmed the right to basic education. provision in old age because we have agreed as a society that those things are fundamental to human -- and it's hard to argue that housing isn't fundamental to human forcing without stable shelter everything else falls apart and i think the way we should deliver on this obligation is there a universal voucher program. take a program at already have that's serving the lucky minority low-income families and we can expand it so it meets the needs of all families living below the poverty line. the idea is simple, if you have a pouch or you can take that boucher and instead of paying 80% of your income to rent, 70% of your income to rent you pay 30% with the voucher covering the rest. you can would like as long as housing isn't too expensive or too shoddy. it would change the face of poverty in this country.

addictions would plummet or they would become rare again. homelessness would drop. when families finally receive housing vouchers after years and years on a waiting list they do one thing with the consistent freedom of income. they go to the grocery store. they buy more food. their children become stronger and healthier but a lot of kids today with names like jory and jafar is will not get t because they ran to ee. that's wrong. the national affordable housing program could change that. the anti-poverty effort a community improvement plan at public opposition of all rolled into one. i think this is one of many potential policy recommendations that can be from at this problem. what works in washington d.c. might not work in milwaukee or dallas.

one city has to build and another has to tear down but whatever our way out of this mess one thing is clear this whole denial of basic needs, this extreme degree of inequality, this isn't us. by no american value is this just a pipe or we can find no ethical reason no holy scripture to be summoned to defend what we have allowed our nation to become. thanks guys for coming. [applause] >> we go or we go to questions there is a black car and a handicapped spot that has its lights on. >> is this turned on?

this is more a statement. in 2014 there were $180 billion of tax expenditures for deductions for people like most of the people in this room who have mortgages, who deduct the interest in who did.there really state taxes and when they sell their house they get a break in capital gains. and that imported into vouchers. >> so, you are right. we are to have a universal housing program in this country. it's just not for the poor. and i think for many middle-class americans the mortgage income reduction is a road to stability. it's something they have bargained for. it's part of the deal that they went and that we need to at least be honest about this. we need to be honest that the majority of our tax dollars at least with respect to housing are going to homes with six-figure and comes. stop repeating the canard that

this rich land can afford to do more. poverty persists in this country it's not for lack of resources, or lack of income. >> as they made at milwaukee and i am curious of your connection to the city and why you chose this for your study? i haven't read the book yet and i apologize. >> i love milwaukee. there's something about that city and a lot of cities that make me feel at home. i think the story of urban america can be written on the margins. we spend a lot of time focusing on art biggest excesses new york san francisco or cities we consider our biggest failures like detroit. if you want to write a story about an american experience and have a shot at representing what's going on in cleveland kansas city and nablus and cincinnati milwaukee gives you a good shot at that. this book is based in milwaukee

but it tells a very american story. >> two questions. one being and homelessness men are often depicted as ellen tensioned exploitative and unsympathetic. can you humanize them a little bit for is? you mentioned you spent a lot of time talking to landlords as well. our day rational human beings making rational decisions in the system or can we fairly characterize them as enemies ask the second question is what do you think ethnography brings to your policy -- policy recommendations? >> so the book works really hard to complicate the relationship between landlords and tenants. i think we let ourselves off the hook and we have ourselves to have a lazier conversation.

if we just say oh these tenets are irresponsible or the landlords are just greedy to reality is it's a lot more complicated than that. arlene's landlord shareen it when arlene moved and she knows the kids and have any good and to the grocery store and bought food for a lien. she has allowed them to slip on rent. how many of us would lose 500 or $1000 be okay with that? landlords due take kids directly. she had a fire bomb through through her office. she has had people turn the water on full blast and then move out. she also makes him single month more than arlene makes in a year it's a fact. when i lived in a trailer park i thought it was very important to understand how much my landlord was making so i analyzed and i

looked at vacancies, missing payments, missed mortgage payments, his electricity bill, his water bill. i could go on and on and i sell you all of this we believe me when i say the landlord of the worst in a park in the poorest city in the country which is made up of 131 trailers took over $470,000 in every year. that's over 30 times what his tenants working full-time minimum-wage and 50 times what his tenants on disability receive. are we okay with that? is that something we should tolerate? i think that's something we need to have a public conversation about. your second question was about how to tell people stories are showing the human cost of social problems. how does that connect to reform

and i think it's deeply connected to reform. getting out of the way of the majority and allowing people like arlene to kind of come through a document as rigorously as i can what she is going through, the terrible decision she is forced to me, the effect it has on her soul as she put it and her parenting and how this is wanting her capacity and diluting her talents in reducing this person who is born for better things, i think that's deeply connected to policy reform and housing specifically you see it in generation after generation going back to -- or who change the laws in new york city by showing the degradation of the tournaments. i think this is a homogenous spirit and tradition of that kind of work. >> i'm wondering if you could talk about why this is disproportionately affecting black women. >> it's a big question i think one thing we are seeing here is

the ongoing prevalence of racial discrimination in the housing market and i can quote study after study after study but let me tell you one story. so i was with two african-american women crystalline benneta and they were both homeless and looking for housing. they lived on the south side of milwaukee which is a traditional latino neighborhood. they were to place and i was in the car watching the net of's kids. from what the woman tells me afterwards the landlord came in and there was in the tub. venetta has three young kids and anyone who has kids knows you have to have the tub so she set the ebony places for the tub? the landlord said yes and the rent is the same and that he stopped himself remembering something and reached for his font and had a fake conversation and said wouldn't you know at it just went.

so i wrote down as number. i'm a white guy. i called him the next day. i told them that i made the same as venetta and crystal made and told them i had three kids are at a city of any places places with the tub and he drove me to it. this happens a lot and this is why arlene is looking at 20, 40, 60 and 80 places. that's a real thing. i think another thing we have to recognize is the role of kids. when i started this work i thought kids would shield people from eviction but it actually exposes people to eviction. we see this in arlene story about the snowball and also about the incident with dejoria at school. we surveyed 20050 eviction courts in milwaukee because he wanted to know and what we found

is you can control for how much people of the more household income in also things that are relevant to that question what really matters is do you look a kids are not? if you look -- let the kids your odds of receiving an eviction notice triple. what you're seeing is a landlords and i would rather work with you than you. i think the question you ask, there are two pieces to it and obviously a lot more. >> i just wanted to pick up on her question i'm curious about your influences and if there are any ethnographic studies that influenced you. i read your book and made me think about there are no statistical analysis but she followed me for many years. >> it was the last book that made me cry and the tradition of people that are writing about

poverty from the ground level headed -- left a deep mark on me. i see myself very much operating within that tradition. she had a long-established tradition of ethnography related to poverty and since we are in washington d.c. i have got to plug elliott du bois amazing ethnography tallies corner which is about african-american men in the city which is the slim incredibly brilliant ethnography. that is one of my favorites i would have to say. >> thank you. >> hi. your presentation and a powerpoint display brings out the brutality of evictions and the cost and when you walk by a

site where there has been an eviction what you see is not just somebody's longings but really their life and her photograph of the belongings raised with me a varied tactical question but nonetheless a question because what is on the street is not just furniture. his baby pictures. it's my mentos from family members etc. that will never be recovered because by the time the person gets back they are all destroyed. there was a time here in the city where the city would take up the longings and store them. is that done in milwaukee? >> so one thing that i think i didn't realize going into it is when you get evicted off than

you not just your home but your possessions. in milwaukee you are given two options. you get a shares in eviction and a trucker curb. kirk mean two things are from a sidewalk and truck means your things are taken by an addiction mover and it's stored and bonded storage which means that you have to pay $375 to get it back if you get a backup first month then it goes up every month after that. it's a storage facility so it's a business. i think a lot of -- i have spent a lot of time with moving companies in milwaukee. the biggest moving company called eagle movers. 70% of the lives they do get thrown in the dump. if fiction is erasing possessions too, yes. >> i'm from milwaukee also and really appreciate this book. i know a lot of the neighbors you are talking about and i work

in in education but i wanted to know if you could talk a little bit about what the impact was on the kids and the schooling for are the kids who were evicted across different, both in the trailer homes. >> yeah. this leaves a deep scar on the next generation and when arlene was living in a homeless shelter outside of town 17 consecutive days jory was absent from school. it was insane as a high order need. find a home and once we do we would get you guys in school and that's how arlene did it. when she found a home she got the kids in school and the best in school but there was this crisis that would emerge again and again and again. we are not going to be able allow jory lavar is to return potential if we keep betting the brown school here there and

everywhere and if they are going to school hungry because her mom does have enough food to last through the end of the month because she's paying for housing , it's obvious to me that this is fundamental to improving inner cities. >> my name is betsy. thank you so much, an and incredibly powerful presentation predators wanted to ask two questions would you chose to speak dress to stories and pictures and i'm curious if anyone has approached a reviewer perched others about using those pictures and other venues? i'm not sure through exhibitions or a tour and the other question you also say what are we going to do about it? you say we have got the vouchers and we can do this. is there anyone taking up that mantle? it is a political season and these issues are -- so those are two fundamental questions. >> to your first question one

thing i did, my wife and i started this organization called just shelter pretty good to just shelter.org, just shelter.org. >> this was not a setup. >> we did not talk earlier. i always look for ways to work again. this organization does two things. first it highlights and emphasizes the role that non-profits are playing all over the country. a lot of the work going on with affordable housing is block by block neighborhood by neighborhood so if you're in d.c. or bethesda or nebraska or you can click on this map and see the organizations working on this issue and plug in and get involved but what we are also doing here we are allowing people to tell their own eviction stories. most of the times when my work is covered in the press i get letters from folks who say this is my story and this is what i went through. i've got more buzz.

if any of you in this room have experienced eviction or foreclosure and want to share your story you can go to the web site and share it. that's one thing we are doing with stories. so policymakers when confronted with the fact that this country has more and worse poverty than any other rich democracy usually respond by saying jobs, jobs. paul ryan wants to incentivize work hillary clinton wants to raise wages. that's half the solution. we often need to recognize that poverty is not just a product of voting but also product of the extracted markets when incomes rise the housing market -- and i think we need to address this from multiple angles but i think without solving and addressing

this housing crisis of any other property solution is going to fall flat. >> thank you. >> i found it to be amazing what you laid out. it was just i don't know it just daggers me that what i wanted to ask, you obviously went to a certain level with the people you interviewed and looked at. did you think of moving on to the next level of politicians like members of the council, members of the state legislature and further up because they see them as being able to empathize and affect policy only if this information is really pushed

into their faces, excuse me for using that expression. i really think there are no easy answers to this. i'm sure you are well aware of that but what forceful methods can be used to make the population are where? i do want to carry on but in these elections now and all the nonsense that is being talked about i don't hear the word poverty mentioned very much and i don't believe between now and the time the leader is elected we are going to hear it. sia so, one thing i'm doing is writing a book and having conversations like this. i think that's at least a grain of sand. i think we are having a

conversation in the nation today about inequality. that conversation is going on on both sides of that. we see poverty plans from people of various political persuasions and i'm kind of encouraged that we have reached the point as a nation that we are very unsettled by the level of inequality today and a lot of us want to do something about it. housing has a lot of reason to be optimistic. just think of several generations ago we had slums in our largest cities. we had poor folks without heat in running water. he took on the slums and we won that battle but i'm not naïve about how much further we need to go and housing problems. i lived in a trailer park for the most the time and i didn't have hot water. told my landlord i'm a writer and i'm going to write about you and your trailer park so imagine what my neighbors had to deal with. there's no denying they made huge leaps forward in housing quality but now we are just

taking this other huge problem which is the fact that it's getting harder and harder to afford a roof over your head. one of the things you ask arthur smaller interventions and absolutely yes. one very important thing we can do i think is to extend legal help to families facing eviction unlike colonel courts the antigens have no right to a lawyer in civil court so in many housing courts around the country 90% of the tenants don't have lawyers and 90% of landlords do so if you think of some of my car leaned who doesn't have a high school education and you don't have a lawyer, would you go? on up i would go to a lot of folks don't go. milwaukee 70% of cases that are summoned to eviction court and one shows up. we can change that from a local level. we can provide families legal

assistance and make an investment upstream to stem the tide and a the cost of the reaper for addictions downstream. that's one powerful thing we should do on a local level. >> what i am meant to ask is when you approach, sorry, when your approach higher level politicians such as let's say members of the legislature were they responsive? they have other more important issues to deal with. >> i think, we didn't know the depth and extent of this problem. i didn't know know going in to peer know going into the i don't think we knew how many people have been at the two. we didn't know that it was directly causing poverty so i think there is still a lot we have to learn and i think this message about the neutrality of

housing is working its way to folks in the legislature. >> we will have time for everyone lined up already at the mic. >> i too m. for milwaukee. >> this is so cool. >> in my youth i was a tenant organizer on the east side but since then i live here and i go back every two years in october before the election. i do campus including the neighborhood to speak of, southside northside far west side. i am struck and stunned by the evisceration in that city of a working-class city where were 20 years ago you could get a welding job that paid eight bucks an hour or 10 bucks an

hour, 15 bucks an hour. today that's all over. i just wanted to ask you the palooka consequences of the housing crisis. i see when i go door-to-door to try to find voters there've been tremendous efforts to develop and create supporting these committees particularly around the obama campaign's big every year i go back and they are gone. they have moved to no brain knows where they are. the houses are gone, they are boarded up. this is how you end up with scott walker. this is how they stay with the progressive tradition has become a battleground in part because of that evisceration. it is wondered if he could speak to that, the political consequences of what i really see as the destruction not just of housing stock that the destruction of the community and the people who inhabit it. >> some neighborhoods in

milwaukee have extremely high eviction rate, you know and some neighborhoods, one out of four households in the neighborhood are gone every year. how do we build a community with that when people are just buzzing in and out and how do we allow people to invest in the community? i think you're absolutely right to articulate that with equal consequences of housing instability. also a fact that these neighborhoods have been neglected for decades and there is a lot of suffering there. there is a concentrated amount and i think the folks see so critically their own neighbors spain and you have have to because you are working together to try to make ends meet. it's hard to see their potential too, the political potential. you're right about what milwaukee and other rust belt cities have experienced.

milwaukee lost more jobs during the great depression but i also want to say that i saw that in the lives of the families that this book is about but i also saw a lot of brilliance and generosity and courage in the face of adversity. one time when i was with crystal and jafari --. they worried eating a mcdonald's. the boy walked in, he was eight or nine and looked really dirty and look like someone had hit him in the face. he didn't go up to order coming when around to the tables looking for scraps. and venetta, crystal turned to venetta and she said what have you got? the two homeless women pulled their money and went up to that

boy and bought him lunch and crystal gave him his big old hug and sent him on his his way. when he left she turned to venetta and said i wish i had a home i would take him in. and you see that in the stories of people in the city that we love too. he reminds me how gracefully people like crystal and venetta venetta --. >> that's terrific and thank you for bringing this forward. i just want to make one final comment. those people now are going to be required to have a picture i.d. in order to vote this november. this is going to be impossible and we are going to see the consequences because of these kinds of requirements. how can we possibly have authorized governmental i.d. when federal you don't know where you are going to be living next month?

>> i am not for milwaukee. [laughter] i would like to point you back to stenography and uses stenographer because i think it's really interesting is a qualitative policy pressure to kind of change the way people are viewing people and committees. there is a question earlier about humanizing the tenant owners and the landlords but i want to ask about the humanizing of those that are impoverished are homeless. as a professor worried about poverty there has been a history of the urban ethnographers white males who continually gone to the inner-city and while being very helpful has somewhat perpetuated and reproduced the norms by -- so i was wondering personally how he was an apt motto for wrestled with lifting up the voices of the poor and

while continuing to humanize those and not exaggerate that for politicians? >> so and that's not good for -- and ethnographers has a duty to write about life in its full complexity as much as it is her his ability to do so so that means writing about human suffering but also human courage. it means writing about mistakes people make but also moments of dutiful generosity. i think i took these stories extremely seriously. the responsibility of writing someone's story is for me one of the deepest and most profound honors of my life. and so i think putting in this book stories like -- and times

like this one time i was up to kingston family and their housing was tough. the landlord was neglecting their place. it was february and they asked me to go down in the basement to see if their heat was off. i had to see if i could do something with the furnace and i go down to the basement and i don't know what i'm doing. i was like i don't know. kick the furnace or something and then i came back up and they had bought me a birthday cake. they want to celebrate my birthday. that's in the book and i think writing about people's lives in that way helps us both to confront the trauma and sadness of poverty but also validate and recognize the beauty and complexities of folks as well.

it's also important to meet tuesday in close contact with books in the book. they read the book long before you guys had. i went over every part of the book with them. i read it to some people that some people read it to me. we had long conversations about it. i think that process was extremely important to me too not only for getting the facts are but also getting the essence right. >> good evening. i'm a washingtonian and i want first of all to thank you and congratulate you and encourage you, this element of what you have presented and that i see here is you have highlighted the fiction as a very very powerful symbol that touches on and embraces the whole issue of affordable housing. i have been working on this for a long time in washington and

our churches and built 500 units of a portable housing in downtown washington where we are located. i would like to encourage you to try to identify who want the hill for several to bring youth eviction, that's a powerful story in the way it's so clear but to have a major theory on housing, portable housing and it's so dramatic. everybody lives in washington knows it's just incredible. so that's the main thing i wanted to say. i would just love to see this and that's up at harvard. >> i'm not here, i'm not here. >> i want to encourage you, that's all i'm saying and i will on my par with what contact i have put the idea out there to

her right can find to listen. i see this as such a powerful tool to tell a story that needs to be high-profile story and i will do everything i can as i move forward to rally support. there needs to be legislation that addresses this and money and sources that these individuals have indicated that i encourage you and i bless you and i'm praying for you. >> i accept that. thank you so much. [applause] >> i guess i have a simpler question. you understand the tenets in these places but i guess i wondered and may wondered and maybe explain this before i got here but who becomes the landlord? how do these people take up, like do they decide in high school man i want to run an

apartment or own a trailer park? how does that happen? what are their stories? where do they come from? >> yeah, many landlords are second, third and fourth generation landlords. in their blood so to speak. landlord and has been a way for immigrant committees to get a foothold in the middle-class america. so in milwaukee for example on the south side there are these things called polish flats. they came over jack came over jack at their came over jack at their house built basement rented out and that is a way they have made extra money. that tradition has been passed down so a lot of landlords have with them. shareen i saw herself as an entrepreneur and landlord share that quality, that idea that they can start out with nothing and with their own gumption and ingenuity come back with a

living. i think folks like sherena and my landlord at the trailer park have -- which is like a stomach for it. it can be difficult work. >> i showed up a little late so for get me up as a starting coverage. first i have covered housing issues as a reporter and one of the groups that does housing work is the washington -- for the homeless. if anybody wants -- data was supplied ones that bite and landlord-tenant courts and they fight the government on homeless issues and they fight the homeless shelter where people slept in hallways and an abandoned hospital, slept in trash cans and were physically assaulted and harassed. that's where we live. we live in a very rich place with our typical ice makers on 14th street and we put our

home and families in hospitals. that's where we live and we should all remember that. the second thing there are two big issues that affect d.c. in the last decade. you you might party dresses but the impact of section 8 and the impact of -- six and what that did to housing and housing stability. it does seem like we have placed terrible public housing and section 8 really was an unstable way of getting people help pretty much of the dodgers i want to get your take on that. >> we could have a 5015 minute discussion on the ins and outs of housing policy. i think that for tonight what i want to come back to his scale. scale, okay? in many cities there is kind of amazing thing going on with housing and building affordable housing units, incentivizing

developers, green public housing great, awesome, not meeting the needs. we just need something to scale and i think there is no study that shows you can offer housing at equal quality for lower cost. vouchers are the more efficiently to do that pretty can make that program more cost-efficient and their things in the book that i have suggested for that but this is the best way to help this unlucky majority. we are bleeding out so if it's section 8, if it's light pack or public housing whatever it is we should have something when my friends say that i housing vouchers like thank you jesus. i can see my kids. i can stay my home. i can live in my community. we know from statistics that

folks that have housing vouchers live -- than books that are in public housing. another variable to buy their food. we know the research is pretty mixed mixed. there is not a lot of evidence and the status quo is a much bigger incentive to donate can hold on to your house long enough to hold on to your job so i think for me that's the bottom line. the issue is the waiting lists. >> we have time for two more. .. smond

>> thank you have sharing that with the room. it is beautiful that you could share that. thank you. [applaus [applause]

>> so i think there are a lot of pokes doing work on poverty today and a lot i work with on issues of mass incarceration and decriminalization and labor market discrimination and a lot of journalist are writing about this today. i think there are a lot of folks circling and trying to understand the best way to make a big impact on this deep issue. the first question is about trauma and the pain and shame that often comes with that and i think that is something i have experienced. i didn't experience that with a political mindset but was just embarrassed and shameful. when i showed the manuscript to

arlene she said i see courage but mistakes. arlene misses an appointment with a case working and she is evicted. so i think part of the narrative is to refrain those things and show we make mistakes and the consequences are totally out of whack. and yeah, and to show that, you know, this is something that is affecting not tens or hundreds of thousands but millions of folks and give us a new way of understanding this that is not within the concept of shame or embarrassment but the concept of this national crisis. we need a lot better numbers on where evictions are happening the most, are they going up and down and what cities are doing a good job to spend eviction time.

i am working hard on that. evisions in the cities i liked at are going up i can tell you -- evictions. and when you read accounts from the '30s and '40s eviction looks weird and scandalous. remember the scene where everybody is moved out and invisible man is like what is going on? that is how it used to be. it used to draw crowds. there was a 1930 editorial i read about is it said because of the cold only so many showed up to protest. that is how it used to be. there are hundreds of data screening collections that sell information to landlords.

there are sheriffs and people have grown used to the effects lining the curb. i think we need you. >> i don't know what you d.c. housing and affordable housing experience has been but if it hasn't been extensive i invite you to a rally at 10 o'clock tomorrow. the coalition for non-profit housing will be there. thousands of people will be there. i invite you all. this is our opportunity to move the steady forward. the mayor committed, the counsel committed so if you are around boundary methodist church, ten o'clock.

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