Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.

The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.

Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.

“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Laura Flynn: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Laura Flynn.

Living on a tight budget can feel like balancing on top of a metaphorical Jenga tower — one wrong move and the whole thing collapses. Maybe your hours are cut at work, or you lose your job, or your credit score is dinged. Maybe an eviction notice lands on your door. Suddenly, what once felt stable is gone.

When we think of homelessness in America, we often picture people living on the streets, maybe in tents or cars. But it can come for many of us, faster than one might imagine. As journalist Brian Goldstone writes, homelessness isn’t a fixed state. It’s a “point along a spectrum: in a motel today, on a couch tomorrow, possibly in a tent a year from now.”

Here’s the thing: Homelessness in the U.S. is increasing. Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless — the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And those figures don’t capture the “hidden homeless”: the families doubling up in cramped apartments or living in motels.

Meanwhile, housing costs are rising while incomes, especially for low-wage workers, are not keeping pace. Nearly 10 million children live in poverty in the U.S. — that’s also a growing number. The precariousness people and families face are under even greater pressure today.

Donald Trump: We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve very dirty, very — got a lot of problems. But we’ve already started that, we’re moving the encampments away — trying to take care of people. Some of those people — we don’t even know how they got there.

LF: President Donald Trump is calling for encampment sweeps, implementing budget cuts to food assistance and health care aid, proposing changes that would make it easier for landlords to evict people in public housing or who are receiving housing assistance, and even limiting the amount of time someone can receive assistance.

To understand the realities so many face trying to navigate staying housed in America today, I spoke to Brian Goldstone. His new book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” captures the crisis with deep reporting and vivid storytelling. And just a note, I spoke to Brian a few weeks ago, before Trump’s latest attacks. Here’s our conversation.

Welcome to the Intercept Briefing, Brian.

Brian Goldstone: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you.

Laura Flynn: Your book tells the stories of five families, and I want to start with one of those stories. Can you introduce us to Celeste?

Brian Goldstone: Yeah, absolutely. So Celeste’s story begins in a really dramatic way. One day, she’s driving home from work with her children. She’s just picked them up from school. She’s left her warehouse job, and her neighbor calls to say that her rental home is on fire.

And by the time Celeste makes it back to her rental, it has burned down. The street is closed off, and the family loses everything. The only possessions they have left are the few things that were in the kids’ backpacks and a few loads of dirty laundry that Celeste had thrown in her Dodge Durango that morning, intending to go to the laundromat after work. They’ve lost everything else.

And it’s later determined that an abusive ex who Celeste had recently taken a restraining order out on was responsible for the fire. And even though this fire was kind of the first domino that fell on Celeste and her children becoming homeless, I think it’s really important to note that it wasn’t the fire, it wasn’t even the domestic violence that led them to become homeless.

What led them to become homeless ultimately was the fact that months after the fire, Celeste was applying for apartments and she was denied. She was told that there was an eviction that had been filed against her, and she said, that’s not true, I don’t have an eviction on my record.

Come to find out that after this fire took place, Celeste called her landlord, which was not just like a mom-and-pop landlord, it was a private equity firm called the Prager Group. They owned tens of thousands of rentals across the south. And when Celeste called to request that she be put in another home in their portfolio, they told her that in order to “terminate her lease” on this house that had just burned down, she would have to pay not only the current month’s rent — the fire had happened at the beginning of the month, so she hadn’t yet paid her rent — but an additional month’s rent as well. And she would lose her security deposit. And Celeste had hung up in disgust. But yeah, like months later, found out that after she hung up, they filed an eviction against her for nonpayment.

In Georgia, a tenant doesn’t even have to be notified of an eviction in person. The sheriff was able to carry out what’s called tack and mail dispossessory. And when she actually drove to the house that had been burned down — it still hadn’t been repaired — in the mailbox, she found an eviction notice on which the sheriff had written “served to fire-destroyed property.”

So at this point in her story, Celeste realized that her chances of getting into an apartment were basically destroyed. And her credit score — this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to something as basic as a place to live — she realized her credit score would basically lock her out of the formal housing market.

In those proceeding months before she found out about the eviction, she had been calling on favors from every friend, relative, co-worker to allow her and her kids to sleep on a couch, to sleep in a basement. Many nights were even spent sleeping in her Dodge Durango. And those nights were terrifying for her because it wasn’t just having to wake up for work the next morning, despite lack of sleep and just the fear of someone maybe breaking into her car or hurting them. It was also that the cops would come. And that fear was founded. In Georgia, over a third of child removals are the direct result of “inadequate housing.”

So at that point, when Celeste realized that she was locked out of the formal housing market, she was desperate to get out of her car. And she did what scores of other homeless and precariously housed families and individuals in America are doing: She went to an extended stay hotel.

LF: Like you said, Celeste and her family went to a budget motel and like others in the book as well. And it’s this kind of place I would think of as on the edge of homelessness. I grew up in a place like this in LA in the ’90s. And I always thought of us as like, not quite homeless, but very close to it.

And today, there is greater recognition that people and families living in motels and overcrowded homes do meet the definition of homeless, but often slip through the cracks of official counts. Can you walk us through how homelessness is defined and counted in the U.S., and how those definitions shape both our understanding of the problem and how resources are allocated or distributed?

BG: It’s actually instructive just to continue following Celeste as she and her children move into this squalid extended stay hotel. Like many people, Celeste, up to this point, she thought that these extended stay hotels that she was passing by every day as a resident of Atlanta were hotels — just, you know, as we tend to think of them. Some people when they hear “extended stay hotel,” they think of places where traveling nurses or health care workers or business people will stay.

“These hotels … are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. … They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live.”

But these hotels — as Celeste came to discover — are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. They are places that are proliferating around the country. They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live. These are places that don’t require a credit score to get in.

And so this entire underclass of Americans — who really make up what one journalist friend of mine calls the “credit underclass” — these are places where they are forced to go in the absence of family shelters or in the absence of any other accommodations. So Celeste, when she ends up at this place called Efficiency Lodge, there are nearly a dozen similar places lining the roads around this hotel. The weekly rent at this place was almost double what she had been paying for the rental home that had just burned........

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