Air Date 8/6/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. After the recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed governments to constitutionally purge unhoused people from public spaces, we are getting an immediate lesson in the difference between addressing systemic problems with solutions and using the police to clean up after governments that fail to act. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today includes Today, Explained, The Majority Report, Democracy Now!, Citations Needed, Factually!, with Adam Conover, Morning Joe, and The Thom Hartmann Program. 

Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more on four topics:

Section A: The Supreme Court; 

Section B: Demonization; 

Section C: The Digitalization of Renting; and 

Section D: Solutions.

Criminalizing homelessness - Today, Explained - Air Date 7-2-24

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: The decision is called City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. And Grants Pass is a city in [00:01:00] Oregon of about 38,000 people, about 600 of whom are homeless on any given day. 

<CLIP> KPTV FOX 12 Oregon

Reporter: The City of Grants Pass claims it does not have enough space and shelters for their homeless population at the same time its laws impose civil penalties including fines on people sleeping outside on public property. If the fines are not paid they can become criminal charges

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: So some homeless people filed a lawsuit saying this is unconstitutional. And it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. You're punishing us as homeless people. You're punishing homelessness, which, under a decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from a few years back, was determined to be unconstitutional. It's the largest of the circuits in the federal appellate court system. And so this is a [00:02:00] decision that applied to all the western states, which happened to be the states that have among the worst homelessness crises in in the country.

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: And so what happened here in this case, in Grants Pass? 

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: There have been a number of claims since 2018 from homeless people living in various places on the West Coast, saying these ordinances are unconstitutional under the 2018 ruling. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: hmm

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: And this is one example that you can't ban public sleeping. And this is a decision from the Ninth Circuit that got up to the federal Supreme Court and what the court decided, 6 to 3, with all six conservatives on one side and the three liberal justices on the other, they decided that homeless people in Grants Pass do not have a constitutional claim, that the Eighth Amendment does not protect them from ordinances that criminalize [00:03:00] sleeping in public or in public parks. 

<CLIP> KGW News

Anchor: the US Supreme court has sided with Grants Pass Oregon.

ABC7 News Bay Area

 the high court’s decision is the most significant ruling on the issue in decades

<CLIP> KGW News

 and it comes as cities in the west like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco have struggled to manage tent and outdoor encampments. 

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: And basically, this gives cities everywhere in the West and across the country more tools at their disposal to address the homelessness crisis, but which the liberal justices thought was unconscionable. 

<CLIP> Forbes Breaking News, oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson

Elena Kagan: sleeping is a biological necessity, it’s sort of like breathing. I mean, you could say breathing is conduct too. But presumably you would not think that it’s okay to criminalize breathing in public. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: So just to review, like before this case, if you were an unhoused person in the West, you had a pretty good legal case to say you can't criminalize me sleeping in public. But now it's going [00:04:00] to be a lot easier for cities and states around the country to criminalize camping outside. Can you tell me about the majority opinion? Who wrote it and how did they come to this opinion? 

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: The majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was the first of Donald Trump's justices, who he nominated to the court when he first got into office. And Gorsuch begins by acknowledging that homelessness is a crisis, especially in the West. He quotes someone who says it's the defining public health and safety crisis of the day. But then he says, you know, it's not just a crisis for homeless people. It's a crisis for everyone. And that large public encampments bring with them a lot of crime and disease and drugs. And it's not the role of the Supreme Court to hamper the efforts of cities to try to address that crisis. 

<CLIP>KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco

Anchor: He said that this is essentially a matter of local [00:05:00] control. Saying in part quote “a handful of federal judges can’t begin to match the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding how best to handle a pressing social question like homelessness” end quote.

STEVEN MAZIE [THE ECONOMIST]: The basic reasoning that Gorsuch summoned in this case is that the Eighth Amendment, when it bans cruel and unusual punishment, it's only banning certain methods or kinds of punishment. So he gives the examples of things like disembowelment and public dissection and burning people alive. Right. These are cruel and unusual kinds of punishment that the Eighth Amendment prohibits. So those things unconstitutional, but imposing civil fines on people for sleeping in public or ordering people to stay out of public parks. Those, he said, are not terrible. They are not painful. They are not cruel or unusual. He also makes a [00:06:00] point that the only argument on the other side involves. A position that criminalizing someone's status is unconstitutional. And there is one Supreme Court case that suggests that. But he says in this case, homeless people are not being criminalized as people. They're being criminalized for the things they do, which is sleeping in public with a blanket on them or with a pillow under their head. And then he says this: “it makes no difference whether the defendant is homeless, a backpacker on vacation, passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Interesting. So basically, the unhoused people in this case, we're trying to say, look, you're criminalizing my status as a homeless person. You can't do that. But Gorsuch is basically saying, no, it's not - it's not criminalizing a status. It's criminalizing [00:07:00] the action of camping. 

Sotomayor TORCHES Oregon Town Trying To Ban Homeless People - The Majority Report - Air Date 4-23-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Regardless, here is Sotomayor, in oral arguments yesterday, expressing that skepticism, questioning the attorney for Grants Pass, Theane Evangelis, Theeanne, and I don't know how to say her name, but, um, this is what Sotomayor was asking about.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: You're assuming it's there. It prohibits you criminalizing homelessness, right? So what you do is say only homeless people who sleep outdoors will be arrested. That's the testimony of your chief of police, two or three officers, which is, if you read the crime, It's only stopping you from sleeping in public if you, for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live. And the police officers testified that that means that if a stargazer wants to take [00:08:00] a blanket or a sleeping bag out at night to watch the stars and falls asleep, you don't arrest them. You don't arrest babies who have blankets over them. You don't arrest people who are sleeping on the beach, as I tend to do if I've been there a while. You only arrest people who don't have a second home. Is that correct? 

THEANE EVANGELIS: Well... 

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Who don't have a home. 

THEANE EVANGELIS: No, these laws are generally applicable. They apply to...

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: That's what you want to say. Give me one example, because your police officers couldn't, and they explicitly said if someone has another home, has a home, and is out there and happens to fall asleep, they won't be arrested. Fall asleep with something on them.

THEANE EVANGELIS: Well, joint appendix page 98 is one example of a citation issued to a person with a home address. But more importantly, I think what we're getting at here is that these laws [00:09:00] regulate conduct of everyone. There's nothing in the law that criminalizes homelessness. I really...

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: That's what, that's what you say, but if I look at the record and see differently... 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, I mean, she makes a very compelling point there, which is essentially that if you are clearly of a class that has a home and has private property or is a renter, you're like Sotomayor and you take a nap on the beach, or even, say, you're sunbathing in a public park in the summer and you fall asleep—I've done that—then am I going to get arrested in the same way that the person who's showing that they are visibly unhoused would be? Of course not. And the fact that this lawyer was trying to assert that there wasn't a double standard in this instance is ridiculous. 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: To be coy. They're being coy. This is a lock up homeless people bill. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It is. 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Own it. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Catfish James writes in: "Small correction on Grants Pass v. Johnson: there is a private homeless shelter there that requires church attendance and labor to use it." 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Oh, that's wonderful. It requires [00:10:00] church attendance? Beautiful. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That's why I didn't really include it because it's also, uh, categorized as a religious "transitional housing program". I wouldn't categorize that as a shelter, to be honest with you. 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean, George Orwell wrote, he did Down and Out in Paris and London, where he went around as he called at the time "a tramp", and went through the humiliation that unhoused people go through in religious contexts, needing to, like, put up with just bullshit to get fed.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, I mean, right, exactly. It's, you have to show fealty to the religion. You have to basically be docile, and that's not a way to treat a human being. I mean, it's humiliating, and that's the kind of thing that... and there was also all these hoops to jump through and requirements often for testing ... first, the number one thing we need to be focused on is alleviating the exacerbating factor here, which is being unhoused, contributing to [00:11:00] mental health episodes tangibly, as well as active addiction, and then you can work on those issues and getting people back up on their feet. But, Mark Joseph Stern, as always, has a great write up in Slate and explains further what the Supreme Court is looking at here. "Since 2018, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the Constitution prohibits the prosecution of indigent people who sleep in public places when there is no available shelter space." That's the case that I referenced earlier in the Ninth Circuit. "Grants Pass gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn that rule and in the process roll back long standing limitations on cruel and unusual punishment. A majority of the court seemed inclined to do so based in part on a suspicion that the Ninth Circuit somehow is exacerbating homelessness," which, by the way, the implicit argument here—this is me editorializing—is [00:12:00] that it's incentivizing it? Oh, because you say people can sleep in public under a blanket, they're gonna all want to. 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: This is money, too, to prison systems. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yes. Yes. And Mark says, "Let's be clear, it isn't. And abolishing the Ninth Circuit's now ruling will do nothing to help people who lack housing or the communities in which they reside. The appeals court decision was rooted in the 1962 Supreme Court case called Robinson v. California. In Robinson, the high court struck down a California law that criminalized addiction to narcotics. The disease of addiction, the majority reasoned, constituted a status that the government may not penalize under the 8th and 14th Amendments, which proscribed states from imposing cruel and unusual punishments. The act of using narcotics could, of course, be prosecuted, but a person's mere condition as a drug addict could not. Based on this precedent, the 9th Circuit ruled that homelessness, like addiction, is a status that Grants Pass could not lawfully punish. And sleep, far beyond being a voluntary act like narcotics [00:13:00] use, is a basic human need that unhoused people literally cannot live without". 

So, there's the second layer there that should undergird this reasoning and basically say that Robinson applies and that the Ninth Circuit ruling should stand, because sleeping is not in the same legal status as narcotics use, which is illegal. But addiction's not illegal. Homelessness is not illegal. The second standard beneath that should also, again, make this case stronger, but that's not seemingly what the conservative justices are alluding to. 

"Advocates for homeless people were alarmed when the Supreme Court agreed to review the appeals court's decision, given the conservative majority's extreme hostility towards the Eighth Amendment. SCOTUS has torn down pretty much every safeguard against cruel and unusual punishment that it has come across, eviscerating the principle that the amendment enshrines evolving standards of decency into constitutional law. The real question in Grants Pass then is not whether the Supreme Court will side with the town. It will". This is [00:14:00] what Mark says. "The question is how much damage it will do to the 8th Amendment along the way."

 So, Elena Kagan, Supreme Court justice also made the case that I was just making an oral arguments about how sleeping is not something that's voluntary or an action that you can take that should be deemed a criminal criminal activity. But to bring it back to what I said before, this is a way to further. push people in a cycle of poverty and into the prison industrial complex where they're going to have to pay fines over and over again for their own poverty and the conditions that society has set for them.

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And, yeah, I mean, I think Luke O'Neill's talked about this with regards to locking up, the police locking up people in Chicago. Like, if you lock up somebody from downtown Chicago, and they are transported to, like, a suburban containment facility, prison, that not [00:15:00] only means money to that facility, basically for caging humans, but also counts for them on the census. And I imagine this would probably play the exact same way, that, Okay, we sort out all the developers who want the police to remove homeless people, we get more money for prisons and count it towards the [unitelligible] on the sentence. Yeah, this is all part of the system.

Biden Proposes Major SCOTUS Reforms, Including Ending Lifetime Appointments & Enforcing Ethics Code - Democracy Now! - Air Date 7-30-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: President Biden has laid out his plans to reform the U.S. Supreme Court, calling for 18-year term limits, an enforceable code of ethics and an end to presidential immunity. Biden’s plan comes a month after the Supreme Court granted former President Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office. Biden stopped short of calling for expanding the court. He outlined his plan Monday at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, where he commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’m calling for a constitutional amendment, called [00:16:00] No One Is Above the Law Amendment. It holds — I mean this sincerely. It holds that there’s no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office. I share our founders’ belief that the president must answer to the law, that the president is accountable for the exercise of the great power of the presidency. We’re a nation of laws, not kings and dictators. …

The second thing I’m asking for is we’ve had term limits for presidents of the United States for nearly 75 years, after the Truman administration. And I believe we should have term limits for the Supreme Court justices in the United dates, as well. …

Third, I’m calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: [00:17:00] That was President Biden speaking Monday. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson responded by accusing Biden of attempting to radically overhaul the Supreme Court. The House speaker said the proposals will be dead on arrival in the House.

We’re joined right now in Washington, D.C., by Jennifer Ahearn, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Judiciary Program.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jennifer. Why don’t you start out by assessing President Biden’s proposals that he made yesterday in Texas as he celebrated the Civil Rights Act, and also how much chance they have of getting passed, now that we hear what the House speaker has to say?

JENNIFER AHEARN: Good morning, Amy. Thank you so much for having us. It’s great to join you.

I would say this is a pretty big deal for those of us who care about the Supreme Court. President Biden, I think, is somebody who sees himself as an institutionalist [00:18:00] and a champion of the importance of the rule of law and the role of the Supreme Court in upholding the rule of law. And so, if he believes that these kinds of changes are necessary, I think the public already believes this. And so, that he has come along and is lending his voice to this call is, I think, critically important for this moving forward.

I, you know, understand Speaker Johnson’s view, and I understand that this — that means this is perhaps a longer-term project that we are engaged in. And I think, politically, we have a ways to go before the views of the people and the commonsense reforms of these kinds can actually make their way through the Washington process. But I think this is a really important moment in that long process. And we’re just really grateful that the president has chosen this as one of the things to speak out on in his last hundred days in office.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Jennifer, [00:19:00] the commission that President Biden established on Supreme Court reform submitted its report in late 2021. That’s almost three years ago. Why did you think it took him so long to actually pursue some recommendations?

JENNIFER AHEARN: Well, I mean, actually, right, he specifically asked the commission not to give him recommendations, so it really didn’t give him even that list, which I think really goes to show sort of how much movement there has been in his thinking on this in the last few years, right? That he didn’t even want to consider recommendations in those early years of his administration. And so, I think that that is a sign of how far his thinking has come and how far, you know, more broadly, the public’s thinking has come on this issue. And so, I think that that really is why, I think, we are where we are today.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about this proposed 18-year term limit? How would that [00:20:00] affect the court’s stability and continuity, if it were enacted?

JENNIFER AHEARN: I think it would put the court on a more sustainable path in terms of how it relates to the public and to public support for and views of the court’s legitimacy. It’s worth remembering that, really, the Supreme Court has nothing other than its legitimacy, right? There’s no — it has no army. It has no power of the purse. You know, in our constitutional system, the court’s legitimacy and the respect that we, as a country, have for it is really all it has. And so, something like term limits, that would bring the court more in line in a very long-term, sustainable kind of way with where the public is and where — and with the issues of the day, I think, is really important to the court’s overall legitimacy and putting it on that path.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, Jennifer, if you could more specifically address the points that [00:21:00] Biden is making? What would an 18-year term look like? And if there was an 18-year term, who would be off the court right now?

JENNIFER AHEARN: So, the longest-serving members of the court at the moment are Justice Thomas, Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. So, depending on exactly how you implement a reform like this — and there are lots of different ways to do it — you would probably see those folks rotating off first on the list.

You know, I would also say, in general, if you look at, really, big picture, what would this do, remember that the president, obviously, is the one who nominates Supreme Court justices, and so you would see the — whatever swings there are on the court, in terms of partisan who — the partisan who appointed the justice, that would more closely track how presidential elections have gone over time. And that’s really not what we see on the court [00:22:00] right now. We see the appointees from President Donald Trump having, you know, a huge — having appointed three Supreme Court nominees, which is more than any other president. So, you would see some of that smoothing out over time.

The New York Times also had a graphic this morning that showed that if term limits had been in effect in the past, we would see a 6-3 liberal majority at the moment as opposed to the 6-3 conservative majority that we currently see. So, that’s sort of how you might want to think of it generally. And, obviously, the specifics depend a little bit on how you actually put this into place.

News Brief Media, Billionaires' Attacks on Homeless People May Pay Off Big at Supreme Court - Citations Needed - Air Date 3-6-24

ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: I want to talk a bit about, if you could, media narratives around this. This is a media narrative podcast. There hasn't been a lot of coverage of this particular issue. For the most part, it's either, kind of, lurid, shocking tabloid local news stuff centering one's homelessness status in a headline. You know, 'homelessness person' [sic] stabbed so and so, or 'homelessness person' [sic] is caught doing such and such. But of course, we never see headlines saying 'house person' murders wife or 'house person' is arrested for, you know, [00:23:00] securities fraud, right?

So, it's either inciting violence, or it's this maybe, occasionally 10%, you'll kind of get this liberal hand wringing kind of personal interest stuff. Which is fine. I have no problem with that. But generally speaking, as we've covered on the show, there's a lot of demagoguery and misinformation around this particular topic. And like you said, it is framed in this kind of moral context as if it's just millions of people who are just either drug-addled zombies or just lazy. There's been a concerted effort fueled by VC money, real estate interests, and right wing and, frankly, Democratic politicians, I think we would be remiss not to point out where it's gotten more hardcore lately.

So, in the last two years, there's been an effort by the Miami City Council—it was voted on, but I think it was later overturned only because of, I think NIMBY concerns—they wanted to turn an Island off the coast of Florida into a homeless camp, effectively. And then there was an op-ed by former NBA all-star Bill Walton advocating a camp in the middle of the California desert for homeless people. Ron DeSantis now has just revealed a plan to build camps for homeless people. 

Now, what they'll say is, is they'll say—and this I think is kind of a clever [00:24:00] marketing thing that I want to get your take on—they'll say, Oh, it's voluntary. But then when you read the fine print and you realize everywhere that isn't the camp, it's illegal for them to sleep in, by pain of jail or police abuse, and when anywhere but the camp is illegal to exist in, by definition, or to sleep in in any meaningful way, like you said, with the blanket or pillow, then it's no longer voluntary, then it is actually definitionally an internment camp. 

So, if you could, I want you to talk about what these kind of fringe solutions—"solutions"—which, again, are always kind of laundered through this voluntary choice rhetoric, even though we all know that's bullshit, talk about the more extreme end of the spectrum, if you could, and how even like, I think, 10 years ago, this wasn't really even imaginable that as the housing crisis gets more acute and we see more visible poverty, the solutions really seem like they're becoming more overtly cruel and fascistic.

JESSE RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I want to say maybe three things. One is to note that Donald Trump is running explicitly on a campaign of throwing people experiencing homelessness into [00:25:00] internment camps. And that is terrifying. I don't think the things that you're talking about, these internment camp strategies, are fringe anymore. Cities and states across the country have passed legislation to do this. It's largely being promoted by the Cicero Institute, which is funded and backed by tech fund billionaire Joe Lonsdale. And this template legislation has generally four components. One is, camping is illegal. One is the creation of internment camps. So, if you do sleep outside, the only place you can sleep is an internment camp, which is not voluntary. Another part is the gutting of housing that ends homelessness. So, actually taking money away from proven solutions and homelessness. And the fourth component is the requirement that police are involved in homeless outreach, not to address people's needs, but to enforce anti-camping laws.

So, those components are extreme. I want to [00:26:00] talk about Kentucky, who's working on a more extreme version of this, that in addition to those clauses would enable people to enact 'Stand Your Ground' laws if there is a homeless person that's staying on your property. You could use force and even deadly force to remove a person experiencing homelessness from your property. 

So, all of these things are extreme, but that is just unfathomable. And Arizona is working on—you know, I think states are trying to outdo each other—Arizona added a new provision that says if there's a hotel for people experiencing homelessness, or if there's a hotel where people are staying and also being used as shelter for people experiencing homelessness, you have to put a giant sign outside that says homeless people are staying here.

This continual desire to demonize and ostracize people experiencing homelessness is harmful. It's dangerous, and, most importantly, doesn't end homelessness. 

ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Well, that's the issue, right? Because, like, this reminds me so much of this, like, [00:27:00] so called border crisis panic, where it's like the existence of unwanted humans is seen as this thing that just kind of fell from the sky that has no root cause. It has no origin. It has no social solutions or humane solutions, that every solution we have is batons, bars and cages, right? Sort of it's cops and cages, but all the way down, no matter what. And you see this often when it comes to people talking about alternative solutions. So, your organization obviously tries to present that. And in many ways, maybe it's a bit of a, you know, you're kind of yelling into the void because, of course, the media largely presents this kind of anodyne, you know, it's like all the euphemisms we get, right?—secure the border, tighten the border—that obscure the human cost, just like cracking down homeless camp sweeps. 

These anodyne terms necessarily make it look like these are kind of harm-free measures. And the human face is just completely obscured or diminished. I want to ask you from the advocacy work you do, obviously, there's a bunch of people working on housing solutions that are not punitive, obviously, on a state level, especially I know New York has [00:28:00] seen great strides or have made an effort. I know Washington, D. C. has tried to do that and obviously I'll work on that, and that has to sort of be an alternative to this punitive approach. So, from y'all's perspective, what do you find is the general, just talking to lawmakers in the public, what do you think is the kind of biggest misinformation or misconception that people have about the cops and cages approach versus like, Yes, this is not a moral criminal problem, it is a problem of not having sufficient housing. 

JESSE RABINOWITZ: I think the biggest misconception that folks have is that homelessness is a choice and homelessness is an individual failing. But in reality, homelessness is caused by housing that's too expensive and wages aren't enough. But by continuing to individualize the problem, people think there are individual solutions, like a jail cell or punishment or a courtroom. 

But realistically, we have to get to the root of this. And the root of this is that Americans can't afford to pay rent. I think Miami is a really [00:29:00] interesting counterexample to Grants Pass. Miami, until recently, was under a consent decree that basically said they couldn't criminalize people experiencing homelessness if there was no shelter available. So, instead of responding with jail cells, Miami was forced to respond with more housing and more shelters, and they reduced homelessness by half. This shows that another way to address homelessness is possible. 

It's so disappointing to watch our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans, throw up their hands and say, There's nothing we can do, the only thing we can do is arrest people, when in reality, there's so much they can do. We saw during the pandemic that essentially overnight cities opened up hotels to house homeless folks. There's no reason we can't do that now, except we lack the political will to do so. We know that when folks are connected to housing and services, [00:30:00] they don't live outside anymore. And in DC, where I'm based, 95% of people experiencing homelessness in permanent supportive housing stay housed after their first year. This idea that housing doesn't work is simply not true.

Myths about Homeless People with Dr. Margot Kushel - Factually! - Air Date 5-8-24

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: But there is this myth out there that people don't want housing and, um, if that person exists, I haven't been able to find them. You know, like, housing, a house, you know, you probably don't need permission in your house to leave or come, you probably don't have like random strangers walking in, right? You get to do kind of what you want to do. Like, no one is door knocking on your house to say, did you, I don't know, open a can of beer, you know, they don't do that in my house. They don't come and ask me. And so once you offer that, everyone says, yes. 

We did this other study a number of years ago in Santa Clara County. So most, this is like where Silicon Valley is, most expensive real estate market in the country, I [00:31:00] think. And, we basically helped them find about 300 people who were the most, um, or maybe it was 400 people, sorry, 400 people who were like the most challenging folks on their streets in the county. These were folks who were like in and out of jail, the hospital, the psych, emergency room, you know, really causing a lot of chaos. We basically found them and we were like, you know, we're not even going to ask them if they want housing because we're going to see them. Because the reason they're in this group is like, they're getting arrested or getting pulled into the ER all the time. So, we just kind of put a note in their chart, like we flagged their police record and everything. And we're like, if they show up, when you're ready to discharge them, can you give us a call? 

So, the deal was that they had to give us a call. And we had enough units of housing for about half of them. And so we showed up at about seven in the morning and I'm actually not kidding. We literally showed up and we're like, Hi we know you've been up all night, like in the ER, you probably don't feel that hot and, um, you never met me before, but if you sign these [00:32:00] 20 pieces of paper, um, we'll give you a coin flip, a 50/50 chance of getting into housing. We approached 426 people. Two said, I'm really tired. I can't talk to you. Fair enough. One was eligible and said no. Every other person, 423 people were like 50/50 chance and all I have to do is like sign up and sign up to be in the study? Absolutely. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Wow. 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: We flipped the coin. The people who got into housing by the time we finished, 91% of them had been housed at the beginning, 86% when we published our study had been housed. These are like the "toughest to house" people, like lots of psychiatric disease, lots of [unintelligible]. And then once they got housed, they stayed housed. We followed them for seven years and over 90% of the nights on average, they were housed for the next seven years.

So, these were the folks who are like the public is most freaked out about, you know, these are folks who were in the psychiatric emergency department, you know, 10 times a [00:33:00] year, in jail five times a year, you know, in the hospital four times a year, whatever. Like, really, really folks who are struggling mightily. They all were like, sign me up. 

So, this idea that people don't want housing, it's just not true. And what we found in the state study is people desperately want housing—desperately—but there were just so many things. First of all, they couldn't afford it. They were like, you know, when we asked them about the barriers to housing, it was a little bit of a hard question to ask them because they were like, looked at us like everyone sort of looked at us. Like, are you a literal idiot? The rent is too damn high. Like, they were literally like, what do you think? This apartment I can find is $1,500 a month and I only have.... 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah. why don't I have a Rolls Royce either, you know? 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: Yeah, right! Exactly. They were literally like... my poor staff would like text me and they're like, I feel kind of like an idiot to ask [00:34:00] this question. And people are treating me like I'm really dumb. But there are all these other reasons. Like people talked about, almost half of people talked about the discrimination they experienced in the rental housing markets. They're like, you try to go looking for housing if you look like me, they would say. You know, lots of discrimination, lots of people not having the paperwork. They're like, have you ever tried to rent a house where you have no clean clothes and no proof that you exist? Like, how are you supposed to rent a house? So, lots and lots of barriers. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: And in terms of why people are on the street, in terms of those barriers, we almost should have tackled this earlier because it's one of the biggest things that people say about folks who are homeless, is that they are either profoundly psychiatrically disturbed, or that they are addicted to drugs. And that's why they ended up on the streets is because of drug addiction. How much did you find that was true? How much did that cause their problems? How much do those problems exist and how much were they caused by homelessness itself? 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: Yeah, well, to [00:35:00] answer that, I'm going to actually, is it okay if I start with like a little analogy that I feel like helps explain this?

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I would love an analogy. I live for them. 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: You live for them, awesome! So, my good friend Greg Colburn wrote this, with Clayton Alden, this amazing book called Homelessness is a Housing Problem. I was like, joke, like, you gotta love a book who's like, entire thesis—it's a great book, you should read it—but also the title sort of tells you the whole story, right? Homelessness is a housing problem. And they use this analogy that I've used a lot. They've used, it's a great analogy, which is analogy of musical chairs. So, you imagine like a kid's birthday party and 10 kids show up and there are 10 chairs and the adults plays music and the kids walk around. Adult pulls away a chair, turns off the music, and the kids scramble for the remaining chairs. So, you do a thought experiment, and little Tommy, night before, sprains his ankle at a soccer game. And Tommy shows up on crutches, he doesn't really know how to use and he, you know, shows up at the birthday party and they're playing this game. If you're a betting man, and they're like, who is still going to be [00:36:00] standing when there are only nine chairs? I think we would all put our money on Tommy, right?, who's like not going to be able to like dive bomb into the remaining chairs. Right? 

But what if you ask a different question? What if you asked a question like, why is there a kid standing? Well, duh, there's a kid standing because you've got nine chairs and ten kids and either two kids are sitting in each other's lap or there's a kid who's standing, right? So, the same holds true for homelessness. Like in California, right now, we have 24 units of housing for every 100 extremely low income households. Extremely low income household are basically any household that makes less than 30% of the median income for the area they live in. So, that's like a higher income in L.A. than it is in Fresno, but you get the idea. And available and affordable means that it exists, it's habitable, it's not occupied by someone who makes more money, and that they can afford it on less than 30% of their income, 'cause if you're that poor and you pay more than 30% of your income, you can't really pay for it. And so the idea is [00:37:00] that we only have 24 units for every a hundred households. We're a million units short. We basically are playing this giant cruel game of musical chairs, except we have 24 seats and 100 kids.

So, a lot of kids are sitting on top of each other and then we have a lot who are standing. It is not a surprise that who's left standing are often people with behavioral—we call in the medical field—behavioral health disabilities, either mental health problems or substance use problems, because those are disabilities that kind of interfere with your function, interfere with your social relationships. You know, I'm a physician. Like, I don't think about those as moral failings. I mean, in the same way where I don't think having cancer or a heart attack or inflammatory bowel disease, like those are not moral failings, they're just, you know, complex problems that your interactions of like your genes and your luck and your environment. So, anyway, [00:38:00] yes, people who experience homelessness are much more likely to have substance use and mental health problems in the overall population. No, that is not why we have so much homelessness in California. 

White House takes new action to lower housing costs - Morning Joe - Air Date 7-16-24

MIKA BRZEZINSKI - CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: Joe Biden will be in Las Vegas today to announce new action to lower housing costs across the country. According to a fact sheet obtained by NBC News, the action will include calls for Congress to pass a law requiring landlords to cap rent increases at 5 percent or risk loslng out on federal tax breaks 

JOE SCARBOROUGH - CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: With us now, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Biden, Marcia Fudge. Today, she's officially joining the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign as a national co chair. 

Thank you so much for being with us. Obviously, the affordability of housing is one of the greatest...

MIKA BRZEZINSKI - CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: Huge issue. 

...greatest challenges facing, I was going to say young Americans, but young and old Americans alike. 

MARCIA FUDGE: It absolutely is. And thank [00:39:00] you for having me this morning. I'm happy to be a part of the team. Um, housing is a crisis in this country and it has been for some time. I'm really excited about the fact that the President is announcing this in Las Vegas, where the crisis is particularly acute. Housing prices, especially rents, are going up 10-20% annually, and it is making it such that we have more and more people who need assistance, more and more people being pushed to the streets. I think that the president is saying to this country, I hear you. I see the problem. I know the problem, and I'm gonna do everything I can to solve the problem. And I'm really excited about what can happen when we try to make sure that every American has decent and safe housing and affordable housing. That's what today is about. 

WILLY GEIST - CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: Secretary Fudge. Good morning. Uh, you obviously have firsthand experience in this and you've witnessed it from the inside as Secretary of HUD. What are the big challenges from the inside that you saw? You might have come in with an idea about how you were going to fix things. What are the challenges that face [00:40:00] anyone looking for housing, expensive, less expensive or otherwise in this country? 

MARCIA FUDGE: Well, there are only really two things that we can do. One is build more housing because until we put more housing in the market, the market is going to continue to drive the prices up. So there has to be more affordable housing.

But secondly, as we're talking about Las Vegas again, one in three homes in various parts of Las Vegas are purchased by corporate buyers. Corporate buyers come in, they own almost one third of the recently sold housing in places like Florida, Las Vegas and other places. So they drive the prices up because they hold on to them. They don't sell them. They rent them and they raise the rents on an annual basis, and it has created a real problem because we have no control over how that is happening. That is why the president is saying it's time for Congress to do something, to act to make sure that people are not being gouged and that people can continue to expect to find something that they can live in that is affordable.

Can Homelessness Be Eliminated- One Oregon County Found a Surprising Solution - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 4-1-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: The [00:41:00] other story I want to share with you is just amazing that Washington County is a county here in Oregon, it's not, you know, a huge population county. It's not one of the remote, very, very rural counties. It's kind of in between. It's kind of close to us, isn't it, Sean? Yeah, it's next door to Multnomah County. It's the next county over. So, you know, it's got a pretty good sized population. And, uh, the tri-county area, this is called Metro, we've got this weird government, kind of an oversight government that raises taxes for all three of these counties. And they raised this tax a couple years ago as a 10 year homelessness services measure, uh, that only kicks in for people who are making over a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, and big businesses in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties. And what it did is it raised millions and millions of dollars. Well, Washington County took that money and literally ended homelessness in their county with it. "Over the past two years, the money has gone"—I'm reading from this [00:42:00] piece in Oregon Live, in The Oregonian, our statewide paper—"They built a homelessness services system from the ground up, they established 90 tiny homes at three locations, and built other shelters, which in turn allowed outreach workers to eliminate the county's seven large and medium sized encampments by moving those campers into the collective 380 new shelter beds. The county also experienced a near instant tenfold increase in housing vouchers to cover or subsidize unhoused people's rent for a few months, for any period of time from a few months to a couple of years, or even permanently. And this provides", they note, "a glimmer of hope regarding what many had come to feel as an intractable problem. Voters approved the 10 year homeless measure", I already told you about that. 

So, they did it. They pulled it off, which proves that the homelessness problem is not, you know, yes, there are elements of, you know, mental illness and addiction, as there are [00:43:00] with many other problems we have, you know, the crisis in our prisons, for example. But the biggest part of the problem is housing is just no longer affordable in the United States. And in large part, that's because Wall Street, these hedge funds, and these private equity groups are buying as many as a quarter of all new single family, or all single family homes that are coming on the market, depending on the market, depending on where you are. In some towns, they're buying most all of them. And they're driving up housing prices like there's no tomorrow, because they're taking these houses off the housing market and turning them into rental properties.

 And housing should not be a commodity that can become an investment, you know, outside of the investment that individual homeowners make in their homes. I just think this is wrong. 

[You're listening to The Thom Hartmann Program. Call (202) 808-9925.] 

This exploitation of housing as an investment is wrong. What's right is lowering the cost of housing and thus ending homelessness. [00:44:00] Good on Washington County of Oregon. 

Notes from the Editor on the layers of problems and solutions for addressing homelessness

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Today, Explained laying out the background of the case. The Majority Report highlighted... Democracy Now! looked at Biden's proposed Supreme Court reforms. Citations Needed discussed the demonization of unhoused people. Factually! With Adam Conover compared the benefits of harm reduction programs with the alternative. Morning Joe looked at strategies to lower housing costs And The Thom Hartmann Program described the working solution taken up by a county in Oregon. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important, interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, [00:45:00] through our Patreon page, if you like, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. And if a regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

And now before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half, I wanted to look at the problem of government inaction, sort of layer by layer, using one story from Sacramento County in California, where I grew up. So, I just happened to come across this. In the summers, it gets incredibly hot there. I know that people who aren't from California think, first, of all the places with the perfect weather and the moderate temperatures, but those places are all on the coasts and maybe in the mountains, but in the valley where Sacramento is, it gets oppressive. They nearly broke the record this year for the most 100 degree days in a row, which included many days above 110 degrees. And I think they just had one that broke a record at [00:46:00] 116. So, on surprisingly people need a lot of water to survive in a place like that. Well, the county of Sacramento was delivering jugs of water to homeless encampments—not enough to thrive, not even close, just enough to stave off death by dehydration—until they just stopped in the past few weeks, coincidentally, as it turned out, right before that near record he'd wave. 

So, why did they stop? Unsurprisingly, again, the funding dried up. So, when the contract that they were paying for expired and there wasn't a plan in place to replace it, the program was stopped. So it wasn't an active decision pursuing a desire to cut off desperate people from water, but it was the result of the failure to act, knowing that that would be the result. And this I think is indicative of the entire problem of homelessness we have in this country. So, when you dig deeper, you begin to see the layers of the [00:47:00] problem here. The reason that funding dried up is because it was part of emergency COVID funding from the federal government, which of course ended. Now to be clear, I am glad that that emergency money was being used for this good cause. That's not the problem. The issue is that this water delivery program was totally dependent on emergency funding, which was, predictably, a very fragile way to fund a critical program that helps prevent the near instant death of people who cannot access water in the summer in a place where it regularly gets up over a hundred degrees. 

So, looking at the very bottom layer of this problem—insecure funding for water deliveries—one could argue that, Well, the solution is we need better funding sources to deliver water to people. But one layer up, there's another argument that came from an engineer who wrote about this problem and asked, essentially, why the hell are we delivering water [00:48:00] in bottles? Sacramento already has great plumbing infrastructure, so we just need to tap into it. The water delivery program costs $200,000 a year and only provides individuals with about six gallons of water per month. For the same cost providing taps where unhoused people are actually living would provide far more water than the delivery program and help prevent unauthorized tapping into the system, because of course, desperate people seeking water are going to do what it takes to get water. And so they have figured out how to illegally tap into the system, which then of course puts them at risk of further interactions with police and on and on. The writer puts it this way. "Our current method offends my engineer's soul. It is outrageous that humans are picking up, driving, and delivering plastic gallon jugs of water when we have plumbing right now. We have mastered delivering clean, [00:49:00] pressurized, on-demand water to our people. That people are dying of thirst in a place with complete water infrastructure is a sign that we have failed at decency" 

Plus, just the, like nuts and bolts logistics of being unhoused, it is hard to imagine how hard it would be to ever be able to pull oneself out of homelessness if you have to spend significant amounts of time each day, sourcing water to drink. So, making it inaccessible, except for rare deliveries, just helps to perpetuate the cycle that keeps people living outdoors and perpetuates the fact that the government has to deal with those people and the problems that result from it. 

Of course, as we're arguing in today's show, just like how you'd get a better result if you act on the bigger picture, like using built infrastructure rather than cobbling together flimsy insufficient band-aid [00:50:00] programs like water delivery, you'd also get better results if you'd zoom out even further. Start by providing people with housing. They come with water. And watch as that provides the foundation for people to get their lives back on track. Think what they could be doing to improve their situation, if they had a kitchen and a sink with as much running water as they needed. 

SECTION A - THE SUPREME COURT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, for more of the problems and solutions, we continue with Deeper Dives on four topics. Next up, Section A: The Supreme Court. Followed by Section B: Demonization, Section C: The Digitalization of Renting, and Section D: Solutions.

Criminalizing homelessness - Today, Explained Part 2 - Air Date 7-2-24

Unhoused Woman: My biggest concern is that as much as we try, we might be stuck being in the car for a long time. 

RACHEL: Just to put this in perspective: the fastest growing demographic of homelessness in America is people over 65. 

<CLIP> CBS Evening News

Reporter: According to research, the number of homeless people over 55 is expected to spike to [00:51:00] 225,000 in the next four years nationwide, up from 170,000 in 2017. That's a 32% jump. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: So, broadly speaking, how are communities handling this like record setting number of people who are unhoused?

RACHEL: Communities are pursuing, you know, a mix of different strategies. 

SCORING IN <CEZ_CEZ_4209_00201_Strategies_APM>

 Some are increasing funding for low income housing and passing these measures to make it harder for people to get evicted from their homes. 

<CLIP> WMHT, New York NOW

Reporter: That's why New York's capital city of Albany recently became the first in the state to approve what’s called “Good Call” evictions. That makes it harder for landlords to evict tenants without a clear reason why

Council member: we have to protect tenants. There are 60% of residents in the city of Albany who are renters and we want to make sure we are protecting them.

RACHEL: Other communities are also looking for more of these sort of stop the tide measures, like investing more in emergency shelters. Some are banning outdoor camping broadly, but then saying, okay, there can be some places within the [00:52:00] city that people can go if they want to sleep outside, but they can't go anywhere else. 

<CLIP> KVUE

Anchor: For the first time we're seeing dozens of locations, the City of Austin is considering to designate as homeless camping sites. 

RACHEL: As you can probably tell, like these don't really solve homelessness. The real solutions just take time. So we're seeing a lot of communities do things that are sort of trying to deal with the problem, that might not necessarily solve the problem. 

<CLIP> NBC News

Program organizer: Worker: we have housing navigation, we have employment navigation, and we have an outreach doctor, an outreach nurse that comes in, we have mental health professionals. 

SCORING OUT

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: So, Rachel, the Supreme Court just came down with this landmark decision. What do you expect to see from cities on the ground now?

RACHEL: Effectively, what the decision makes it easier to do is it makes it easier for cities to clear out homeless encampments, even if cities don't have actual, real other shelter options available for homeless people to go to. So it also means that it will be easier for [00:53:00] cities to enforce their existing camping bans, which could result in more arrests and fines for people experiencing homelessness. That said, I do want to stress it's not inevitable that criminalization will occur. We could also see states step up like we saw after the overturning of Roe v Wade, to enshrine new protections for people who are homeless. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: So a big question at the center of this case has been whether the Supreme Court is going to make it easier to criminalize homelessness. How does criminalizing affect things on the ground for the people who are trying to solve the homelessness problem? 

RACHEL: Criminalizing people experiencing homelessness absolutely makes it harder to get them into housing. Ultimately. 

<CLIP> VICE News

Unhoused Woman: I got a warning ticket. They know I'm on a voucher. I'm waiting for, from HUD, I'm waiting for the apartments to be built for us to move into. And I'm still getting ticketed. They're gonna threaten to throw me in jail. If i’m going to jail. I lose my housing. 

RACHEL: You know, there are just limits to how many people are willing to rent units to people with criminal records. And so this creates such a significant [00:54:00] barrier. Roughly 1 in 3 U.S. adults has a criminal record. 

<CLIP> VICE News

Advocate for the unhoused: Where do you think that they're brought when they are released from jail? They're brought back to the street, right back to where they started from. The only thing that's changed is they have another barrier to housing. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: You've been covering solutions to the homelessness crisis from different angles, looking at ways cities are trying to combat homelessness. What are some of the more innovative strategies you find that communities are investing in? 

RACHEL: So some states are investing in building more housing and shelter, which is really important. But as we've talked about, it just takes time. And a lot of people are really impatient right now. They want immediate solutions. Some of the faster things that communities are turning to are these things called tiny homes. 

<CLIP> KCRA 3

Sacramento advocate for tiny homes: It's pretty basic, but it gives folks a place to have their own space: a bed, a little desk, some storage. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Does that mean that cities are moving away from, like, temporary emergency shelters? 

RACHEL: Not exactly. But there is this [00:55:00] greater recognition these days that many people who are sleeping outside in tents just do not want to go to these emergency shelters, which at least historically, have been places without much privacy. 

<CLIP> Tristan & Robyn answer ‘Why don't you stay in shelters?’: 

Tristan: Get your stuff stolen. People try to fight ya.

RACHEL: Where you can't really bring many of your belongings, your pets, sometimes your partner. 

<CLIP> Tristan & Robyn answer ‘Why don't you stay in shelters?’

Robyn: If we were to go to a shelter, we would not be able to sleep beside each other. Chances are we'd be separated or monitored or treated very differently because we are a couple.

RACHEL: Some of these shelters have also had rules like mandatory church attendance. A lot of people have had traumatic experiences staying in shelters. And so rather than go back to one, what some people are saying is I'd rather just sleep outside. 

NBCLA

Unhoused man in LA: I'm not on parole. Probation? I'm free man. I want to be treated like I'm free. You living in shelters like you living in jail. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: And like beyond shelters, like, what about people moving, you know, off the streets into actual, more permanent housing like apartments? Is that an option realistically, from a cost perspective, for cities? 

RACHEL: Yes, it's hard, but it is. So an approach to solving [00:56:00] homelessness that has had bipartisan support for nearly three decades is called Housing First…

 … and its general model is getting people into permanent housing and offering them support services but the model has been coming under a lot of strain amid our housing shortage, because you can't really do Housing First without enough housing. 

JULIA LONGORIA - GUEST HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: How did this idea of Housing First even start? 

RACHEL: Well, it really reflected a shift from how homelessness policy in the U.S. had been handled for many, many years, which was this idea of housing readiness or this idea that before we give you housing, we want to make sure you have gone through job training programs, that you have stabilized all the other issues in your life, and then there basically begin a new way of thinking about it. You know, Republicans and Democrats who came to understand that actually, it's really hard to address other parts of your life that are not working well if you don't have stable housing to come home to

Biden Proposes Major SCOTUS Reforms, Including Ending Lifetime Appointments & Enforcing Ethics Code Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 7-30-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In July, Democratic Congressmember [00:57:00] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed articles of impeachment against Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito over alleged ethics violations. The news outlet ProPublica revealed Thomas failed to disclose millions of dollars of gifts from billionaires — in one case, accepting luxury trips virtually every year from right-wing megadonor Harlan Crow — without disclosing them. The Supreme Court justices have since agreed to a code of conduct. On Thursday, Justice Elena Kagan became the first member of the Supreme Court to make a public statement in support of adding an enforcement mechanism to the new ethics code. Kagan spoke at an annual judicial conference held by the 9th Circuit.

JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN: I think that the thing that can be criticized is, you know, rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them. And this one, this set of rules, does not. … I think, you know, both in terms of enforcing [00:58:00] the rules against people who have violated them, but also in protecting people who haven’t violated them, I think a system like that would make sense.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: For more on this, we’re joined by Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica, part of the team who just won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism for its investigation into politically connected billionaires lavishing luxurious gifts on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, also the fact that they support organizations that have cases before the Supreme Court. Your response to President Biden and to Justice Kagan?

ANDY KROLL: I think the statement from President Biden, and especially the comments from Justice Kagan, show how much the conversation around Supreme Court reform has changed in just the last 12 to 18 months. I mean, thinking back to what Jennifer from the Brennan Center said just a moment ago, [00:59:00] the difference between when the presidential commission did its work and put forward its not-recommendations back in 2021 to where we stand today is pretty stark.

The fact that President Biden is using the bully pulpit, as a lame-duck president, to push for these reforms, to really drive this conversation, and then the fact that a sitting justice, in Elena Kagan, is saying this new code of conduct, a code of conduct that was issued in response to ProPublica’s reporting, is not enough, that it does not have enforcement, it does not have teeth, in the way that the code of conduct for every other federal judge does, I think, really shows how far this conversation has come in just a year. Obviously, it has a ways to go, given the politics of Congress right now and what we heard Speaker Johnson say, but we’ve never had this kind of conversation about Supreme Court reform in modern history, so that alone is a notable thing. It just shows the impact, one, of investigative journalism, but also the [01:00:00] impact of this decline in public trust for the U.S. Supreme Court.

SECTION B - DEMONIZATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Demonization.

Criminalizing homelessness Part 3 - Today, Explained - Air Date 7-2-24

RACHEL: Donald Trump, on the other hand, has really been leaning into homelessness. 

 Our once great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged. 

 He released a video in April, saying that if he were president, he would—

DONALD TRUMP: Ban urban camping. Violators of these bans will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment.

RACHEL: He would create sanctioned campsites for treatment and send homeless people to jail who refuse to go. Now, to be clear, he does not actually have the authority to, you know, make all that happen. But he is campaigning on sending homeless people to jail right now, So I think to the extent that homelessness has been coming up, it's really been being leveraged by Trump as sort of this symbol of chaos and disorder and [01:01:00] democratic failure.

'Social cleansing' The Paris Olympics' war on homeless people - Edge of Sports - Air Date 8-25-24

Dave Zirin: UP

We should talk about your organization so people have a better sense of who you are. It’s two organizations in English. It’s Doctors of the World.

PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah.

Dave Zirin: People can see [foreign language] , and also The Other Side of the Medal. Yeah. Can you speak to us about both of those groups?

PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah. So Doctors of the World, they’re the ones paying my salary. I’m a project manager for them, so it’s been six years. I have an amazing team of doctors, psychiatrist, nurses, translators, social workers, and we go towards refugees who unfortunately lives and survive in the streets of Paris and its surroundings. It can be 10 cities, it can be squat in abandoned building that people occupy in order to be out of the streets. And then we have a great network of partners, other NGOs, activists with which we work. And so we organized a year ago and we created [foreign language] , The Other Side of the Medal because we started to just [01:02:00] suffer the effect of the Olympics.

And it’s not just the refugee community, it’s every homeless person, whether it’s a drug user, sex worker, a refugee, people from Eastern Europe. Everybody got affected. All the numbers of expulsions, harassment, even sometimes control and police violence got bigger, new practices started to develop. So we had to organize to shed light on this matter and also to offer solutions in order to avoid that.

Dave Zirin: Now there are attacks on homeless or unhoused people in cities, certainly across the United States and in major cities throughout the world. Do you think the Olympics have been an excuse for this crackdown, or do you think it is happening because of the Olympics?

PAUL ALAUZY: I think it’s a bit of both. I think for the states and the states in general, it’s an opportunity. Because when they do the social cleansing, [01:03:00] they’re going to push the population away and they’re going to replace the tent city with big rocks. They’re going to build new walls, they’re going to put barbed wire.

So I think for them, it’s not just about the games, it’s also an opportunity to transform the city and to select the population. And most unwanted population is the one in public space that they have to push away. So there is opportunity and then there is an effect. There is an Olympic effect, and I think it’s in the DNA of the games. They want to do the [inaudible] village. You have to clear out the streets of all the people you don’t want to so it’s a bit of both.

And here there is a lot of evacuation that you can link to the Olympic village being nearby the passage of the flame. Today it’s the bicycle. Bicycle.

Dave Zirin: The cycling.

PAUL ALAUZY: The cycling race happening today. So [01:04:00] they kicked a slum last week because it was on the tour of the bicycle. So there is a lot of things that you can directly link to the Olympics, but I think it relates to a more general spirit of big capitalist states being violence and mistreating the homeless population in general.

Dave Zirin: You mentioned about them being moved out, put on buses. Where are they going?

PAUL ALAUZY: That’s a good question. Yeah, so I heard a lot about the buses living at [inaudible] before the games, the buses living Vancouver before the games. And here we witnessed this. So it used to happen a lot in France to take the people in buses and send them somewhere else. But France, right before the games in March, 2023 created a new system. It’s called the SaaS system, and they created 10 spots everywhere but in Paris.

So it’s going to be close to [foreign language] transport in smaller [01:05:00] cities, like small cities, like with 5,000 inhabitants tops, in which people get taken in charge for three weeks. They have three weeks in a hotel or something. After three weeks, 40% of them they will have solution meets long-term solutions in that region. All the others, they are being sent to emergency shelters sometimes for nights, two nights, two months tops, and they end up homeless in another smaller cities where they don’t have the same community outreach and everything.

To give you a very concrete example, just today, two hours ago, I had some patients, they have guns. They’ve been living in the streets for a couple of months here. They just received a new guy. He is an Afghan, too. They know him. He’s been kicked out of Belgium. So that’s his first day in Paris because they’re in Paris called an NGO. I was able to give them a tent. I was able to give them sleeping bags, and they will [01:06:00] try to find somewhere to sleep because it’s very tense now with the Olympics, but at least they have this. You have a community and then you have a community that has a network. If you go to a smaller city to reach the states doesn’t give a dime to receive that population. It’s just going to be horrible for their health and dealing conditions.

Dave Zirin: Through the Olympic activism. Have you been able to meet new people who take this issue of the unhoused more seriously? Have more people gotten involved in the struggle for the rights?

PAUL ALAUZY: Well, the beautiful thing, the right side of the Olympic effects is the fact that everybody’s coming up together. We never regrouped that many association and NGOs working with so many different publics. Usually it’s going to be, oh, you guys work with refugees. You do your thing. Us, we work with the sex workers. We will do our things on the side. And now everybody come up together. Sometimes people with very different [01:07:00] positions. So that’s a good thing.

And then the campaign was crazy because when you have a subject of the homeless or whatever, usually people don’t care that much. If you add Olympics to it, then it blows out of proportion because then you have the BBC making inquiries. You have you coming to ask me questions. You have the international attention. So we really spread the world in a way I couldn’t even imagine. This year, we have media from every country in the world asking to make inquiries about this. And I think it’s not just the Olympic effect, but it’s also the ethic of journalists all around the world that want to not just serve the good side of the Olympics, but also do their job. And it’s nice to meet that many journalists from that many country taking their job very seriously to treat every side of that event. 

Myths about Homeless People with Dr. Margot Kushel Part 2 - Factually! - Air Date 5-8-24

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: But what's so funny is that what you said [01:08:00] about, you know, drug abuse and uh, uh, mental health issues being diseases, not moral failings.

Yeah. Is true. And almost everybody in America, if you asked them, which those things are, they would say, yes, that's a disease. And yet there's this moral dimension that we always bring to it. I think all the time about this conversation I have with my neighbor. Um, we were talking about homelessness in our neighborhood and he said, yeah, well, you know, a lot of these people there, you know, they're addicted to drugs and alcohol.

And I was like, yeah, man, but so are we like, I'm smoking weed. I'm seeing your recycling, dude. You're bringing out, you're bringing out a lot of empty Jack bottles every week. You know what I mean? But the difference is you and I are in our homes. Exactly. And these people are not. So what is the actual difference between us and why would you say these people need to get clean before they have a home?

You have a home and you're not fucking clean. You're popping pills. You're, you're doing coke. Come on, man. I 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: know. I mean, it's really like, I mean, [01:09:00] I, I, for like a variety of reasons, don't like, I'm like the most boring human being in the world. I'm like the vegetarian, never smoke, never, never use pot. Don't haven't had a drink in like a million years.

You know, I'm like so boring. It's not even funny. And, um, And, and one thing about being nice, you look around and you realize like, oh wow, when you, when you don't drink, you realize how much people drink and as a physician, you realize how much people, people drink a lot, right? I'll be at these events. Like I do a lot of public events.

Where people are pretty hostile and like being really mad and yet they're all like, I'm like watching people and they're like, they're like, Oh, come to the event. We'll have like lovely wine. I was like, 

MUSIC: yeah, guess what dude, like 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: you're drinking too, you know, but I think, I think also, you know, one thing is we don't walk into people's homes and, and check.

Right. If they're, if they're doing drugs and pull them out, that's just not a thing we do. Um, the other thing is, um, yes, if it winds up being a problem for you, [01:10:00] which it is for many people, um, it, it does interfere with your social functioning. In fact, you know, both mental health and, and substance use issues are actually sort of diagnosed.

Not by, for instance, whether you use, but diagnosed as an addiction if it interferes with your social function. So it's almost like racked up in it. You know, the difference is like, really a little neurotic and having a mental health problem really hinges on whether it interferes with your, with your social function.

So, of course, people who have a problem that interferes with their social function are more likely to be homeless, but, but there's so much we know so well that, um. That it doesn't interfere with the ability for people to be housed and furthermore as someone who does Tons of substance use treatment like it's so interesting for me now to hear this really horrifying backlash against harm reduction Um, and i'm like, dude, the opposite of harm reduction is harm increasing Like do you wanna do you actually want to increase people's harm?

And and I always wonder why people [01:11:00] don't seem to notice that all of us who are actually doing substance use treatment You Believe in it, right? We believe in it because I can't save the life of someone who's already dead. I can't, I can't help you kick your opioid problem if you're dead, it's too late, you're dead.

And, um, and yet what we heard time and time again, we heard some really interesting things about the substance use related to this. One thing we heard from people is people using it, um, what we would call instrumentally, which means that they're using it because they're homeless. And not to get myself in like a whole lot of problem with the law here, but if I were like that guy from Breaking Bad or something, if I were trying to design the perfect drug to survive homelessness, You know, meth meth is sort of it, right?

I believe that people use drugs to solve some problem in their lives. Like, you know, they use it to smooth, you know, they're like a little anxious. And so you drink a little bit and you feel less anxious. That's good. You know, whatever 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: reason I have always used any drug I have used is I got some benefit from it at the time.

I needed to sleep. So I fucking drank some Evan [01:12:00] Williams, you know? 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: Exactly. Right. That's why people use. Right. And so if you're homeless, we heard from so many people that the methamphetamines, um, you know, here they are, they're getting assaulted. Their stuff is getting thrown away. They're like, Hey, and they're hungry.

There's no food. They're hungry. What does meth do? Meth keeps you up. It keeps you alert and it keeps you from being hungry. It's not great. It does a lot of harm. We were really aware. It's not like people aren't aware. It's not like people are like, Oh, no way. I didn't know that this is bad for me. Everyone knows it's bad for them, but they're using it for a reason.

When we talk to people about quitting. We heard universally like absolutely, but I can't do it. Don't, don't take this from me now. Don't take it from me when I'm out here, I can't think about that right now. You get me into the housing and then I'll quit. Um, so that's one thing. And the other thing was really, I think one of the things that was really eye popping to me was that over a quarter of people [01:13:00] who either used alcohol heavily or use drugs regularly.

Told us that at some point since they became homeless, they had actually attempted to get into treatment and the door was closed, they couldn't get in. Wow. And one in five people told us that right now they were trying to get into treatment and they're like, there is no treatment. I go, I show up when I'm supposed to show up, and they tell me there are no beds or there's no treatment spots or there's nothing for me.

And, and I think that that's really important to keep in mind. Um, you know, as a physician, I can tell you that, um, substance use treatment, it takes many times before it sticks. That's just sort of how it goes. Just like, just like we don't cure leukemia in a day. We don't cure substance use in a day. Like it takes some, it takes some, you know, time and time again, and that's okay.

Cause people get there. Um, But the people who are most likely to benefit are the people who have made that mental model switch in their head. They're like, I'm ready. I want to do this. And what we heard is that one in four [01:14:00] people were like, had made that switch, and there was no place for them to get treatment.

You put that with the public dialogue now. If we've got to force people into treatment and I'm like, how about we use our, how about we increase our spots? How about we make it easier to use and come back and talk to me once everyone who wants it can get it. But like we are, and I, you know, as a physician, I can't tell you how much like I'm like calling around begging first, it's hard to get treatment spots.

And yet, and yet like there's this myth out there. That like we've got to force people because they don't realize that this is harming them. They are full well aware that it is harming them and a lot of them are ready for treatment and we are the ones who are closing the door in their face. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah, because the, the, the beds simply aren't there, the rooms aren't there, uh, there's so many times that, you know, you'll see some elected will, will have cleared an encampment, you know, the, the, the cops come through everyone's stuff in the trash and they say, Oh, everyone [01:15:00] was offered housing.

Everyone was offered treatment. Well, what was that offer? Hey, you can get on a wait list. Here's a form to fill out. Here's a number to text. Okay. Just stuff in the trash, you know, like that's, it's not an offer. It's a, it's, it's a sign up for nothing. Um, And 

DR. MARGOT KUSHEL: if, and if they're not taking, if someone is out in the 110 degree heat and they're not taking the shelter, you're offering them, maybe you should give some thought into what, what are you offering them?

And people are never offering housing. Like housing is just, you know, in San Francisco, They open up the wait list for Section 8. Section 8 is the voucher that pays, you know, that you use on a free market and it caps what you pay to 30% of your income. They open up the wait list for two weeks for the first time in a decade this fall.

For the first time in a decade, the wait list. They had two weeks. You have to fill out these extensive paperwork. 65, 000 people signed up. They only have about 6, 000 spots that will be distributed over the next few years. Um, People are not offering people [01:16:00] housing and they're turning it down. I mean, look at our study in Santa Clara.

Those were the folks we intentionally chose the folks who give the public the most headache, right? Who like, we were like, if these folks will take housing, everyone will. These are the folks with the most significant. Significant sort of behavioral health impairments and things. They all were like, sign me up, even though we showed up at arguably like the worst moment.

We generally showed up after people had been up all night in the, you know, ER or in the jail or something. And they were all like, 50 50 chance and all I have to do is subject myself to being in the study? Sign me up. So I don't believe that people are offering people housing. It just isn't true

SECTION C - DIGITALIZATION OF RENTING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section C: The Digitalization of Renting.

The Eviction Economy w Mya Frazier - The Majority Report - Air Date 4-7-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Um, so your piece starts off in 2021 at a meeting for the, uh, Columbus Apartment Association, this landlord lobbying group in Ohio, and this is in the immediate [01:17:00] aftermath of the COVID eviction moratorium expiring. Uh, what did you see? At this meeting, this kind of conference that you went to, which, when, when I was reading your piece in Harper's, it gave me kind of chills down my spine, uh, about how, um, how corporatized and how automated, honestly, this process, um, of evicting people from their homes is beginning to become.

MYA FRAZIER: Um, yeah, I had started spending some time at my local eviction court during the pandemic from some previous stories I've been working on and Um, I started getting interested in this one law firm. He filed the most evictions in court and was trying to understand sort of the power dynamics within, uh, my local eviction court and, uh, and someone mentioned, you know, the main managing partner of this law firm that [01:18:00] files the most evictions in Columbus mentioned he was, uh, You know, headed to promote their services at this conference.

And so, you know, I headed out there that day, uh, and, uh, was, was really kind of intrigued by what I found because it was. It was a lot of these boosts that you would think. At an apartment association, you know, there were the normal boosts for cleaning up. You know, apartments that were messed up or landscaping and so on, but there was also just this.

Uh, Very, uh, all these booth tech booth. So it's almost kind of, you know, kind of like a bunch of startups and, uh, promoting a lot of services that would allow landlords to not even be directly involved in managing their properties. And so, uh, that was, that was very intriguing. Just the rise of prop. [01:19:00] Tech which is this industry that is just during that time frame was getting billions of dollars in investment 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, you have a sentence here that I thought summed it up quite nicely Two converging trends the automation of property management and wall street's consolidation of america's rental housing stock Had exacerbated the already uneven power dynamics of the landlord tenant relationship um, and that The, the symbolism of, of what, uh, you saw in that, in that particular meeting or conference seems to represent that.

Um, if you could just speak to those two trends in particular, and, and what you witnessed, um, and, and what you wrote about, uh, both the automation of, of property management as you touched on there, and Wall Street's involvement as well. 

MYA FRAZIER: Certainly, um, sorry, now my, my own message is, um, certainly we don't hear it.

Don't worry. The, uh, [01:20:00] the interesting thing that I saw was that you, you, I was watching what was going on in eviction court. I was watching the efficiencies that this local law firm had there and trying to understand how is that possible. And so in understanding the growth of property management, you saw how They were able to prepare all all the documents, all the information that was necessary to start an eviction.

So there is almost like a triggering mechanism that's possible now within property management within the software systems where the. Uh, it's, there's just certain, uh, conditions they're able to put on, uh, the, the, you know, the inflows of rent, the, the late fees, the, what would trigger an eviction, and, and just the ease with which they're able to then port that information [01:21:00] to a landlord attorney and proceed with the eviction process.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's almost like artificial intelligence, AI, to a degree of. Uh, who, who meets this criteria, um, for eviction, and then they work kind of hand in hand with legal representatives. You, you highlight this powerful law firm, Willis Law, and they're, they're bundling of these eviction cases for the courts in Columbus, in particular.

Um, what did that look like, this law firm that, uh, Seemingly has made a, a bit of a, a, a specialty in, in representing these landlords in eviction cases in Ohio. 

MYA FRAZIER: Um, yeah, so the, the issue with eviction court, depending on where you are, is whether or not you need a representative in court to proceed with an eviction and.

Uh, [01:22:00] you used to not have to have that in Columbus. Uh, there was a practice known as sort of eviction by affidavit where this law firm would take affidavits from the property manager and proceed forward with the evictions. Um, and, uh, it can be time consuming, like for a landlord to deal with an eviction to have to go to court.

Is time consuming now, there was a le, there was a legal fight where that practice was outlawed, but it didn't do much to stop this sort of batching of evictions on the docket. So the, the, the sort of brilliance of their business model, Willis Law, is they're able to go to their, their clients and say, we're very efficient.

You know, you can own you. You don't have to give up the labor time of sending your property manager. To be there all day or to go on multiple days, they're able to go say on one day and deal with, you know, 2030 [01:23:00] evictions at one time, which I witnessed quite frequently. You know, I spent a lot of time there and, you know, certain cases would be called up for a very specific property.

Uh, and they would just be taken care of very, very quickly. So, um, and out of the dockets, which often ran over 100 a day. Willis would dominate that. They would have the vast majority of those cases on an ongoing basis. And although I never was able to figure out how much they were making on each of those evictions, it's, you know, plainly a very, very profitable practice to batch and, and evict quite frequently.

Uh, for landlords at that level of efficiency, 

Landlords Using Shady Algorithm To Raise Rents w Judd Legum - The Majority Report - Air Date 6-15-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: First tell us about ReelPage and then give us the timeline of what's been happening on that. 

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah. And, uh, and this was a story that was really broken [01:24:00] open by ProPublica a couple of years ago, um, about ReelPage, which is a, uh, software program that is used by many corporate landlords, particularly any large building with a bunch of units, that's really what it's optimized for.

And the landlords feed in all of the information well beyond what you could get, you know, on Zillow or publicly available information, vacancy rates, what they're actually charging, all the fees. Um, everything that there is. And then this program spits back out, uh, a recommended rent for that unit. But what's insidious about this process is that essentially so many corporate landlords are using it that they know that They don't need to go underneath that recommendation because the building around the corner is also using [01:25:00] real page and is also going to be using these prices.

And what we, what they found is since, uh, the corporate landlords have adopted this, uh, in large numbers, the rents have gone up and up and up and up. So that's, that's essentially how this, how the system works is that it's, it's. effectively collusion via software, where they can all, they're not sitting in a smoke filled room, uh, fixing the prices of, uh, rent in a given area, whether it's Atlanta or Seattle or wherever it is, but they're doing so via this software algorithm.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And I, I gotta say, like, I don't remember this element of the story until I read, uh, your piece on it. But if there's also sort of like a mafia quality to this, where they say, look, if you're going to use this software, you cannot undercut the price that we give you. Because then you're screwing up everything.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And [01:26:00] that seems to be a big giveaway. 

JUDD LEGUM: Yes. They have people who are monitoring it, who are making sure you're in compliance with their recommendations. And actually if you price your, uh, apartments too low, uh, too many times you'll get kicked off. Uh, the system. And so we actually have learned a lot more, uh, in the last two years since that pro publica story came out because there's been a series of class action lawsuits.

There's also been lawsuits filed by the attorneys general in D. C. And elsewhere, too. So That process has started to, um, reveal even more information about how the whole system works. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And, um, and you write that, um, um, uh, that it's deploying real paid software in, in one case, uh, in Houston, uh, resulted in pushing people out with higher rents, but ultimately increased revenue.

By [01:27:00] 10 million. So they're making a ton of money off of this, the landlords, but they're, I mean, that's the beauty of like price fixing, right? It's like, I know I can sustain this higher than market price. If everybody sustains this higher than market price. 

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah, and it's essentially gotten rid of negotiation.

It used to be you could go to rent an apartment, they sell you, here's the price, 3, 000 a month, whatever it is. You go into the rental office and you say, you know, I'd really like to pay 2, 900 a month. Um, now part of that is there's a housing shortage, but the other part of it is RealPage has made it clear that you are not to negotiate these prices.

And they, and the corporate landlords can feel confident. Because before they might know, well, if I won't give these people 100 or 200 off, they're just going to go around to a corner to another nice building and those people will do it and I'll be left with an empty unit. But they know [01:28:00] if those people go two blocks down, they're going to run into the exact same pricing scheme and the exact same reluctance to negotiate under any circumstances.

So that's really what's driving the prices up. There used to be a say Get heads in beds, you know, when you, when you ran these big buildings, the idea is keep them full, but real pages kind of, uh, overturned that philosophy. And now they're, they're really holding the line on prices, even if they have to keep a couple of units empty for a little bit.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Uh, you cite in, uh, one of those hours, one of those lawsuits, this one in Arizona, that in Phoenix. apartments, 70 percent of multifamily apartments units listed in Phoenix, Metropolitan area are owned, operated or managed by companies that have contracted with real page. A lawsuit, DC, 60 percent of large multifamily buildings, 50 units or more set prices using real page software.

These numbers, I don't know. I mean, they may have gone up since then. [01:29:00] And we don't really know, I mean we can't, do we know, like. Can we look at Boston, at New York and at, um, the Dallas, the Chicago, I mean, do we have a sense of like just how ubiquitous this real page software is, or is it only piecemeal information?

JUDD LEGUM: Well, it's really piecemeal at this point because, uh, you, when the, when their suits filed, they can do discovery, they can get information about what's going on. Uh, there's, there's are some ways to sort of, to see. Uh, and to and people have tried to collect data, but we don't have a full sense. We don't know.

Um, what the full scope is. And by the way, there was a competing software company, uh, that had somewhat of a different approach to how it advised these corporate landlords to manage their properties. It was purchased by RealPage. So it's really the whole purpose of it and they even say this in their marketing materials is [01:30:00] You can charge more than the market price would bear otherwise Which is a pretty clear indication that you're doing something to subvert the actual competitive market um, and You know, this is in the context of a housing shortage.

So the prices would be going up anyway, but The level of price increases that we've seen, especially in major metropolitan areas, has far exceeded even the inflation that we've seen in some other, um, you know, uh, areas. 

SECTION D - SOLUTIONS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section D: Solutions.

The Eviction Economy w Mya Frazier Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 4-7-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right. And so when, say, your rent gets increased 30%, you don't have anywhere to go, and you are evicted, but you're staying longer as you figure out your next move, um, that would be an example of why squatters rights would be important, or, uh, tenants rights, versus the right of a landlord to evict whenever they choose.

MYA FRAZIER: [01:31:00] Yeah, I mean, the, I think the challenge of the moment is, landlord tenant law is a very, um, Local matter. Um, it varies state by state. It can even vary city by city. And so a lot of the push on that I saw and talking to a lot of tenants rights groups and, uh, national groups that are studying this problem is that there's really no way out of this bind unless there's some federal federal Regulation on what's going on for the within landlord tenant law, right?

That's a challenging, uh, complicated, uh, uh, yeah, I mean, and how that unfolds. I mean, there's been some various attempts. There's been some really interesting proposals, but I think we're very early days on how to sort of address this gap between sort [01:32:00] of the legal context at the local level. The limits of federal intervention and to the housing crisis that, you know, I saw, you know, if it's even happening in Columbus, Ohio, where, you know, pretty much rents were mostly affordable and in my, you know, in my lifetime and have just in the last 10 years become just punitive to the point of impossible for most people, um, Yeah, the question of kind of how to solve that is, I think, remains, um, uh, you know, an open question.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Certainly. I mean, we're getting a little bit of a trickle out from the Biden administration that they see housing as a problem. I'd said a few months ago, Biden should run on a national housing initiative, but we haven't Uh, federally funded affordable housing, uh, since the 90s because of the Faircloth Amendment, um, and like these neoliberal practices.

Uh, we should be [01:33:00] have, uh, some sort of standardized national rent control in addition to building more housing and, and zoning practices so there can be duplexes and, and, and, and, and really though, I just can't imagine how in any just society, a 30% rental increase should be allowed. I mean, that should be federally regulated as an undue burden on the tenant, but we don't have tenants protections nationally in this country whatsoever.

MYA FRAZIER: Yeah, I mean, the push for a tenant bill, Bill of Rights, was kind of you know, was the blueprint, um, in January of 2023. Yeah, so we're, a year later now, what that's sort of been, uh, diluted down to is, um, A possible cap of 10 percent on rent increases for housing that's in, uh, that receives low income housing tax credits in the, in the US.

So that's an interesting proposal, [01:34:00] but it would only impact about 2. 5 million. House households, and when you think about there's 44M rental households, is that enough? And additionally. You know, the people I interviewed at eviction court, the people I spend time within, other reporting that I'm doing, a 10 percent increase is still impossible economically for most people.

Um, I mean, 30% is out there, but even having a 10 percent is, I mean, I mean, inflation rates of, you know, 4 and 5 percent put people under, what a 10 percent for one of your biggest monthly expenses is, Is impossible for a lot of people and, and, and can lead to them being displaced and, uh, and without housing.

So, 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: and, and as we, we wrap up here, Maya, what. In, in your, uh, observations, what was the, the, [01:35:00] the kind of, um, or what were the kind of people who were landlords, right, and what were the, who were the kind of people who were tenants? What, were, are you seeing this kind of rapid increase in corporately owned, uh, housing?

In Columbus, I mean, are the, you speak about this automated landlord system, but, um, for the kind of more existing structure in Columbus, what, what are, who are the landlords and then who are the tenants really? 

MYA FRAZIER: Um, I mean, Thomas has seen a mass infusion of investment from out of state and a lot of consolidation into, um, it's not just that.

You have. Landlords who are, you know, Wall Street owners, but you have property management systems that operate for smaller landlords. So even this idea of a mom and pop landlord, you know, [01:36:00] maybe someone who in the past had 10 to 12 properties that they've managed personally, they're now turning that over to these property management systems.

either companies or software programs that really takes a lot of the human discretion out of that relationship. So you're seeing that on, I think, on a pretty rapid, um, it's, it's, it's almost a, a complete change in how that relationship works. Um, and so I've seen that here, um, where, uh, it just, you know, You know, people have kind of given up and just turned over the management of that to other companies.

So that's, that's a significant change and how, uh, tenants sort of interacted with, with their landlords. Um, I, I would say for tenants, I think the frustrating thing that I've seen from them is they, they just can't, Negotiate with money. It's very difficult to begin a conversation about, you know, I'm having an issue.

You [01:37:00] know, I, you know, I, I had my car break down. I can't make my rent this month and just a little lack of, um. Accommodation or grace within the system because of. The way that these metrics that are now being applied through property management software to making decisions about ensuring the landlord's.

Not just profitability, but perhaps excessive profitability

Rep. Katie Porter Lays Out Her Plan to Lower the Cost of Housing - Rep. Katie Porter - Air Date 6-28-24

REP. KATIE PORTER: My son Paul broke my heart with a question. He asked, Mom, will you come visit me when I grow up and live outside of California? Why would you want to live out of state? I asked. It wasn't that there's somewhere else he'd rather be. He was just a teenager, a teenager. already worrying that he wouldn't be able to afford to live where he grew up.

He's right to be worried. [01:38:00] We all face a big cost of living problem. Housing has become Too expensive and affordable housing altogether too scarce. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that there is a nationwide shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes. That's not just a problem.

It is a full blown crisis. Washington has bungled this for decades. And nothing is changing. Earlier this year, bipartisan House and Senate leaders promised Quote, the biggest housing investment in co in hou the biggest investment in housing that Congress has made in 35 years. Until the deal fell apart.

We're back to solving yesterday's problems tomorrow. Maybe. Washington insiders might not have a plan, but I do. Let's start with the easiest step. [01:39:00] Let's create a housing committee. We currently lump housing issues into the Financial Services Committee, a body focused on Wall Street, banking, and financial markets.

But housing is about so much more. It's about shelter, it's about well being, it's about opportunity. Not just about Wall Street profits. Housing should have a dedicated committee. And then Republicans and Democrats on that housing committee must work together to do three related things. First, increase the supply of housing.

Second, make housing easier to build. And third, make housing more affordable. Believe it or not, the supply part is pretty easy. Republicans and Democrats alike actually want to increase our housing supply. You don't have to take my word for it. Look at the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, which would [01:40:00] enhance tax credits to build 2 million homes over the next decade.

It is publicly supported by 111 Democrats. And 111 Republicans. So let's pass that! And then, why stop with tax credits? Let's unleash private capital for home construction by guaranteeing and securitizing the construction of 1 4 unit starter homes. Just like the government already does for big apartment buildings built by Wall Street real estate firms.

Those are the steps that we need to take to invest in our housing supply. But actually building those homes is still too challenging. And it shouldn't be. Stick and brick homes are expensive. Manufacturing costs have gone down in virtually every industry. Except home building. So why aren't we copying and learning from what worked [01:41:00] in other industries?

Imagine a home built, at least in part, from 3D printed materials. Congress can invest in this type of technology and reduce building costs by over 30%, just by thinking creativity. Creatively. And all levels of government should be partners in creative thinking. Congress should reward counties and cities that take steps to make their building and zoning requirements more flexible.

And the federal government should release some of its unused land so we can build homes on it. With these simple steps, we can build way more affordable homes and get those financed and built. Then, we just need to figure out how to make them affordable to own. One problem is that hedge funds have been scooping up all of the affordable homes, especially starter homes.

We need to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act [01:42:00] and tax Wall Street investors that purchase hundreds of homes solely for profits. Houses should be for homeowners and mom and pop landlords, not Wall Street companies. Looking to drive up their profits and with the money we make from that bill, we can invest in down payment assistance for first time homebuyers.

Often the biggest thing stopping people from owning a home is not having the cash to pay up front for the down payment. Even if they can afford the regular payments on that mortgage. Down payment assistance will solve that. Folks, this is what a plan looks like. Congress just doesn't have one. The United States did not wind up with a shortage of nearly 7 million affordable homes overnight.

Our housing crisis is the gradual consequence of leaders in Washington [01:43:00] being asleep at the wheel for over 30 years. Well, Congress needs to wake up. Lowering people's housing costs isn't pie in the sky. We have done it before. We did it through the GI Bill for service members, and we can do it again for all Americans.

That's what we need from Washington, and I'll keep pushing to get it done.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Today, Explained, Democracy Now!, Edge of Sports, Factually! With Adam Konover, The Majority Report, and Representative Katie Porter, Further details are in the show notes. 

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