In This Episode
Government shutdown chaos deepens as hosts debate the fate of the ‘Blue Wave’, the DOJ targets judges with immigrant defense backgrounds, LAPD ignores City budget hiring more officers than it can afford, and Outkast finally gets their flowers at the 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. DeRay interviews journalist Brian Goldstone about his new book There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.
News
The LAPD is hiring more officers than it can pay for
Fired judges more likely to have a past in immigrant defense
Outkast Honored at 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction
Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: This is DeRay, and welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda. Back to talk about all the news that you didn’t hear with regard to race, justice, and equity from the past week. And then I sat down with journalist Brian Goldstone to talk about his incredible book, There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at Pod Save the People, here we go.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: We are back and, you know, there is cause for celebration in these past weekishness. Shout out to the blue wave. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @PharoahRapture on Instagram.
Sharhonda Bossier: And I’m Sharhonda Bossier at @BossierSha on Instagram, at @BossierS on Spill, and you can find me on LinkedIn.
DeRay Mckesson: Well, we don’t often get to celebrate in the political space because, you know, it’s been doomsday over here, but the blue wave was beautiful. The left won things that we hadn’t won in a long time, all across the country. We have the governor of Virginia, we got Zohran Mamdani in New York City. We got city council races. We have a whole host of mayors across the country in addition to Zohran. But I just wanted to acknowledge the blue wave and we don’t often get a chance to really, really celebrate, but I come out of this now that almost all the returns have happened. Just like, you know what? I see why Trump is gonna be freaked out when the midterms come because the blue wave felt like a good moment for us.
Sharhonda Bossier: [laughing] I do think that people feel like we have finally like put something up on the scoreboard. Um. I can sense people feeling like, okay, they’re not alone, there are other people across the country who see what’s happening and don’t support it. Um. I’m hopeful that also this is a signal that other people can and should run to the left of the quote unquote “center” of the Democratic Party now, that it doesn’t mean that you can’t win elected office. Uh and so I’m hopeful also that the party establishment begins to think about seeding and supporting real progressives who want to run for office, particularly at the local level where I think they have the best chance.
Myles E. Johnson: So when I think about things like reparations, UBI, um healthcare for all, or like these big things I think need to happen in order for there to be an American society in 50 years, I’m thinking that Zohran and what he did may not necessarily be the blueprint of what we can do on a fed, like for a presidential election. That’s what I’m saying.
DeRay Mckesson: That makes sense.
Myles E. Johnson: So maybe I’m having a different story about leadership in my head that’s going on.
DeRay Mckesson: It’s important that we don’t exceptionalize Zohran, that like Zohran was special and really powerful and is a phenomenal storyteller, probably one of the best we got, AOC included, and all of those people coalesced around him. But the wins that we got on on election day were just so broad. You know, it’s like the first two elected people in a statewide office in Georgia since 2006. You know? Like it is there were all these people that ran from Moms for Liberty. Every one of them lost and like 31 people ran and they had flipped school boards and and it flipped over. So I think that we sort of do a disservice to the work.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, but we’ve seen this story before. We’ve seen that story before, we’ve seen the story. And this is what I say–
DeRay Mckesson: When?
Myles E. Johnson: –on the podcast almost every other week is that the pattern of America is once something happens, COVID, 9/11, everybody knows how to vote right. Everybody gets out, everybody’s activated. So now that Trump is showing his ass, everybody gets to the polls. So my thing in my head is in 10 years, 20 years when people forget it, just like people magically forgot Trump the first time that even though it just happened in 2016 and now we’re here again and now that we’re seeing what’s going on with him, now everybody’s activated. Everybody’s doing something. Now that let the Republicans be as heinous as they can be, everybody’s activated. So in my in my head, I’m thinking about what happens when this blue wave chills and what will be the result of that. That’s that’s where my mind’s at. When it comes to measuring how important this feels beyond this election for me.
Sharhonda Bossier: I had a slightly different question based on what you were saying, Myles. And one of them was like, even if Zohran is, we think exceptional, do we think he’s replicable at the local level? Like, do we think there are other–
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah.
Sharhonda Bossier: Like municipal leaders? You know, I understand your point about like, you know, what’s, what’s possible when it comes to the top of the ticket. But I’m like, what about in other state and local elections? Do we think what we saw happen in in in New York is possible? And then the other thing that you’re you know, most recent point made me think of is, you know, people I think tend to blame whoever is in power. And will this blue wave, if there is one, right, sustain for the next two years is a question I have also, right? Which is um, yeah, like, will will that happen? The next time people have a chance to go to the polls, will they continue to vote against the moms for liberty? Will they continue to vote against the Trump agenda? Or will the dust have settled around the particularly acute pain points people are feeling in this moment and they won’t feel that same motivation to get out and and vote? Um. Yeah, some questions I have, but I’m hopeful. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I’m hopeful, what is hope? But yeah, it could happen. [laughing]
Sharhonda Bossier: Hope is not magic, hope is work, to quote our favorite co-host.
Myles E. Johnson: Okay. Who said that?
Sharhonda Bossier: DeRay.
Myles E. Johnson: Oh okay.
DeRay Mckesson: I did. Uh.
Myles E. Johnson: Okay.
DeRay Mckesson: We won we won mayor ships in a host of places, flipped the Aurora City Council. I just think it is happening on a local level. I think that in sensationalizing Zohran, I think that the media has done a disservice to the other incredible stuff that happened at the very at the same time. And my I hear both of your pushes around the can it last? But I think the can it last question is the question of politics and like nothing lasts, right? This is like the thing, like nothing lasts forever. Like it is the ebb and flow and how do people like us, people not elected to office, continue to change the way the base thinks, so that like, no matter who, that we can create the conditions for the next people would be my push. But enough about Zohran and crew. Uh. Pelosi’s retiring. And you know, it is, I will say shout out to Pelosi for doing it on, you know. Pelosi can always read the room. She might not be like, you might have your gripes with her, but she led with an iron fist and she can read the room. And I respect that she’s doing it on her terms. She’s like, this is time to go. She not getting pushed out, she’s not gonna lose to some 25 year old. And um she was a great speaker. And frankly, in this moment, I would much rather have her speaker than Hakeem Jeffries, who I–
Sharhonda Bossier: Wow.
DeRay Mckesson: Sort of like as a person, but I’m like, I don’t know what Hakeem’s doing. And she wielded her power well when she was Speaker of the House.
Sharhonda Bossier: She definitely was among um the most powerful and influential people in Congress. However you feel about her, I don’t think you can deny that fact. I also think what’s interesting is that she’s also such a polarizing figure, and some of that I think is about sexism and misogyny, right? She was a woman in a position of power. Um. I agree with you that she felt much more effective in her role than Jeffries has felt in in um in the speakership. The other thing that has come up a lot, though, on my feed um is people talking about Nancy Pelosi the investor, uh and Nancy Pelosi the person who got incredibly rich over the course of her tenure in Congress. Um. And like mainstream outlets like Yahoo are reporting on that, right? So apparently there are people who are investors who follow what Nancy Pelosi does. And now they’re like, wait.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah well I’m in the Pelosi, that’s that’s my 401k because I’m freelance.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: So I did that.
Sharhonda Bossier: And they’re like. Yeah. And they’re like, okay, what what happens now that she’s not in Congress? Like whose moves are we going to follow now? Which has also been like really interesting because I had not thought about that. So in addition to her sort of political influence, it sounds like she also was some people’s and investment guru.
Myles E. Johnson: She was she was mine chile. I was like what because it was an app, I was like oh this is so genius, I think that like–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –anybody else. I mean, I’m sure if I look back with those companies. Yeah, let’s not even think about that. Um. [laughter] I was like [?] I am sure that somebody should be protesting my door if I think about what I put money into, following Pelosi. Yeah, I do think she got pushed out. I think that um she had this kind of gap for herself where you can do it gracefully or you can do it embarrassingly. But I think, again, I know we’re not, you know, but Zohran. I think the the the cultural celebrity moment meeting the political moment is American politics And the fact that he was able to harness that, and that he just disrupted everything. The fact that Hakeem Jeffries. Just so many people have been just failing miserably when it comes to interacting with the public. I think that she either had this space in between to kind of leave on her own accord and make a beautiful San Francisco edited farewell and and take care of her husband with a knocked head, or she’s going to be forced out in a way that was more embarrassing. But I do think that, she was softly pushed out.
DeRay Mckesson: I think she went out on her own terms, but I hear you, and you know, I can’t defend the stock trade stuff. We should ban all that stuff like that. None of it makes sense. And she’s a daughter of Baltimore, but she was in one of our live recordings in San Francisco. It was such a mess, though, because her and the mayor of San Francisco didn’t get along. So they both brought their security to search everybody, and it was brutal. It was like Capitol Police and the SA, like the San Francisco Police Department. That was not fun.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. I mean, she didn’t go out like Feinstein, so there’s that.
DeRay Mckesson: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, yeah. Do you think there are other people who are going to use maybe this gap between now and the midterms to like maybe bow out in similar ways that she has?
DeRay Mckesson: No, because Eleanor Holmes Norton should be bowing out, and she is not.
Myles E. Johnson: Okay.
DeRay Mckesson: I think of your Pelosi though, you have done every, like, what else can you do? You’re Pelosi. You’re like, were already Speaker of the House. You can’t break any more records and you’re not going to be Speaker right now. Can’t beat Trump, you know?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: But, Myles, at least I know you. Sharhonda, I don’t know if you had a chance to. I have to believe you saw Ziwe and Eric Adams.
Myles E. Johnson: Ooh.
DeRay Mckesson: And there’s a great thread about how like um I can’t take credit for this, but they were like, you know, Ziwe is used to a certain type of person, she not used to your real uncle from around the way.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. [indistinct banter]
DeRay Mckesson: And Eric Adams showed up as your real uncle from around the way and was [?] enough for Ziwe. I mean, it still was very embarrassing. I was embarrassed for him, but um he held his own in a way that I have seen very few people hold their own, I thought, on Ziwe.
Sharhonda Bossier: He’s ridiculous.
Myles E. Johnson: Did you see any of the clips?
Sharhonda Bossier: I haven’t, I haven’t.
Myles E. Johnson: No, it’s such a funny interview. So I love Ziwe. I love this type of um content that she creates. She’s just really funny and I love her type of humor. So for me, because we’re in a specific moment that I think that american society is like on the decay, right? And I think that like we can have like these incremental changes that slow down the decay. But I think that is the inevitability of where we’re going. So sometimes if I turn on a certain part of my brain and I watch Ziwe, I like get upset because I’m like, this is a dangerous man. Like this is a dangerous man who has done dangerous things. And something about the frivolity of Ziwe and her sense of humor, it kind of defangs him. And I know that your community and freedom of speech, this is a way to highlight blah all the bull [bleep] people say in order to get what they think is gonna get them more money [laughs] and get them more attention. It so happens that, you know, people’s political profit ambitions always seem to align. So I’m like, okay, well, would you not do it? Like, is there any cutoff? But anywho, I think that when I watch it, I’m, like, yeah, this is kind of the problem sometimes is that we play so much until it gets real. And this is a real man, this is a real evil. And he was doing real heinous [bleep] and in the same way with my favorite stunt queen, like if you don’t really know that, you’ll watch these interviews and think that they weren’t that bad. And I don’t know what that does for our culture. I think that some of the culture of really evil people being celebrities, not just think about political people, but think about Andrew Tate’s, thinking about so many people that we interact with who I’m like, no, these are heinous people who do dark things. And we do not take it seriously because we have a culture that turns those type of people into fictional WWE characters. And they’re real, they’re, they are real cultural terrorists and political terrorists with inside our society and turning them into an SNL skit is not enough.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I don’t know. I feel slightly differently about Ziwe than I feel about, like remember when Jimmy Fallon like tussled Trump’s hair and he got a lot of [bleep] for that, you know? I don’t know why I feel differently, maybe because she’s a Black woman. But I also think maybe because we’re all supposed to be in on the joke with her in a way that some of those other platforms are, you what I mean?
Myles E. Johnson: But it’s weird, though, right? So, DeRay was on Ziwe, right. So, is she saying that, oh, no, DeRay is an evil person as well, and my whole thing is everybody who is on Ziwe is um some type of evil corporate manipulator and I’m just doing this satire with them? Or are you interviewing a lot of different people and people of all types of different levels of good and bad, and you’re doing the same performance with all of them, which, to me, kind of washes and defangs the evil that we’re looking at?
Sharhonda Bossier: I see.
Myles E. Johnson: Or do you think we’re such a sophisticated multiplicable media consumers that, you know, no one person should matter, you know. I think I just believe in bringing back the guillotine. I think that we should just really treat certain people evil.
DeRay Mckesson: Shout out [?].
Myles E. Johnson: I think certain people we should take it should be very serious. Stop the laughs. People died on your watch.
DeRay Mckesson: I think more people than ever before across a host of things are are sort of media savvy in a way they weren’t. Like at that moment when she asked him, do you have a bag of cash, right?
Sharhonda Bossier: Mmm.
DeRay Mckesson: And, you know, he doesn’t get tripped up on it. He just like rolls with her and she says, you know, what subway stops do you want to do stop and frisk? Which a traditional politician might might sort of say, like, I don’t believe in stop and frisk. He says all of them. You know, it does.
Sharhonda Bossier: [laughing] Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: He sort of leans into the joke. And you’re like, that actually wasn’t funny for the people you stop and frisk though, you know?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: To Myles’ point.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. And I think, like, for some people, we are really savvy, right? Like, we do understand those jokes. We do get it. But also, we are in the same pocket of time that birthed the QAnon conspiracy theories. So, obviously, this this this cleverness is not always birthing the sharpest minds. So, I think… I don’t know, it just feels like we’re often feeding a two-headed monster. But God bless America. I don’t know.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
Sharhonda Bossier: Well, switching gears to news for this week, uh my news is a story coming out of Los Angeles uh about our city budget and um LAPD. So in May, uh the Los Angeles City Council voted to give LAPD just enough money to hire and recruit 240 officers. That is down from the 480 officers that Mayor Karen Bass wanted to hire. They needed to rein in the number of new police recruits and hires because there’s a one billion with a B budget shortfall um for the city and it would also prevent the laying off of other city workers. Um. But on Tuesday the city council learned uh that the LAPD is actually on track to blow past its allocated budget and hire uh, closer to 400 officers, um, and that would mean hiring as many as like 170 officers that are not currently included in this year’s budget. Um, and so, you know, city council members are trying to figure out how to close this shortfall, how to avoid the layoffs of what they’re anticipating will be something like 1,600 civilian workers um for the city. And they’re hopeful that they can reach an agreement, but LAPD again has moved ahead with its plans to hire the officers that they have requested. Um. I’m bringing this to the pod for a few reasons. One is to just like highlight the kind of fiscal crisis that a lot of cities across the country are facing. Two is to talk about the way that the police and the police union in particular are taking advantage of this moment by pretending that they are also part of who we should consider organized labor, right and part of the labor movement. Um. And three is because there’s a question for me, honestly, and I think we even saw this with Mamdani in New York, right? About whether or not you can really run for and secure elected office at the city level without the police feeling like you back them. I mean they have strong political muscle here, and we’re seeing a moment when they’re using to flex it. Even at the expense of other city workers. So wanted to bring this to the pod so it was on people’s radars, but also to get y’all’s reactions.
DeRay Mckesson: I do think this shows how the money with the police is always really funny. So one of, you know, I got a lot of criticism for not being as a part of defund as people wanted me to be. And you know I remember being in meetings with people being like, they could pass whatever budget they want. You know, when the moment the police have overtime, it’s getting paid.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: It won’t show up in the budget.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yup.
DeRay Mckesson: But it will be allocated. That’s like the way the game works. And you can’t, we can’t really pass a law banning the payment of overtime. Like that’s not a thing that we all believe in paying for overtime, like whatever.
Sharhonda Bossier: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: There are ways to do it, but like if you think that cutting the budget straight up is a real strategy, let me tell you now, it is a it’s a ruse, they’re just going to do the overtime thing. So this is interesting because I just haven’t seen, so A, they are playing this overtime game, that’s a part of this story. Uh. But the other thing is, it is interesting when the city council just says, don’t do it and the city just does it anyway. Like what do you know?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Who actually stands up to the police department and who actually stands up to the mayor? Because they’re mad at the mayor, and I get it, and but the police are also participating in–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yup.
DeRay Mckesson: This crazy. The third thing I’ll say is that the idea that there is a ideal staffing level for police departments is police fiction. There is no like they sort of make up this number. They’re like, we need 800. You’re like well where did that come from? And they do.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: There’s no there’s no nothing. And no major police department in the country will let us audit how they spend their time. So people have been asking for a long time. Let’s put trackers, let’s put let’s just see how the police are allocating their time so that we think about it. I think about one city that I know of where they were scheduling, the majority of police were scheduled when the least amount of 911 calls came in.
Sharhonda Bossier: M.mm
DeRay Mckesson: That doesn’t make sense, right? If the idea is that the police are supposed to put, crime is out of control, then you would ostensibly schedule the police with the most 911 calls so that there’s like active coverage, right. So all these things that we would force any other workforce to contend with, we just sort of lay off on the police. So I love that the LA Times wrote about it. I love that people are paying attention to it because the police have been playing these sort of games with like the numbers and the overtime and all this other stuff for a very long time and, you know, I have to guess, 911 calls in LA are probably relatively flat. It’s probably like–
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm hmm yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: –the same number of calls for violent crimes.
Sharhonda Bossier: In fact, it’s down.
DeRay Mckesson: Violent crimes. Yeah, you’re like, but when you start asking, well, how are people spending their time?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: The police always do this, how dare? We risk our lives every day. And you’re, like, y’all, how long will that be the rationale?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: So for me, I get that this is in L.A. Times, but for me I feel like the whole narrative very quickly around the police has shifted and I don’t know if that’s me or or if anybody else is um seeing, I need to do more research. So I was reading the article and I was thinking about how maybe even like, I guess like 10 years ago, right? There was this talk around abolition. There was this talk around. Um, just like kind of steady force around imagining a place where there was no prisons and no police, right? And I don’t know if I was in my own Angela Davis reading bubble and around a lot of other like Black feminists who thought that was important, but I do remember seeing media platforms based off of the abolition of police and prisons. I remember just feeling like there was more dialog around it. And it just feels like, even though this is in LA Times, it feels like these kind of stories don’t ignite or feed into another idea about like an alternative to police and prisons anymore. It feels like we have all kind of like bowed to being assimilationists and we’ve all like said, okay, that’s never gonna happen. So let’s just um be reformist. And and that just feels interesting to me. You know, I don’t even know if it’s weird. Maybe it just, it just feels interesting.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, even in this article, right, the mayor spokesperson acknowledges that crime overall is down in Los Angeles and says that the way that they will ensure that that continues to be the case is by hiring more police officers, while they’re also saying they don’t have the number of police officers that they need and you’re like, now, wait a minute. Is it Oochie Wally or One Mike? You know, like, you got to choose. If crime is down and hiring in the police department is also down below the levels you would want, then what is actually driving crime down and why don’t we invest in that instead of hiring more police officers? You know what I mean?
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Well Myles, you named something. I don’t I actually think that it was never real. I think the abolition wave was an internet thing. I think it was a media thing. I remember people who were in the street in L.A. being like, we saying defund DeRay, we don’t. They were like, that’s not, I don’t actually believe that, but that’s like, this is the moment. I actually don’t think, I think that the movement, the far left of the movement got ahead of the base.
Sharhonda Bossier: Hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: And I think people participated because the moment was crazy and obviously George Floyd should be alive, but I don’t think people actually believed it. And I think the moment that people challenged it, they were like, the base was like, no, we need the police. And I think the only thing that I’ll say that I think the Trump team nailed was that ad around defund, if you remember it, where there was a police department with the lights off and the phone kept ringing.
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: And it just rang.
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: And they were like this [?] and like I think that scared people and I think we are like the left did not have an answer to like, you know, this is what happens when things happen in your community. It was sort of a philosophical answer, but I don’t think the abolition that moment was a sustained real moment.
Myles E. Johnson: I mean, I will feel like I’ll be doing like a really big sin if I made it seem like what I’m talking about is five years ago.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Like, I’m thinking about people who are imagining like kind of like radical alternatives. And it feels weird that even if I hear what you’re saying politically, if we’re think I don’t think of myself as a Democrat, or like or anything like that. So I get like, if that doesn’t work when it comes to winning elections. But I’m also thinking about that cultural philosophical work that you named of continuing to push people to imagine different things. And this story can feed that narrative. And it feels like that whole infrastructure apparatus is gone, even if people who have like democratic interest or whatever aren’t gonna adopt it because they know it may not, you know, sell votes, but where is that conversation anyway? You know what, am I making sense?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Maybe you’re not saying different things. What I’m saying is that I think 2020 was the opportunity to apply the theory for people of like what this might mean in real life and I think it was a failure. I think it didn’t work. And I think it lost a lot of people from the like people were like, Oh, I’m cool with the idea. And then 2020 was like, Okay, well, let’s do it. And I think the version of let’s do it turned into defund and people were like in real life, no, that is not what I want.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: So I think the theory people still were there, but I, you know, because Angela has been writing for a long time, but there’s this question of like, can we do it in 2020 was everything’s on our side, there’s all this stuff and da da da. And I think Defund was a loss in that way.
Sharhonda Bossier: I hear in Myles’s question, like, even if we missed, you know, to your point, DeRay, like the practical application opportunity, where are the scholars and the theorists and the thinkers still holding the conversation to say, like okay, based on what we learned in 2020, here’s what we still think might be possible on this front?
DeRay Mckesson: My only push is I think the only thing the movement has overproduced is the writers. We’ve overproduced the thinkers and the philosophers and da da da, we’ve underproduced the people committed to turning any of that thought into reality. So I’m so I guess my push is like, if you can’t find them, I think that you just might not be looking. They are I’m tripping over books about abolition from people who have organized nobody ever in any community in any world. [music break Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: On to the DOJ. Uh. So what what Trump is doing that I think is we need to talk about is he’s firing immigration judges. So before I talk about the article, remember that immigration court is run as a sort of division of the executive branch um and is housed in the justice sort of wing. And immigration judges, as you can imagine, decide on issues of immigration. So visas, um asylum, like all that, like citizenship status, all that stuff. One of the ways that you screw people is by just screwing up immigration court. So what Trump is doing in droves is he just is firing the immigration judges. He’s even firing judges in the middle of court. They are getting notices while they’re on the bench that they–
Sharhonda Bossier: On the bench! Wow.
DeRay Mckesson: While they are on the bench that they are being fired and they are not given any reason. They don’t know there’s a woman, Anam Petit , who was hired in 2023. She had worked in immigration defense. She was sitting on her bench in a courtroom in Virginia when she was notified by email that she was let go. So I say this because, you know, one of the things that, this is one of the things that you don’t see is when he’s like, you know, when they’re like, oh, well people don’t have their legal status and da-da, yeah, it’s hard to get legal status if there just are no judges. Like part of the, part of the deal is that, you know there have to be judges to hold the hearings. And one way to undercut the ability to do this is just get rid of the judges. So there were 700 immigration judges at the start of this year. And over the past 10 months, they have fired more than 125 judges. This is the largest purge of judges since the establishment of immigration court. So the last thing I’ll say is that the only thing that they have seen that is like a common denominator and NPR did this is that they are firing people who have any background in immigration defense. So I just wanted to bring this because I have not heard people talk about it.
Sharhonda Bossier: I also hadn’t heard anyone talk about it um and I’m really grateful that you’re highlighting this. I don’t know what else to say except for how clear the targeting is, you know what I mean? Um. And I don’t know, Myles, what you got?
Myles E. Johnson: A, when I was reading this, I would, you know, I just have these like little, these little Black power apocalyptic daydreams. And I’m like, I would love even to explore a Black president or Black leadership that was as gangsta as Trump about Black power initiatives. That is a daydream that I have. But the only thing I can really offer to this is to remind people that what this is, no matter how um radical any of this is. Is the goal is to make a white nation. So.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: All of these things that are illegal, all these things that are unprecedented, blah, blah blah blah, all these things are because the goal of the Republican Party is to create a white nation again. It’s in Project 2025, and it’s also in the literature that the leaders of Project 2025 and the Republicans and the far right are doing. So if we talk about Nick Fuentes, if we talked about um St. Charlie Kirk, they all are they all have this aspiration for a white nation again. And they have not just that aspiration, but these are game plans of how to do it. And part of how to do it is to make sure there are no there ain’t no such thing as somebody who comes and defends somebody who’s not from America. And specifically when we’re trying to kick them out so our white men and our white boys can have more job opportunities and more opportunities. So they feel as if they’re at war and anything that they have to do is fair game.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. It also is just like throwing another part of the system into complete and utter chaos, right? It’s like gumming up the works and gumming up the work is being core to the strategy, you know? Um. And even if you are someone who is like, well, you know what? I’m going to take it to court. Now your wait to see a judge is even longer. You know what I mean? So you’re you’re going to see a whole lot more people likely decide not to fight and do what we are euphemistically calling self-deport. You know? Because it’s like, well you gonna have me in a cage for months before I see anybody now. You know? And now I’m sure that the person I’m going to see is unlikely to have any empathy for my situation as an immigrant, because you’ve made sure of both of those things. Right?
Myles E. Johnson: And to your point, I don’t think I ever mentioned this on um on the podcast before this presented this idea, but I always think about it when we talk about this. Please understand that that part of the terror of being in a cage or whatever is a part of the story. So even–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: If the goal is to get you back home, you need–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: –to go back home with a horror story.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: In order to let other people know what happened.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: In order to dull anybody else immigrating.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: Like, so it’s not.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: So that is the um, I think we always say the cruelty is the point, sure. I say that all the time too. But also cruelty is also the strategy as well because–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: That creates a myth around going around America that is not, is the opposite of when we got that statue of liberty.
DeRay Mckesson: Did you see the–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Did you see that picture of the um the husband who showed up at the ICE detention center?
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yes.
DeRay Mckesson: Looking for his wife. He–
Sharhonda Bossier: Crying, looking for his wife crying. Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Crying, he said and you’re like, that propaganda is part of what you’re saying, Myles. Is that like.
Myles E. Johnson: Exactly.
DeRay Mckesson: You need to be so afraid of that moment that you’ll just leave anyway. Right?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Or you will never come, is what I’m saying too.
DeRay Mckesson: Or you’ll never come. Yes yes yes.
Myles E. Johnson: Or you’ll never come. You’re like, I’ll stay in my war-torn country because they’re going to put war on me.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: If I go in to America. It’s me and you. Can you finish the lyric Sharhonda?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yo mama and yo cousin too.
Myles E. Johnson: Come on!
DeRay Mckesson: Ah y’all so Black. I love it.
Myles E. Johnson: Come on, Atlanta in the house, no tease, Atlanta. So, my news today is that Outkast got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Of course, me being me, I know that these awards and these moments are absolutely meaningless in an American society where everything was stolen from us, who gives a [bleep] who who what the people give to us. But any time that we get a moment to talk about Black genius, I’m so excited about. Even though I want, I envision a day where we uh don’t need these kind of external validations by white institutions. Um. One of the most beautiful parts about the speech that um Outkast did, specifically when Andre was talking, is he talks about how such great things start in small rooms, and he actually got emotional around that. And I thought that was such a beautiful moment, because so many of the things that make Black folks like Black folks have this specific way of of going from the humble into the into the paramount in ways that you would never think could happen. So I love that in the moment where you’re kind of expected to come out glossy and big and funded and and and 10,000 people cruise if you’re in hip hop or whatever behind you. I love the he did that reminder where he was like, you know, I might’ve had an MPC. And some lyrics and a mic.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yup.
Myles E. Johnson: And that’s where this started. And I think that that reminder was so beautiful, specifically in a post-AI, post um like post-fame, everybody can be a media company if you just bootstrap big enough. And I love that reminder. Um. And again, like I don’t think, like like Outkast is such a big deal to me being from Atlanta, like the dungeon Family, being able to go to Stinkonia Records as as um as a teenager and in my early 20s and seeing history, that it almost feels, I’m glad that they feel good about it, but it almost feels disrespectful to what Outkast means to me, because in my head, I wanna be on the Stinkonia Hall of Fame. I wanna be on the Outkast Hall of Fame, because to me they are um talk about innovative, talk about bending both genre and gender, talk about um cultural example of different types of Black masculinities being able to find harmony and make music, from Hey ya to Bombs over Baghdad. Like, when I think about the sounds that they’ve created, I’m like I want Black folks to think bigger. I think Outkast, to me, is important enough and a good example enough of a Black people who have done such big things that they can become their own institutions and they don’t have to minimize themselves and fit inside of there. Again, excited, happy that it happened, love it. I was crying during it, but also I long for the day in 70 years where there’s a Black kid crying because he got inducted into the Outkast Hall of Fame because I think that is where we should be heading.
DeRay Mckesson: Shout out to Outkast. I wish I had a cultural criticism moment. The speech was great. The big things happen in little rooms was a really beautiful moment. And borrowing off of somebody else’s talk that had just happened. And um it was cool. And it was cool to just see them together again. And like just on stage. We haven’t seen them together in such a long time. And they’re all a part of our childhood. So boom.
Myles E. Johnson: Yes.
Sharhonda Bossier: And it’s just beautiful to see Black men getting older, right, and evolving and continuing to like, you know, stretch themselves creatively, watching them, you know, uh Big Boi, for instance, like be a grandpa, you know what I mean? Like we just so rarely get that and we so rarely get that for our Black men entertainers. And so just it’s been beautiful to see that part of who they’ve evolved to become too.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, specifically after D’Angelo, right?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, for sure.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. I think we needed that moment.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: On today’s show, I’m talking with author and journalist Brian Goldstone about his new book, There’s No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America. Couldn’t be more timely. I learned a lot about how we talk about this conversation around homelessness, about who is, who isn’t, what we do. I’m happy for us to share this conversation with you. Here we go. Brian, it is so great to have you on the podcast.
Brian Goldstone: It’s wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much.
DeRay Mckesson: You have a podcast voice too, you have a radio voice.
Brian Goldstone: Thank you. No one has ever told me that.
DeRay Mckesson: So I actually found out about your book on Twitter and I saw it and I was like, okay, this seems sort of cool. And then thankfully you sent it and I read it and now I’m excited to talk to you. But let’s start with your own story. Did you always know you were gonna write about housing? Did you always care about this issue? Did you stumble upon it? Like, what’s your journey to this topic?
Brian Goldstone: Yeah. So I think like many relatively educated, relatively liberal progressive people in this country, I had always been aware of homelessness and and sort of housing insecurity. Um. I and for a long time, I did want to write about it directly. But as a journalist, I had you know covered issues around the world, everything from Israel’s illegal deportation of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers, to the opioid crisis, to mental health in West Africa. And it was only in about 2018 that I actually came to this through my wife. My wife is a nurse practitioner and she was working at a community health center here in Atlanta where we live. And she was just noticing this trend among her patients. She would see patients who worked at Walmart or McDonald’s or who drove for Uber and Lyft. And these patients, like after they finished their shifts, after they did their airport runs and their Ubers, they were returning not to apartments, but they were often like sleeping in the very cars they had just been doing those airport runs in, or they were going to shelters or even, in some cases, sleeping on the street. And she was just stunned by this this trend of like work and homelessness going together. And when she told me about it, it just seemed like, like I was totally astonished by it because it immediately just upended a lot of the assumptions that again, even as like a relatively liberal person, I had about homelessness that like a job was an exit from poverty. A job is an exit from homelessness, not an accompaniment to it. And it just seemed like, okay, here’s here’s an angle that I haven’t seen addressed by journalists or scholars. And so I ended up writing a story for the New Republic magazine about one family in Atlanta. And and kind of following their journey, the mom was a full-time home health aide. And by the time I met them, after they had been kind of pushed out of their working class historically Black neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying, by the time I met them, they’d been homeless for about four months. And in the course of continuing to follow their journey I just realized that I was only scratching the surface of of this phenomenon and of just all the interlocking systems, not just housing and not just work, you know the two terms in that phrase, working homeless, but all sorts of other systems too, health care, education. And I just realized after it was done that I wanted to keep going with it. And so it sort of organically developed into this book where I now you know follow five families in Atlanta.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, before we start talking about those families, or just the way you designed the book, which I thought was beautifully humanizing, I don’t know a better way to ask it, but like, what is homelessness? When people, cause I feel like one of the things I realized in reading the book I’m like, oh, well I’ve actually heard people use this word to mean a ton of things. And the reason why I ask is at in the end of the book you sort of lead into this question of what do we measure? How do we measure? What do we miss? And I was like, oh, well, I didn’t even think that critically until I read the book about how do we define it in the first place.
Brian Goldstone: Mm. Yeah. I mean, homelessness is not having a home. Homelessness is not have access to stable shelter, um not having a roof overhead. And that seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but but astonishingly in this country, homelessness is not necessarily associated among many people with just the simple fact of not having a home. It’s seen as a byproduct of addiction or mental illness. And, you know, in the book, I try to show that, again, there are all these risk factors that can make someone more likely to be without a home. And mental illness and and substance use can be part of that. Although we should point out, even at this point in the conversation, that often severe mental illness or substance use is just as often a byproduct of the experience of being homeless rather than the cause of it. I want to be absolutely clear in this book that the reason people are homeless is because they don’t have access to housing they can afford. Primarily poor and working class people don’t have access to housing they can afford, so that’s what homelessness is, but you know as you alluded to, there’s this entire world of homelessness that we’re not seeing. That’s a major kind of impetus for this book, that that there’s this whole world of homelessness that is out of sight and maybe we can return to that, but what we see on the street, that does not encompass the reality of homelessness in America, that really is just the tip of the iceberg. As I say, the tents are just the tip of the ice berg. And in some ways, like my book is about everything that’s under the water’s surface, like this entire universe of homelessness and housing precarity that we’re not seeing, even as I argue that it’s all just one big iceberg. It’s all one big spectrum of insecurity.
DeRay Mckesson: I’d heard people sort of talk about the numbers, but what I love about your book is because it is narrative and true. I’m happy you said that in the beginning, because I was like, wow, this is so beautifully written that it almost feels like fiction. And then it was like it’s not fiction. It is nonfiction. Sort of humanizing the work, like the people who have jobs and are homeless, because you’re right. So much of the narrative is like they made poor choices, they sleep in tents and parks. Um. And you help us sort of understand another group of people who are also um homeless. How did you choose the families? And then can you just, for readers who have not yet bought the book, but who are going to buy the book after they hear you talk today, can you tell us how you set the book up?
Brian Goldstone: Yeah, so, you know, I think it was less a matter of how I chose the families than who was willing to just have have a journalist immerse himself in their lives for, you know not weeks or months, but really what turned out to be years. And that is a huge, huge thing to ask of anyone. And it’s especially a huge thing, to ask, of people who are experiencing, you know, extreme duress and, and were really in the middle of pretty extreme suffering. And so part of how I found these particular families is through the course of that magazine story that I mentioned, while I was reporting that one of my kind of, I don’t know, either virtues or vices as a journalist, this really comes out of my training as an anthropologist. Um. Before I became a journalist, I got a PhD in anthropology. And in many ways, I approached journalism and reporting the way that I approached fieldwork as an anthropologist, which is really just like throwing myself into into another social world, you know and just trying to get as absorbed as I can possibly get in that world. And so while I was reporting that magazine piece, I was following this family you know to food pantries, to meetings with caseworkers, to church, just spending really an excessive amount of time. With them and beyond what even made it into that story. But when it came time to write the book, I had met all these people, all these caseworkers, all these church volunteers. And you know one thing I’ll say about this subject is there are certain journalists who when they go out to write a story, it’s a challenge to find someone who kind of checks the boxes of what they’re needing to explore. In my case, there is no shortage of families who are employed in the low-wage labor force and who are experiencing homelessness, families and individuals. So in my case, it wasn’t a matter of finding someone, it was like finding the people where there will just be that that rapport and also just that willingness to allow me in. And I met the families through these various means through um references from other caseworkers, volunteers. Um. Some I met by sort of immersing myself at this extended stay hotel and hopefully we’ll talk about kind of the world of extended stays, because that’s a really important site in the book, but yeah, I just met them through in these various ways and it took a really long time to meet them and it took a long time to gain trust and ultimately in order, as you said, to humanize them, to not just show these like caricatures of people who are suffering in this way, but to show them in the fullness of their humanity. And that involves also you know showing their flaws, showing the choices they made that they themselves regret, because it can be just as dehumanizing to show people. Only you know as these like angelic figures who have no faults, as it can be dehumanizing to simply pathologize people. And so I wanted them to be real living, breathing parents and their children in this book. And largely that was geared at the sense that before we can really fix a crisis, we have to feel it. And so my hope is that in this book, readers will feel the crisis that these families are experiencing.
DeRay Mckesson: I love that. And so we can start an extended day. I also, one of the things that you paint really well is just the hoops people have to jump through to get help. So even when they sort of acknowledge that like, okay, something’s wrong. I want to do better. I want try and get a thing. It’s like, whether it’s a lottery or like a, I don’t know, a crazy waiting list or rules about who can live in what things with housing, um you painted such a good picture of the web of things that that limit even the best intentioned people. So we can start wherever you want. We can start there, we can start extended day, but I, that stuck out to me.
Brian Goldstone: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I think it is easy for me, the academic side of me, to just sort of lead with these kinds of abstract explanations and to talk about systems and to talk about statistics. But I, because the stories of these families are so crucial to what this book is doing, maybe I could just use one family’s experience to to kind of illustrate this phenomenon that you’re describing, you know, just sort of being locked out of assistance. So let me just tell you about Celeste. So Celeste’s story in the book, it starts in this really dramatic way. She is driving home from her warehouse job one day, driving home to her rental property that she has been living in with her children for the last year or so in East Point, just outside Atlanta. And her neighbor calls and says, you better get back here because your your house is burning down. And so by the time she and the kids get back to this rental home, it is no longer standing, it has been destroyed by a fire. And it turns out that an abusive ex set fire to this property. She had just taken out a restraining order on this man. But I think it’s important to note that Celeste and her children being pushed into homelessness, and I use that term very deliberately, pushed. They did not fall into homelessness. What pushed Celeste and her kids into homelessness was not the house burning down. What happened after the house burned down is you know she and her kids went to a Howard Johnson hotel where the Red Cross paid for a few nights. And when those funds ran out, Celeste was hoping that her housing search would be relatively brief, that she would get into another place quickly. But what she found, as so many people in Atlanta and across the country have found, is that even in the time she had been renting this place, the ground had kind of shifted under her feet. As Atlanta was going through this unprecedented renaissance, this much celebrated transformation of urban space that had really turned the city into a playground you know for for the rich. As that had happened, the city had lost hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units. In just a five-year period, the City of Atlanta lost over 200,000 affordable units, and rents had skyrocketed. Neighborhoods that were once affordable for people like Celeste were no longer affordable. So what she thought would be a really quick housing search turned into a really protracted housing search. And it was only like three or four months later that she finally found an apartment that seemed you know within her budget. And she went to apply for it and the leasing agent prayed with her and they said, you know she was like, God, thank you for opening this door for me. And she thought that she and her kids would be housed by the following month. But a few days later, she gets a call from the leasing agent and the agent says, why didn’t you tell me about the eviction on your record? And Celeste is like, what are you talking about? There is no eviction. Now, what happened, she found out, was when the house burned down, she called her landlord, which was not like a mom and pop landlord. It was a private equity firm called the Prager Group, and they own tens of thousands of rental properties. When Celeste called them to request getting into another unit that they had within their sort of network, they said that the only way she could break her lease was if she paid the current month’s rent because the fire had happened at the beginning of the month and she hadn’t yet paid her rent. She would have to pay the current month’s rent, plus an additional month’s rent, and she wouldn’t get her security deposit back. That’s how they would allow her to break her lease and move into another unit. So she hung up in disgust and came to find out months later that when she hung up on them, they filed an eviction against her. And in Georgia, you don’t have to be notified of an eviction in person. They can carry out what are called tack and mail dispossessory notices. So the sheriff, come to find out, left a notice in Celeste’s mailbox at the burned down property. And on the form it said served to fire destroyed property. And Celeste was completely unaware that this had taken place. And in her absence, the judge had handed down a default judgment. So Celeste finds out that her credit has been absolutely tanked. This three digit number that has come to determine whether millions of Americans have access to something as fundamental as a place to live, this credit score had been completely destroyed. And she and her kids end up going to what is really the default option, again, for millions of families across the country, where in places where there are no family homeless shelters and here in DeKalb County, where I live and where Celeste lived, there was not a single family homeless shelter for her to go to. So she and her kids went to an extended stay hotel and they end up getting trapped there. And just to go to the issue that you’ve raised, you know she realizes very quickly that that this place is is an expensive prison, as another family in the book calls it. She’s paying way more at this, in this [bleep] hotel room, this squalid extended stay hotel room. She’s paid way more than that than she was for the rental home she had been living in. And it is absolutely abysmal in terms of the conditions there. And she wants to get out. But when it’s time for her to get out, she goes to this place, Gateway Center, and yeah, I don’t know if you want me to tell you what happens next, but that’s really, a really dramatic moment in the book.
DeRay Mckesson: What were the aha moments for you in putting this book together? I have to imagine that some of the stuff you went in knowing, you were like, okay, well, I sort of know this, but let me provide some texture. And then some of this stuff, I don’t know, like what were your aha moments?
Brian Goldstone: So I think one of the most shocking things in the course of reporting this book was to discover how incredibly profitable all this precarity has become. We’re maybe used to hearing the James Baldwin line about how extremely expensive it is to be poor in America, but I think what these families’ you know experiences show is how is sort of the flip side of that equation, how extremely lucrative all this this insecurity is for some in America and you know at every turn in these families’ journeys there is an entire business model designed to capitalize and really profit off their predicament and this runs the gamut from like these co-signing companies that have sprung up and charge exorbitant fees for people who have low credit scores who can’t get approved for an apartment, these co-signing companies will charge you to sort of co-sign on the lease. And then if you end up getting evicted, you have to pay that money back. And it ends up putting people even further in a sort of hole than they would have been otherwise. So everything from these co-signing companies, and payday lenders, to more kind of agregious examples like these private equity firms, like the Prager Group, who I was just talking about with Celeste’s situation, who, you know, are not only buying up vast swaths of America’s rental housing. I just got a report the other day that ten percent of America’s housing stock rental housing stock, I should say, is now in the hands of private equity firms. That is just a mind-blowing figure. So, not only are these Wall Street firms and investors buying up vast swaths of rental housing and making it harder for families and individuals to stay housed by employing these techniques like automated eviction systems where if you’re even you know two days late on rent an eviction is automatically filed against you and you’re saddled with the late fees, you’re saddled with the court costs if you try to fight that eviction. And if you end up staying, you owe those fees and and often you get put out. And that’s what happened to one family in the book. These firms know that if one family or one individual, one tenant loses their home, another three or four will you know be given the nature of this housing crisis, and there are three or four will gladly take their place. So they’re not only forcing people out of the homes they have. These private equity firms and Wall Street investors are also increasingly cornering the market on the very places where people are forced to go once they lose their housing. And nowhere is that truer than of these extended stay hotels. Which are basically like extremely profitable homeless shelters. Again, in the absence of shelters, these hotels have sprung up, they are proliferating across the country, and they’re concentrated in areas of the country where working people are most likely to be losing their homes, losing their housing. And these places will charge sometimes double or even triple what you would pay for an apartment down the street. And you know, during the pandemic, Blackstone and Starwood Capital, two private equity giants, they saw that, you know, normal hotels were at like 0% occupancy during the pandemic early on, while extended stay hotels, because they were housing all these homeless families and individuals, were at, like, 80 to 90% occupancies. So Blackstone, and Starwood Capital, spent $6 billion to buy the largest chain of extended stay hotels, called Extended Stay America. And one of the families in the book, Maurice and Natalia, they end up having to move into one of these hotels at Extended Stay America. I spent hours and hours in their room. It was awful in there. The conditions were awful. They were living in there with their three children, one of them a toddler. They were paying more than double what they had been paying for a two-bedroom apartment nearby. And this was just a like a studio unit. You know in an eight-month span, they spent $17,000. So again, I think one of the most shocking things was, you know, not just the forces that were pushing these families into these situations, into this homelessness, but all the business models, all the actors that were sort of rushing to profit off their desperation.
DeRay Mckesson: I have to imagine that there are people you have encountered who had different ideas about homelessness. Are there any myths and misconceptions that we have not talked about that we need to get in front of when we think about the issue of homelessness that you encountered?
Brian Goldstone: Yeah, I mean, definitely one of the biggest myths is, and we hear it sometimes when people, you know, look at an unhoused person and they’re like, why don’t they just get a job? You know, there’s this myth that people who are unhoused are not part of the labor force. And, you know, I was, to continue with the theme of things that shocked me, I was really surprised to find that this myth, this sort of perception of homelessness actually has a history. And this was an engineered perception. It goes back to the 1980s when mass homelessness first exploded in the US. I think it’s hard to remember sometimes that mass homelessness is like a relatively recent phenomenon. It has not always been with us. And you know it sprung up in the U.S. when the Reagan administration was just slashing the budget for low income housing, slashing funding for public housing, slashing just the social safety net in all of its various forms and instead of acknowledging that this was the reason why why millions of families and individuals were now without a place to live in cities across the country, the administration undertook a very concerted sort of campaign to control the narrative around homelessness. And you know, there was an article in Science, the journal Science in the ’80s, called Reagan versus the Social Sciences. And what it involved was an examination of how the administration was funding research on homelessness that focused on mental illness and alcoholism and addiction, and was was deliberately not funding projects that wanted to look at sort of, you know the legacy of racist housing policy, a history of redlining, a history of of excluding Black and other minority Americans from the housing opportunities that that white Americans enjoyed. All sorts of things these researchers wanted to look at that were systematically barred to them. And this attempt to sort of make Americans when they think about homelessness think about those who are suffering most visibly on the street who seem to be in the throes of of addiction or severe mental illness. That attempt was really successful. Um. A poll conducted in the 1980s by the New York Times asked people what causes homelessness. And the number one answer was psychological problems. The number two answer was laziness. And nobody who was polled mentioned housing. So again, that perception, that narrative was very much an intentional one. It was very much an engineered one. And we are living the consequences of that today in the sense that so many people who are aware of homelessness, who encounter it in their day-to-day lives, harbor these really destructive myths, both about what causes it, and I would argue about the way you solve it.
DeRay Mckesson: That was the thing that stuck out to me. You know, I, too, I think early in my activism had understood homelessness to be like people either who were dealt just a really bad hand or who like made choices that really just changed the entirety of their life. I hadn’t quite understood until I became an activist that like, that that is an incomplete story. And I say that as the as the child of two people who were addicted to drugs and and have seen people at every stage of their life. I’m interested in like what we do structurally. Like what do, what is the fix? You know, it wasn’t, I didn’t even, it was your book that made me for the first time critically think about the lottery system is not a win because the lottery system to me had always been sold as like the fair way to do this, right? It was like, this is the only fair way. And I, then I read your thing and I was like oh, hold up, maybe this is actually part of the scam. So what do we do?
Brian Goldstone: Yeah, I think even that word lottery is so strange to use when it comes to something as fundamental as a place to live, right? Like part of where I’m coming from as an anthropologist is to, you know, anthropologists like in Anthropology 101, they like to do this thing where it’s like anthropology is about making the strange familiar. Going to other places and kind of translating them into terms and concepts we’ll understand. I actually subscribe to a school of thought within anthropology that’s about making the familiar strange, taking things that we are sort of take for granted and are part of our status quo and saying like, wait, how the hell did we come to think of it that way? And nowhere is that you know more acute than when it comes to housing. We, in this country, you know, have treated housing first and foremost as a vehicle for wealth accumulation. We have treated it as a commodity. And we’ve basically said that if you’re fortunate enough to have housing, if you are fortunate enough to own property, if you’re fortunate enough to be a landlord, you will invariably profit in some shape or form off the desperation of the many, many, many more people in this country who just need a roof overhead. And so I think the fact that, like, the best we’ve been able to come up with as a society is like a lottery where, you know, one out of four families and individuals in this country who check all of the boxes for qualifying for housing assistance. That means like they’re they’re working, they don’t have a criminal background. They check all these means tested boxes in order to qualify for this assistance. Only one in four americans actually receive it because it’s not funded as an entitlement the way that like food stamps are or you know medicaid or social security it’s it’s basically like there’s a lottery and if you’re lucky enough to win it, win that lottery. You might get housing, but even, you know, one of the families in the book, Brett, who you mentioned earlier, she actually wins that lottery and she can’t find a landlord to accept her voucher because we, you know, basically what we’ve done is we’ve looked to the private market. We’ve looked at capitalism to solve a problem created by the private market, created by capitalism. So we’ve tried to incentivize landlords, incentivize private developers, please house people who need who need a place to live, please provide housing for people in our country who don’t have a home. And that simply is not working. So I think, like in terms of solutions, yes, there are like very concrete things we can do immediately. Things like, I mean, I feel like the categories that solutions fall into need to be both like keeping people in the homes they already have. In other words, preventing homelessness before it starts by strengthening tenant protections. Again, like Celeste wouldn’t have become homeless with her children if there were just like basic tenant protections in Georgia that made it illegal to evict someone from a house that was literally uninhabitable. Like basic tenant protections would keep hundreds of thousands of people in the homes they already occupy. Rent control, rent stabilization, those sorts of things can can drastically stem what is really this like relentless churn that in some cities like LA or San Francisco sees for every one person who gets out of homelessness into housing, another four people become unhoused. And the reason is because we’re we’re only focused on like getting people off the street. We’re not focused on preventing people from being pushed into homelessness in the first place. So like that’s one solution and another is to get people into homes they don’t already have. But you know at the root of all of those solutions, I believe has to be just a radical paradigm shift around how we think about housing in this country. We need to think of housing more the way we think about like education, just as this basic need. And we don’t say about education, like if a kid is lucky enough to be able to afford a private school, he or she can get a K-12 education. We just built public schools and said, sure, if someone wants to go to a private school, they can, but we’re going to make this basic thing available for everyone. And that’s what we need to do with housing. It needs to become insane to us that we have treated this this essential human necessity as something that’s like auctioned off to the highest bidder and forced people into what one caseworker in the book, Carla Wells, what she calls the housing hunger games, where it’s just this like survival of the fittest race to to get housing for yourself and your kids, even if, as is the case with all the families in this book, they are working and working and working some more, and it just is not enough. So this idea of like, you just need to work a little harder and then, okay, you might not make it rich, but you’ll at least have stability, you’ll at least have this basic security. The families in this book are a testament to um how false that assumption now is.
DeRay Mckesson: Boom. Well, what do you say to people um who in moments, especially like this political moment, you had no you had no way of knowing that your book will come out in the world that it’s in right now. There are a lot of people who listen to this interview, who’ll read your book, but who come to this topic with their hope really being challenged right now, who are like, you know what? I’ve read all the things, I protested, I went to the meetings, I’ve testified, and it still looks pretty bleak out there. What do you say to those people whose hope is challenged?
Brian Goldstone: Yeah, I mean, my hope is challenged too. I think that it can seem just, you know, incredibly out of touch or even utopian to talk about beginning to treat housing as like a basic human right at a moment when unhoused people are being rounded up and and put into detention facilities where where people at the highest echelons of power right now are basically talking about constructing camps where homeless people will be forced to go. When homelessness is just being criminalized across the country, it can seem really you know sort of hopelessly idealistic to talk about treating housing as a human right. And you know I want to be clear that like what we’re seeing right now under this administration is absolutely horrific. Like they are taking an already threadbare safety net when it comes to housing and so many other things. And just absolutely shredding it, just decimating it. And I think we need to be really clear about what’s at stake right now and just how terrifying this is becoming and how how much worse the housing and homelessness crisis will become if our political leaders continue down this path. I also think it’s important to say though, that you know I began the reporting for this book during the first Trump administration and much of the reporting for the book then continued through the Biden years, and now we’re in the next Trump administration. And the circumstances that these families in the book were experiencing, you know changed not at all during those four years. And you know the truth is that the abandonment of poor and working class people in America has been a bipartisan project. I wouldn’t even call it a bipartisan phenomenon. I think project is the right term because you know, homelessness, as we maybe have heard before, is a policy choice. This is a policy, we are choosing as a country across the political spectrum to abandon these families and individuals to you know to a market that has very little concern for their stability. And we are we are allowing that to happen. We’re allowing labor protections to be gutted. We’re allowing the rise of of gig work, where you know, people have no sick leave or they have no basic protections as workers. That has been a bipartisan bipartisan project. And I think we have to really consider like what we mean when we talked about a strong economy because the big argument in this book is that, you know while we may be used to thinking of homelessness as like a by-product of poverty. The kind of homelessness and insecurity that this book is documenting is actually a product of prosperity. It is occurring not in the poorest areas of the country, but in cities like Atlanta that are undergoing this unprecedented renaissance, this much celebrated renaisance. And it’s that very boom that has you know pushed people not only out of the neighborhoods they grew up in, but increasingly out of housing altogether. And what’s especially perverse is you know, the families I write about in the book, they are not on the fringes of society. It’s their labor, it’s their work that is actually powering the growth, that is powering the boom that has deprived them of a place to live. So I think we have to reconsider what we mean when we talk about a booming economy and stop looking at things like how the stock market is doing or what the GDP is at, or, you know, even low unemployment rates. And we need to ask, how many families are competing for a single, squalid, extended-stay hotel room? How many families are trying to get into a shelter today in our cities? You know, how long is the line outside the food pantry? And how many of the people in that line are filled with the workers who are powering our economy and powering our cities. That’s what we have to start asking. And I think that the neglect of that question, again, is something that both political parties have fallen prey to.
DeRay Mckesson: Boom. Well, we consider you a friend of the pod and can’t wait to have you back.
Brian Goldstone: Thank you, DeRay, it’s such a treat to talk to you. [music break]
DeRay Mckesson: Well, that’s it. Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week and don’t forget to follow us at Pod Save The People and Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. And if you enjoyed this episode of Pod Save the People, consider dropping us a review on your favorite podcast app. And we will see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by AJ Moultrié and mixed by Charlotte Landes, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Myles E. Johnson and Sharhonda Bossier. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
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