The Roots of Poverty in America
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This message comes from NPR sponsor, Mattress Firm. How do you sleep at night? Upgrade to the rest you deserve with Mattress Firm's premium selection of top brand mattresses. Get matched at Mattress Firm's semi-annual sale and clearance and sleep at night. In May 1831, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived on his ship in Newport, Rhode Island. 35 days had passed since our departure when we heard the first cry of land.

He had passed through thousands of miles of open ocean. Above, below, and around reigned perfect solitude and absolute silence. Moonless nights and furious storms. Our vessel pitched violently, throwing up on each side huge clouds of foam. This foam looked like fire. The 25-year-old son of French aristocrats had come all this way to see America.

Technically, the French government had sent de Tocqueville and a close friend to investigate the prison system in the United States. And they did that. But for de Tocqueville, the prison research was just an excuse. The thing that truly fascinated him was American democracy.

So he ventured off, around the Northeast, out into the Western frontier, then down the Mississippi. We set forth with the intention of examining as fully and as scientifically as possible all the springs of that vast machine, American society, everywhere talked of and nowhere understood. As de Tocqueville grew to understand how 19th century America worked, he also started to see some ways in which it didn't.

He wrote about racial inequality in the U.S., how both Native Americans and Black people suffered under what he called tyranny of white Europeans. And then there was the growing income inequality he observed. The manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public.

Decades before the Gilded Age, de Tocqueville noticed a fracture forming between the people who owned factories and the people who worked in them. These two men meet in the factory but know not each other elsewhere. And whilst they come into contact on one point, they stand very wide apart on all others.

This wasn't a political divide. It was an economic one. But it did have political implications. In other words, if you live in poverty in this country, can you actually enjoy the civil and political rights which you are supposedly guaranteed? Nearly 200 years after de Tocqueville's visit, another emissary from outside the U.S. arrived.

In 2017, Philip Alston was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. And what he saw in America concerned him.

After his visit, he went on a bit of a press tour. To go to Skid Row in Los Angeles to see the never-ending encampments and tents, to go to Alabama to meet with people who live in areas that have no sewerage connection, and so their sewage is basically just pumped out into their gardens. Those sorts of things have a pretty big impact. His assessment of the likely future was bleak.

The reality now in the United States is that if you are born and live in a certain zip code, you will probably forever be linked to that income level. So if you're born poor, you won't escape it. You'll get bad education, you'll get bad childcare, you'll get bad nutrition, and you'll end up with bad schooling and a bad job. The American dream has become the American illusion in too many respects.

The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And yet over 10% of people in America, nearly 40 million, are living in poverty. Think about the last three years, the price of everything on the rise, from gas to transportation, housing, food. It's no wonder families are continuing to struggle. Do I pay rent right now or do I buy healthy groceries for my family? That's big.

I've been part of the system, and I know what it means to make a dollar too much, but you still can't cover your basic needs. Even if you're not experiencing it yourself, extreme poverty is becoming harder to ignore. We see it in sprawling tent encampments, commutes that take three hours each way because it's too expensive to live near a job. More than a third of people in the country say they're worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage.

Medical bills and layoffs can change a family's economic status almost overnight. Two million families across Pennsylvania. 101,000 kids in Kansas lived in poverty. It's an issue that affects Democrats and Republicans. Leaders across Portland and the region are dealing with homeless encampments. People living in major cities and people in rural areas. The bottom line is this is an American crisis. It's not an anomaly.

The percentage of Americans who think economic issues are the nation's most important problem has more than doubled since 2020.

In a 2024 poll, more than half of Americans named high costs and inflation as major problems. Even for people who aren't poor, the specter of poverty can feel close, too close. And that's going to matter when they go to the polls this November. So with that in mind, we wanted to talk to someone who's thought a lot about poverty's implications and who has ideas for how to address it.

Poverty sits at the heart of all these problems we care about. Matthew Desmond is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and sociologist at Princeton University. He's dedicated his career to studying the roots of poverty in this country and figuring out what can be done about it.

His argument is that addressing poverty in the U.S. is central to addressing many of our other political and social issues, and that it's something we might actually find common ground on. Whatever our issue is, whatever keeps us up at night, this tolerance for

for all this poverty and unnecessary poverty in America is somewhere at the heart of that issue. If you care about democracy, you should care about making sure people have this floor under them that will give them kind of the energy and the ability to be productive, healthy citizens. If you care about public safety,

and making sure kids can walk down the street. You know, you should care about addressing poverty. If you care about, like, making sure we have the most dynamic, fast, forward-facing country, you gotta care about poverty. Poverty is a policy choice, and it's something that we can undo. It doesn't mean that poverty is only here in America, of course.

But it does mean that we have much higher rates of poverty than we have to have. So all this poverty in our midst is unnecessary and shameful. And because it's unnecessary, there's hope. There are real solutions on our path. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. Today on ThruLine from NPR, what it means to be a poverty abolitionist. Hi, my name is Tim Berry. I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina. And you're listening to ThruLine.com.

from NPR. Poverty and income inequality are not the same thing.

But they are related. Inequality has grown wider in recent years. The rich are richer. But for most of us, wages have stayed about the same. And this reality is especially hard on kids. The child poverty rate in the U.S. is significantly higher than some other developed countries, places like South Korea, Germany, and Canada. So, Throughline producer Christina Kim spoke with sociologist Matthew Desmond.

about how we got here. How would you explain what is the state of poverty in the U.S.? Can you paint us a picture of when we talk about poverty, when we use this word, what does it look like, feel like, smell like? What can we see and not see that fall under the umbrella of what poverty is in America?

Yeah, the state of poverty in America is bad. You know, I mean, we have a lot more poverty than other rich democracies. So we have this distinction of being this country with enormous wealth and enormous poverty. And poverty isn't just the state of not having enough income. For a lot of folks, poverty begins in childhood, like it did for me and my family, right? And that childhood is a childhood often of blunted possibilities and potentials.

It's a childhood where you grew up in substandard housing, often dangerous housing, but your family is still giving most of their income just to keep the lights on and keep the rent paid. It can be a childhood of eviction and homelessness. The normal person getting evicted today in America is a child.

Poverty is often going without health and dental, right? So poverty is cavities until the tooth rots. Poverty is ignoring that pain. Some communities, poverty is getting roughed up by the police or spending time in a cage for sentences. You know, poverty is often rejection upon rejection.

It's also this diminishing of personhood. Poverty really stresses us out. You know, have you ever like been in a hospital waiting room? Like your friend or your loved one is like behind those doors and you're just waiting, waiting, waiting for the news.

And you can't think of anything else, you know? That's kind of like what it means to be in poverty mentally, where you're just focused on that bill or this crisis, which came after the last crisis, which came after the last crisis. And that's incredibly taxing on people on a day-to-day too. So, you know, an image that we might have is just one problem on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, this kind of constellation of social maladies.

And so I think the weight of that problem should really spur us all to action. And we should really start questioning why this country of dollars, right, has so much poverty in our midst. I think the biggest misconception about poverty in America is that we have to live with it. You know, that all this hunger and scarcity and homelessness is kind of like inevitable or, you know, there's nothing we can do about it. And I think that that kind of hopelessness or nihilism is pretty boring and just like not American, you know?

So I'm going to shift us a little bit. I'm going to make you kind of go back a little bit in history before we dive in a little more into the arguments that you're making. It feels like poverty, like as you have explained it as a feeling, as people's opportunities, it feels like the world has always been divided in haves and have-nots. It's almost like part of the human condition. So like when did poverty as we know it today start in the U.S.?

Oh, we've always had poverty, right? I mean, this is a country founded on the backs of enslaved workers, right? So we've always had incredibly deep poverty in the United States, even if we haven't officially counted it. I mean, one short history of poverty that we could tell is like, you know, World War II happens, the country comes out of the war victorious. And this was a time of like, the United States felt just awesome about itself. The American economy is one of the wonders of the world.

You know, Philip Roth calls it the moment of collective inebriation. You know, the country's drunk on its own success. Today, our surging strength is apparent to everyone. The economy is really strong because Europe is in tatters. And we start describing America as really the country with the highest standard of living, right? It's affluent, an affluent society. 1960 promises.

to be the most prosperous year in our history. But in the late 50s and 60s, these reports started coming out that began troubling middle class and affluent Americans who, you know, kind of thought they were living in a poverty-less society.

And most famously, you get Michael Harrington's book, The Other America, which wants to expose kind of this hidden group in America, the poor. Many of us and perhaps most of us don't know that these people exist. The elderly poor, kids that are poor, African-American families disproportionately poor. We may be for the first time in our history in these United States or

on the verge of having a hereditary poor, a permanent poor. And that book really got to Kennedy and therefore got to the Johnson administration, and it shook a lot of middle class and affluent Americans. It kind of changed our story about who the country was. And the real tragedy is that at this very moment, where we have in our grasp with our technology, with our productivity, with our science, the possibility of

abolishing poverty, at this moment, perhaps we are creating a hereditary poor. Can you tell me the story of Molly Orshansky, who she was and how she calculated poverty and how are we still living in her wake, if you will?

Yeah, so JFK is assassinated. LBJ assumes the presidency. And he needs an issue. And the issue's got to be one that extends JFK's legacy, but also is an issue that LBJ can really emboss with his own stamp.

And poverty is that issue. January 8th, 1964. Mr. Speaker, members of the House... So his very first State of the Union address goes down, stands in front of Congress and says... And this administration today, here and now... We are launching a war on poverty.

And so the War on Poverty is launched, and it's this kind of bundle of domestic programs. It makes food aid permanent, expands Social Security, invests in education and health insurance. But now how do you know if you're winning the war, right? Like, how do you know if you're making progress on poverty? And so a bureaucrat named Molly Orshansky is like, I got it.

If poverty is not having enough money to meet your basic needs and nothing is more basic than food, then you can calculate poverty by saying, okay, here's a basic food budget, kind of a low-cost food budget. And if more than a third of your income is dedicated to that food budget, you're poor. And so that's the poverty line. And that's still our poverty line. It's called the official poverty measure and it's adjusted every year for inflation going back to the 1960s. And if you use that line...

What you learn is that, you know, between 1960 and 1970, the official poverty rate dropped by about half, in large part because the war on poverty. And it only measures food, it seems like. It's not looking at housing costs or other things. Is that correct? It uses food as kind of a baseline measure for when someone should be considered officially poor. But no, it doesn't count housing costs or health care costs or regional differences in cost of living.

So in 2011, the country launched a different kind of poverty line. This is called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, and it overcame those problems. And this kind of measure, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, is what most social scientists use to measure poverty today.

Could you talk to me a little bit about the war on poverty? So what advancements happened and then when did they stop? Yeah, what's going on? So when we think of the success and the war on poverty, the big thing that we have to keep in mind is the war on poverty didn't fight the war by itself. So back then, one in three Americans who were working belonged to a union, right? Yeah.

Wages were climbing every year. CEO pay was reined in. So when the labor market was delivering for workers, even the poorest paid workers in the country, anti-poverty programs were cures. But today, the market has turned those programs into something like dialysis. You know, they help. They really help. They're lifesavers to millions of families today. But the way those programs are designed is not in a way that actively cuts poverty at the root.

But even it seems like during the war on poverty in the 60s, because there was a stronger labor market that was actually helping workers or at least allowing workers to make more of a living wage than today, those remedies, they were more, you called them cures as opposed to dialysis. So where is the turning point? Where do you begin to see in this U.S. history that the anti-poverty measures stop taking effect? They stop being cures and they start becoming like palliative care.

You see this real clear connection in the data between the lack of worker power, which is the decline of unions, and the decline of effectiveness with addressing the poverty rate.

So when we talk about union power kind of beginning to decline, we see that with deindustrialization in the 70s going up into the 80s. We see, you know, obviously more outsourcing of a lot of the jobs that were unionized in the past. Is that the pinpoint then? Is that when we start to see a change in programs? And I ask this because interestingly, you know, in your book, Poverty by America, you say you often hear –

liberal discourse say, oh, it's the neoliberal turn that began in the 80s, you know, with Reagan and Thatcher as the spokespeople there to blame for this big change. But you don't find that. I used to think that was the story. Like one of the reasons poverty has persisted in America, state retrenchment, like the state doing less for the neediest people.

But if you look at the data, the reality is a lot messier. And so this gets a little wonky, but here we go. So if you look at per capita welfare spending on the 13th biggest means-tested programs, these are things that we usually think about when we think about welfare, like food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid. So spending on those programs goes from about $1,000 per person the first year Ronald Reagan is elected president to about $3,400 per person the first year of Trump's presidency.

That's a big increase, the 237% increase adjusting for inflation. So at least when it comes to spending on anti-poverty programs, the country has not gotten stingier over time. The opposite is true. One way that people resolve this paradox is by saying, oh, the government programs don't help. That's untrue, though. That's just an empirically untrue statement. There's just a ton of evidence that these programs are incredibly helpful.

I think what we have to accept is the fact that we might be spending more to stay in the same place because a lot of these programs do not cut at the root cause of poverty. So if you think of...

work, right? The biggest thing we do today to help poorly paid workers isn't to like increase their power through unionization, for example, it's to give them a wage subsidy called the Earned Income Tax Credit. It's about a $70 billion a year program. It's a huge program, which is incredibly helpful and reduces poverty and is a lifesaver to these families, but does not address the fact that they're still poorly paid workers at the end of the year.

And the starting point is when workers started to lose power. And so I think that's when you see this kind of division between wages and productivity, where the country continues to get way more productive, but the bounty of that productivity is not shared openly with workers. And then that's when you see also this kind of beginning of the housing crisis that's only accelerated in the decades since.

You know, you mentioned earlier that these programs aren't addressing the root causes of poverty. So what do you think are the root causes of poverty in the United States? I think there's three. First, we exploit the poor. We exploit the poor in the labor market, in the housing market, in the financial market. I mean, financial exploitation, just in fines and fees, like in overdraft fees, check, cash and fees, payday loan fees, $61 million in fines and fees pulled out of the pockets of the poor every single day. That's a big reason.

before we have so much poverty in America. The second reason is we do a lot more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty, you know? And so we have this welfare state that actually gives the most to families that need it the least. But the third reason is we continue to be segregationist. You know, we wall ourselves off and we draw lines between opportunity and desperation. And, you know, if we want to get serious about ending poverty, we have to finally tear down those walls.

Coming up, every year the U.S. government spends billions of dollars on welfare programs. But where is that money going? And why isn't it doing more to alleviate poverty in America? Hi, this is Jamie Platt from Rockford, Illinois. I love how you make history come alive. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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If you had to guess, how much of our annual federal budget would you say went to poverty programs? A little? A lot?

Well, the total spending on anti-poverty programs in 2023 was more than $3 trillion. That's more than our defense, education, and transportation budgets put together. Those funds are distributed to many different welfare programs and used for things like cash assistance to families, Medicaid, and supplemental security income for people with disabilities.

But in both red and blue states, there are also billions of welfare dollars that don't reach those people. According to 2020 data from the Census Bureau, a higher percentage of both children and adults are living in poverty than the year before. At the same time, states are holding on to more federal money set aside for helping these people. $732 million. That's how much the state of Tennessee has left unspent in

in federal funds for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. This is a rare issue where both Democrats and Republicans in Tennessee are very riled up about this. And this isn't just happening in Tennessee. In 2020, Hawaii and Maine also held on to millions in TANF funds. So did the state of Mississippi. And much of the money they did spend didn't go to needy families.

NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre is under growing pressure tonight as a new court filing says the former football star waged a campaign to aggressively lobby for millions of dollars from the state welfare agency to finish building a volleyball facility at his alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter played the sport. A former director of Mississippi's welfare agency, John Davis, has now pleaded guilty to federal and state charges that he conspired to misspend tens of millions of dollars.

of those welfare funds meant for the poorest families in what is the poorest state in the U.S. — When this news broke in 2020, Brett Favre denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. He later paid back some of the money he received as speaking fees and still insists he did not know the funds were coming from programs meant to provide aid to poor children. — This event made a lot of Americans wonder: How could something like this have happened in the first place?

Matthew Desmond says the bigger scandals are the ones that don't make headlines. Throughline producer Christina Kim picks up the conversation. So I'm wondering if you can explain what happened with Mississippi and like TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Like what's happening to these programs that you're saying, you know, we're funding more of, but somehow they're not as effective. I mean, the Mississippi story is,

is bonkers. So when Clinton reformed welfare in the mid-90s, he turned welfare into a block grant, which is now called TANF. And a block grant is just a wonky way of the federal government saying, hey, Mississippi, or hey, Louisiana, or hey, California, here's some money, and here's some general parameters about how to spend it, but you guys have some freedom about how to spend that money.

And boy, states do exercise that freedom and no one bigger than Mississippi. And it made a lot of headlines, right? And people were outraged. But for me, the deeper outrage is like in state after state, red states and blue states, most states do not spend most of their TANF dollars on direct aid to those families. They spend it on all sorts of stuff like abstinence-only education, marriage counseling, Christian summer camps, etc.

There's a bunch of states that don't even spend the money. And so nationally, for every dollar budgeted in TANF funds or welfare funds, only 22 cents lands in the hands of someone in literally direct aid to help them. And what we're talking about when we're talking about that, we're talking about kids not having enough to eat. We're talking about kids getting addicted because of that. These are real consequences.

And so, yeah, a dollar in the budget does not necessarily mean a dollar in someone's pocket. And is that what's breaking down? Because, you know, we are funding these programs. Is it all just this, this kind of mismanagement? Like what is happening to our anti-poverty funding? Is it this TANF story? TANF is one story. Another story is about welfare avoidance. The fact that billions and billions of dollars in unused anti-poverty aid go unclaimed every year.

What drives that? We used to think it was stigma. You know, we used to think people were too proud to connect. And there's something to that. I don't know if you ever spent time in a welfare office, but it's a pretty embarrassing, even dehumanizing experience. And there is something to the stigma argument.

But it's not everything, actually. So like if you look at the share of folks in each state who could receive food stamps and do. OK, that's called a take up rate. So in Oregon, basically everyone who could receive food stamps received them.

But in California, only about 63% of folks who could receive food stamps receive them. So it's not like you cross the border and suddenly food stamps get more stigmatized. Something else is going on. So what's going on? So the answer is like red tape and bureaucracy to receive food stamps. You know, we've wrapped these programs in unnecessary red tape.

And we're doing a pretty bad job, you know, of connecting families to programs that could really use. I think that's both maddening and hopeful. The hopeful thing is like some small tweaks can go a long way, you know. So even changing like the font on advertising can get more folks to sign up, for example, for like the earned income tax credit.

I want to go back to the root causes of poverty. And I think one of the ones that you really outline in your book is essentially that we live in a system in which many people benefit from poverty. Can you break down who benefits from poverty and how? You alluded to it a little bit earlier, but if you could. Yeah. So one of the folks I write about in the book is a young man named Julio Peaz. So Julio would start his day at McDonald's working 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.,

They'd have two hours to rest, and then he'd clock into Aerotech, going anywhere where the temp service sent him between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. And then he'd rest as much as he could, and then he was back to McDonald's. You know, each day, a minimum wage. Julio told me he had to work that much to afford the little apartment he shared with his younger brother in the Bay Area. Who benefits from that? So corporations benefit from that, sure. But...

Don't you and me benefit when we consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce? It's easy to talk about shareholder capitalism like it's like 12 dudes in a Manhattan boardroom, but like half the country's invested in the stock market. Don't we benefit when we see our savings plans or retirement accounts going up and up like magic, even when that means that someone like Julio pays a price for it?

And so I think that when you really start writing yourself into this story, you often are confronted with the fact that, you know, it's not just the other political party. It's not just a super rich. It's not just structure, like whatever that is. It's also us or, you know, $11 billion in overdraft fees charged every year to poor bank clients.

So banks benefit from that, but so do you and I if we have free checking accounts. They're not free. You know, they're subsidized by all those fees. You know, if landlords are raising their rents really aggressively, they benefit from the housing exploitation of the poor. But so do those of us who are homeowners. Don't we benefit when we collectively work to make housing scarce and expensive so our property values goes up?

So these are the kind of arguments the book is trying to make. Not to make you feel guilty, but to make you feel empowered. You know, if you're part of the problem, you're part of the solution too. On the other flip of this too is like, you call people out, right? The story of poverty isn't about them, they, other people. It is a story about us. It's like an American story in which we're all participating in. But you also argue that the government also subsidizes the middle and the upper class. What does that look like? Yeah. Yeah.

For me, this is like the biggest shocker of the whole book. When people ask me, like, what surprised you the most? This is the thing. Because when we think about welfare programs, we often think about TANF, cash welfare. We think about food stamps, housing assistance. We might think about Social Security, you know, which a lot of us benefit from or will someday. But you also got to think about tax breaks. You have to. You know, they cost the government money and they put money in our pockets.

So if you add up all that money, everything the government does for us, what you learn is that families at the bottom 20% of their income distribution, those are our poorest families, they receive about $26,000 a year from the government. But the average family in the top 20%, like our richest families, they receive about $35,000 a year from the government. That's almost 40% more. And so I think that should make us...

really question the values of this imbalanced welfare state. And it should force us to reject any claim that this country can't afford to do more. Like we could afford to do more if the richest among us took less from the government.

And I want to move to like the second part of your argument, which I know you have three, but it's about housing. Housing, I feel like is such a hot issue. I think people listening to this now are feeling a housing crunch on all sides. Like rents are up 22% since the pandemic. It's a high borrowing costs and expensive housing have like locked many people out of, you know, the quote unquote, the American dream of buying a house, whether you're middle or upper class. And then we do see homelessness rising.

It's skyrocketing. I think people are hearing this and they're like, okay, access to any kind of housing, I'm feeling it regardless of whether I feel poor or rich. It's a problem. So how do we make sense of the housing market right now when so many people feel like they're barely making it because of housing? So for families that are renting below the poverty line, they're spending most of their income on housing costs.

just on rent and utilities. The rental market is brutal. The housing market has become out of reach. And segregation is a major part of this story. The country continues to be deeply segregated by race and class. It's an active project that's still going on in America today. And if you doubt it, you could just take a Tuesday night and go down to a zoning board meeting.

and meet a lot of folks that are doing their best to uphold exclusionary zoning that keeps out any kind of affordable housing or even just any kind of like multi-family housing in certain neighborhoods. We can say there's not enough parking, there's environmental concerns, the schools won't be able to take it, I'm really worried about my property values. And this is something that's happening in Republican communities and Democratic communities.

And so I think that this isn't just the result of the legacies of redlining. This is also the result of people today doing a really great job of coming up the process. If low-income families literally can't live in certain communities and towns, that's going to highly concentrate poverty outside of the walls. And so, you know, you can't solve poverty without solving the housing crisis. So how do we do that?

If the country suddenly decided to double, triple our investment in affordable housing, and we wanted to build a bunch of housing, where would we build it with all these zoning laws? I think that part of the solution isn't just deepening our investment. Part of the solution is really rethinking the design of our communities. And for affluent white folks that are listening, this is on us.

This is us that are drawing these incredibly hard lines around our communities. And so I think we have to rethink that if we want to get serious about the housing crisis. Coming up, Matthew Desmond says Americans can abolish poverty. And he has a list of suggestions for where to start. Hello, my name is Lina and I'm listening from West Sonoma County, California. And you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

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On an October Sunday in 1970, residents of a small town in New Jersey filed through the bright red door of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church. They took their seats in the one-room chapel, and a meeting began that set in motion a landmark case for affordable housing. A group of local organizers in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, wanted to bail 36 garden apartments in their town. This was a housing affordability issue.

As affluent white families had moved out of Philadelphia and across the Delaware River to New Jersey, families who had lived in the area for generations were being priced out of their own communities. In Mount Laurel, the population more than doubled between 1960 and 1970, and the town's historic black neighborhood was in desperate need of affordable housing.

Some residents were living in converted chicken coops. But even as the committee laid out their plans, the mayor, a man named Bill Haynes, was unmoved. He said Mount Laurel was only zoned for single-family homes on big lots. He put an end to the discussion, saying, quote, If you people can't afford to live in our town, then you'll just have to leave.

That didn't work for Ethel Lawrence. The 44-year-old schoolteacher had lived in Mount Laurel her whole life, and so had seven generations of her family. Here she is in an interview with the New Jersey Network in 1985. Every time a developer bought a piece of land, somebody was displaced. So therefore, you know, there just wasn't any affordable housing. And the cost of housing went up and up and up. So Lawrence went to see a lawyer

And in 1971, she became the lead plaintiff in a complaint against the township of Mount Laurel. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled on that case four years later, in 1975. And it made a groundbreaking decision, saying the restrictive zoning in Mount Laurel discriminated against the poor. And that violated the state constitution.

The Mount Laurel Doctrine, as it became known, has been challenged in court multiple times since the 1970s. Not everyone in New Jersey was happy about the new mandate to build affordable housing.

This decision is past nine and we should fight it by doing absolutely nothing and let the Supreme Court challenge us. This is mind-boggling. A little town like this with only 750 houses suddenly being increased to over 4,000 units. I'll go to jail before I'll surrender my town to the courts, to the judges and whomever else is attempting to jam this down the throats of the people.

But the Mount Laurel Doctrine continues to be enforced in New Jersey, where more than 60,000 homes for low-income working families have been built in the last 50 years. Matthew Desmond explores how policies like the Mount Laurel Doctrine can reverse our housing crisis. And he has more thoughts on how to abolish poverty in the U.S. Here he is again in conversation with ThruLine producer Christina Kim.

What needs to happen in order to solve the housing crisis? How do we have to reimagine our communities? What do those look like? So New Jersey has a state law. It's called the Mount Laurel Doctrine. And it says, look, every community in this state has to do its fair share of affordable housing. And that fair share is dependent on like job numbers, demographics. But everyone's got to pitch in. It can't just be this one city or this one cluster of cities. We all got to pitch in.

And if you don't pitch in, the courts could redraw your zoning laws. So this has given every community in Jersey a big incentive to really come up with a plan to do their fair share of affordable housing.

I took some of my students to go visit the affordable housing development. And I told them, like, there was a big study that came out and it showed that there was no effect on property values. And a few students were pretty skeptical. They're like, is that true? But then we get there and it's clear why that worry was so overblown because Mount Laurel is a beautiful development. You know, there's green grass, there's pretty apartments, there's swing sets, you know. And so once you kind of take it in and look at it, you're like, oh, of course it didn't have any effect.

on property values. And in fact, so many times, you know, what kind of scares folks or petrifies folks, even reasonably, is a fear we have to fight through and lean on the data. Because if you allow developers to come in and build multifamily homes, they have a profit motive to do so, even if there's like a cutout for 10%, 15% affordable housing units. And so if we want a market-based solution, you know, to the housing crisis, here's one of them. We have to really rethink

zoning laws, moving from exclusionary zoning that commands most of the country to inclusionary zoning, something more along the lines of what New Jersey has. So do we need a deeper federal investment in affordable housing? Absolutely. But we also need to rethink our communities on the ground level. You actually believe that poverty can be eradicated. I mean, that is a very hopeful reframing of the problem. I think a lot of folks may be listening to this

feel like it's intractable, even though you believe that. So how do we do it? What are some ways that you think we can start to systematically eradicate poverty? The first thing we do is deepen our investments in fighting poverty. And we did this during COVID, the third rescue bill, the American Rescue Plan. That was the most important thing that the federal government has done for low-income families since the war on poverty. And it did things like

Expand the child tax credit so very poor families could receive it. Extend rental assistance to tenants who are in arrears with their landlord. These kind of things. Those domestic policies reduce child poverty by 46%. So we have a very clear track record of what we could do to fight poverty if the government would get more serious about doing so.

The second thing that we need to do is to empower the poor. We need to expand worker power. We need to expand housing choice. And we need to end the unrelenting financial exploitation of the poor. And the third thing we have to do is tear down our walls and really try to reach for communities of broad prosperity and not communities of just hoarded opulence and hoarded opportunities. Yeah.

You explicitly say in this book, this isn't about poor people. It's about everyone else. It's about us. Yeah. So how do people reconcile –

with their daily lives? Like what can they personally do? And how have you grappled with it, right? Like I work at NPR. You are a Pulitzer Prize winner, a noted author. You run a lab at Princeton, which has a many billion dollar endowment. And I ask this not to call you out, but because, you know, I think it can be paralyzing. It's like, okay, I'm part of the problem. What can I do in my daily life? I don't, you know, I'm not writing policy right now. So what do you say to them?

I think you should call me out. You know, I think that we should call each other out. We're open to having this conversation about other social issues that we care about. So let me tell you about my process. So for years, I've been critical of like the mortgage interest deduction, which in theory is something that all homeowners could take, but it's really just a windfall for the wealthy. How does it work?

So it works during tax time. If you have a mortgaged home, you can deduct the interest of your mortgage from your tax bill. You can do this on your first home and your second home, including your yacht or your ski cabin or your RV. And that costs us about $26 billion a year in a few years because the expiration of some caps that Trump put on with his tax bill, it's going to cost us over $100 billion a year. Okay? This deduction. Okay?

Most people that claim this deduction are white, and most people who claim this deduction are in the top 20% of income earners. And so I'm eligible for this deduction. Okay? I'm a homeowner now. I don't want it. I think it's ridiculous. We would rather live in a country where less money from the government flows to stable homeowners and more money flows to renters that are crushed by the high cost of housing.

And so this is a way that we are kind of pushing against this normalization of an unbalanced welfare state where those of us who can just can take all the deductions we're entitled to. But maybe that's immoral. You know, maybe we shouldn't. And so that's one other way that you can get involved. And then those of us who are living in segregated communities, we've got to go to those zoning board meetings. Yep. And we've got to stand up and we've got to say, look, um,

I'm for building this thing. You know, I want these kids to get the same opportunities my kids get by living here, build it. And this is like, this is awkward. And this can be contentious with your neighbors. And this can cause some friction in your life. But this is what it means to be a poverty abolitionist.

So these are a few ways that I've struggled with, that I've wrestled with. I haven't figured everything out. But I think that there is something very meaningful about trying to divest from poverty in our daily life and kind of talk to people about it. You've done a ton of these interviews. What frustrates you about the conversation you're having? Do you think that the people interviewing you, media outlets, are missing something or should ask you or talk to you about something else?

I do think that there's a lot of us that have kind of, our default is like hopelessness, you know, or nihilism. And I think that that default can allow us to embrace these absolving theories of poverty.

Like a question, what is the likelihood that Congress will pass, you know, like that? It's like, I don't know. What's the likelihood that you're going to change like tomorrow because of this, you know? And I think that I'd rather have those kinds of conversations than these conversations about things that feel very far away and distant. I just think that if we want to get serious about strong, real structural political change, we have to get serious about personal change too.

And that's not really a conversation we usually have on NPR. You know, we usually have a conversation about policy, history, Congress, far away stuff. I guess I'd like to have a little conversations a bit closer to home. And I just, I'd like us to stop blaming the other guy. It's not that the other guy isn't blameworthy. He probably is. But it's also like, what are we doing with that discourse other than just running in circles?

Are you hearing from people on the right or that might have a more conservative point of view that you think people on the left should consider and vice versa? Are you seeing, especially around the poverty debate, this kind of missed opportunity where because we are so polarized right now, there's kind of something that's missing, like where we're not hearing each other, that we should be?

This is not to deny like real divisions that are present and harmful and hurtful throughout the country. But on this issue, on economic justice, there's huge bipartisan hunger. There's folks in red states and blue states, folks in rural America and urban America that feel that the country isn't working for them. And so I do think there is real potential for a mass movement against poverty.

The thing about mass movements though is they're mass and not everyone in the tent agrees with you on everything. And that's where the challenge comes in. That's where the work comes in. Are you okay with organizing with someone

you completely disagree with on issues of abortion or gun rights, but you're locked together on issues of worker power or needing to address the affordable housing crisis. That's a sticky wicket that I think we have to confront. But there is real power in the fact that many Americans on both sides of the aisle

are really done with all this poverty and all this inequality. They do want a more vibrant country. They don't want to worry so much about their kids. They don't want to have that, like, icky feeling that you feel when you're, like, in an exchange and you know the other person is just getting the short end of the stick, and that's America. So I do think a lot of us are willing and ready to make sacrifices because we know we're going to get a better country because of it. That was producer Christina Kim speaking with sociologist Matthew Desmond.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And... Christina Kim. Casey Miner. Sarah Wyman. Rachel Horowitz. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Devin Kadiyama. Nick Neves. Kiana Paklion. Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Alex Goldmark, Johannes Dergie...

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

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