>> Tonight, how to finally end poverty in America.

A Pulitzer Prize winning sociologist jerseys wake-up call.

What he says everyone can and should be doing to lift up the over 38 million Americans in need.

MetroFocus starts now.

♪ >> This is MetroFocus with Rafael Pi Roman, Jack Ford, and Jenna Flanagan.

MetroFocus is made possible by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation.

The Peter G. Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund.

Bernard and Denise Schwartz.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

And by Jody and John Arnhold.

Dr. Robert C. and Tina Sohn foundation.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Estate of Roland Karlen.

The JPB Foundation.

>> Good evening, and welcome to MetroFocus.

I'm Jack Ford.

Since our last interview, Princeton University sociologist Mathew Desmond has won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and seen his book named one of the decade's best.

Because work is credited with transforming the conversation about housing in America and experts a saving over one million people from homelessness during the pandemic.

In his latest book entitled " poverty by America" he is arguing poverty persists in America because among other things the rest of us benefit in some shape or form.

It is a wake-up call to people of means everywhere.

Professor Desmond joins us tonight to discuss how we can hopefully end poverty for good.

Thank you so much for joining us.

>> It is good to be with you.

>> Before we get to this book, which is just another deeply researched evocative and provocative look at this issue, I am curious about you personally, because you have dedicated your professional life to a study of this idea of poverty, and how it exists, why it exists, and what we can do to combat it.

Why has this essentially becomes the central purpose of your professional life?

>> I just hate poverty.

I hate when it does to diminish us and exhaust us.

It cuts our lives at short.

I grew up in a family without a lot of money.

We had our gas shut off.

I lost my childhood home to foreclosure.

The property that we experienced was nothing like the poverty I saw for my last book evicted.

I saw grandma's living without heat in the winter, whole families getting evicted all throughout the year, and this level of poverty and destitution in this land of riches -- really -- unsettles me.

>> One of the things you write about is this paradox.

We say your -- you say we are the most prosperous democracy in the world, and yet we are engaged in such dramatic property.

Why that conflict, contrast?

>> It is a paradox, and it is maddening, because the richest country in the world certainly has the resources to end poverty, not just reducing.

The way I come down on this question is there is so much poverty in this land not in spite of our wealth, but because of our wealth.

A lot of us who are privileged, protected benefit from poverty often in ways we do not recognize.

>> I went to get to that in a second.

This is fascinating and in many ways will cause discomfort or many of your readers.

When we are talking about poverty, is there a definition?

Is one of the problems how we define it?

>> In a way, yeah.

Poverty is income level.

A family of four below $20,000 a year artificially for -- $28,000 a year are officially poor.

It is the population of Australia here.

Plenty of hardship above the poverty line.

One in three folks in America live in a home taking in $55,000 or less.

That is not poor, but what else do you call it when you live in Miami or Boston or Seattle and are trying to raise a few kids on $55,000 or less.

There is there the fact that poverty is not a matter of low income.

It is chronic pain on top of a debt collector harassment on top of eviction and homelessness on top of death, early and often.

Poverty is not just a line.

It is a tight ball of agonies and humiliations, that should spur us.

>> You made a couple of important points.

We have the poverty line and you think if you're above it you are fine.

I was raised by a single mother with four children, and we lost our house, and then my mom went back to college to get her teaching degree.

We were above the line, but raising four kids on a teacher's salary back in the 1960's was not that easy.

We got closer to paychecks, we were eating peanut butter and jelly.

Personally, that is fine, but let me go to what you mentioned here, a couple of things that you mentioned.

One thing I want to ask again is this idea about poverty and definitions.

Where does race enter into this calculus, if you will?

>> Straight to the heart of it.

It is impossible to write about poverty in America without simultaneously writing about race in our present-day systems, racial exclusion and our legacy of systematic racism.

One critical part of this is, you know, racial privileges and disadvantages do not dissipate below the poverty line.

That is why black poverty and white poverty are quite different experiences, and the biggest thing to recognize here is the kind of neighborhoods that white poor families live in are really different than the kind of neighborhoods black poor families live in.

The typical black poor family lives in an extremely poor neighborhood, that is not true for the typical white family below the poverty line.

A lot of those white families are struggling, but they are also often sending their kids to schools that are flourishing, they are often living in neighborhoods with more economic advantage then low income black families.

That is one example of how race and poverty intersect to complicate this picture.

>> Let me go back to something you touched on a minute ago when we are talking about definitions.

One of the things you write about in your book is the idea that poverty is not simply not having enough money, but rather not having enough choices.

What does that mean?

>> When you do not have a lot of choice, you get taken advantage of.

That is called exploitation.

I note that is a hot word, a morally charged word, but I think a lot of us have been in situations where we have to take a bad bargain because it is the only one we have.

A lot of us for example when we are in an accident and an ambulance arrives, we do not ask what it costs.

We have got to take care of the emergency.

That is the situation poor families face all the time.

Let's think about housing.

If you are a poor family, and you you usually have only one choice about where to live.

You have to rent in a private market and give most of your rent to the landlord.

At they are shut out of homeownership and also public housing, because the waiting list for public housing systems is not counted in years anymore in our biggest cities.

It is counted in decades.

Often that means they overpay for rent that is not up to what they're paying for.

They are overcharged.

A lot of low income families are red strapped because of supply and demand dynamics but the housing crisis has not enough homes, they are often overcharged because folks can.

They do not have a lot of choice.

Attacking that and expanding choice is a huge part of what it means to address poverty today.

>> I want to go back to something you touched on.

It is reflected in the book's title.

One of the core concepts you talked about is that poverty persists in this country because other people in many ways benefit from it.

Now, that might be a discomforting thought to folks, so let me ask you to explain that concept.

>> Yeah, so many of us benefit from property -- poverty because we consume cheap goods and services that the poor produce, cheap goods and services that rely on rock-bottom pay.

Many invested in the stock market enjoyed returns in our investments, but many of those returns are a kind of human sacrifice in the country area many of us to protect certain tax breaks like the mortgage interest reduction or tax breaks for wealth transfers that starve antipoverty programs from sufficient funding.

>> In what way?

The money is going there instead of into antipoverty programs?

>> Absolutely.

Should I give a few examples.

In 2020 nations been $193 billion on mortgage reductions.

Most of that subsidy goes to families with six-figure incomes.

Most families who are white in America are homeowners, but most families who are black and Latino are not because of our systematic disposition of people of color from the land.

$193 billion tax subsidies that benefit the most privileged of us, but only $53 billion that same year of direct housing assistance to the needy, things like housing vouchers that reduce the rent burden.

That does not make a lot of sense to me.

We are giving to families who needed them most of the least, and that we have the audacity, the shamelessness to ask how can we afford doing more, and the answer is staring us in the face.

We could afford it if the richest among us took less from the government.

>> I said this concept might be discomforting to people.

People who are reading this court in those socioeconomic brackets were talking about, many of them I am sure it would say, look, I would like to do something to help combat poverty here, but in some ways the book is suggesting that they are complicit because of all of these things.

How do you anticipate getting over that emotional-intellectual hurdle of someone saying I would like to help, but wait a minute, I cannot have my mortgage deduction anymore?

>> I think Ray -- we as a country already.

Most Democrats and Republicans now believe that poverty is not a product of moral failing but a product of unfair circumstances.

We have shifted our vision as a country to really recognizing how the deck is stacked against so many folks today.

Now we need to take another step and say, do I contribute to those unfair circumstances?

Am I part of this?

I think we should be weary of absolving theories of poverty and take some ownership, and that includes me.

This is something my family has had to do as well, to look at the tax breaks we receive, the way we are consuming, the way we vote to take ownership of this, and this is something akin to climate change.

Many of us know that climate change is a real issue, and it requires big policies, right, and it also requires us to search ourselves, and how we eat and what we drive?

How we do best a little bit, and I would love to see us do more of that when it comes to poverty reduction as well.

>> I went to get more of your thoughts because some of them are fairly dramatic in terms of suggestions.

You mentioned something, again, that I think is worth taking a deeper look at, and that is the idea of personal agency.

For a long time, part of the view of poverty in America has been -- and not by everybody and not completely, but a good part of it has been, wait a minute, you have to make better choices.

You have to put yourself in a position where you can live the American dream, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Are you saying now this notion of personal agency, bad decisions or forced upon you decisions is not as significant as other factors?

>> I do not think we believe it.

I think that we say it to avoid looking hard at the conversation.

Part of the problem, but in our heart of hearts, we know it is not true.

We can see it in our daily lives.

Somebody gets a promotion who does not really deserve it but has a good connection with the boss, is pretty, is the right skin color.

We see these ways, this irrationality of life in our daily lives, and are we really going to tell black families, oh, you have far less wealth than white families because you did not work hard enough.

What we look at the person in the face who was cleaning our offices and our homes to had skin rashes that she can just work your way out of it?

I do not think we believe it deeply, so I think it is a time where the country can start raising new questions about this, and look, working hard is something that we tell our kids, and we also see it in our daily lives.

Working hard does help, but it is not a theory of how the world works.

People that work hard should be rewarded for that, but there are a lot of people that are working incredibly hard, and they are stuck below the poverty line, and that is something the country should not stomach.

>> Let's talk about some of the things that you outlined in your book.

I do not know if solutions is the right word, it may be a purchase better word.

The first overarching question is is this idea of combating poverty a partisan issue?

We see so much of what we are dealing with as social issues are so terribly hyper-partisan, even tribal.

Are we seeing poverty looked at in that way, or are we seeing progress in terms of how political parties and legislative approaches, and how the concept of poverty is being viewed?

>> More Americans deserve better than what either party has delivered for them over the last 50 years, and it is true that the Democrats are much more likely to support stronger, robust antipoverty measures than Republicans are at the level of leadership.

On the ground level, I think there is quite a lot of overlap.

There are a lot of Republican voters out there that want to see wages go up, that went to see housing prices be stabilized, that want more broad prosperity.

To share a story for my book, there was a protest lead by one fair wage group trying to end subminimum wage.

They were in Albany, New York and most of them were black and Latino women.

Suddenly a group of white folks with redheads came over, and they were MAGA protesters.

They were having the release of the same day and the stop the steal guys were like what you guys protesting.

And they said we want higher wages and they said we care about that too.

I think on the basic issues of economic fairness and justice there is quite a lot of overlap and agreement among the American people.

What we need to push on is our leaders.

>> Let's talk about some of the scenarios, some of the approaches that you talk about in your book.

We often refer to the notion of a safety net, and I think some people who are looking at the levels of poverty might have the notion, the safety net has shrunk.

There is not as much out there to provide the protection, the ability to get somebody and abort their fall into poverty, and one of the things you talk about that I was struck by is you say it is not necessarily a problem of welfare dependency, but rather welfare avoidance.

How do you mean that?

>> We hear about welfare dependency all the time.

You heard about it in COVID.

The unemployment insurance is keeping people home, they are not going to work, and it is just not empirically true.

We can dig into that if you want.

If you look at the data, what you learn the much bigger problem is welfare avoidance.

Families are not taking advantage of programs directed at them.

There is a program called earned income tax credit to give low income earners a boost at the end of the year.

It is a big program, one in five workers who qualify for the boost do not take advantage of it.

>> I want you get back to the numbers, but I went to ask the question.

Why do you think that is?

Why would they not take advantage of it?

>> We used to think of it as stigma, the people were embarrassed, and there is something to that.

Something about being broken America does come with this deep sense of stigma, but the better evidence suggests that we have made these programs confusing, hard to apply for, baffling, and this is quite a raging.

I have a phone, I can click a few buttons and have anything delivered to my home tomorrow.

We know how to market things to people in this country.

We know how to deliver things, do we have not taken that same amount of effort and creativity and to make sure that families who need and deserve certain help it.

When I say welfare avoidance, I am talking about huge numbers.

If you add up the amount of money left on the table on food stamps, worker benefits, unemployment insurance, were talking over $140 billion a year.

This is a picture of us as a nation not doing a good enough job of helping the most vulnerable people in our country.

>> I think people would be astonished to know that.

If you ask 10 people, they would probably say there is not enough money.

Everybody is jumping into these programs and pulling money out of it.

To find people who are genuinely qualified into these programs are designed to help are just resistant for some reason, how do we get that message across?

how do we move that needle to say to people, do away with the stigma.

Do not feel bad about this.

This is designed to help you so you can make your own personal progress.

>> This is on our government.

This is not on the families.

If you look at food stamps, almost everyone in the state who could apply for food stamps and qualifies for them receives them.

In other states, the numbers are way lower.

It is not that there are certain folks in Oregon are less stigmatized than folks in California does a worse job than Oregon getting families aid for meeting basic food needs, so this is about caring about that deeply, making sure every dollar in the budget it's out the door.

There are really easy things we can do, like literally making the font bigger or connecting folks to help her at the walks them through the steps of how to apply to aid and takes half an hour.

These can have huge benefits on the folks who sign up.

>> One of the things that you urge, and I think this is essential, is that the idea that we need to become, in your words , poverty abolitionists.

That is a very strong word, August the echoes of slavery and racial inequality.

Why use the term poverty abolitionists, and what does it mean?

>> When President Johnson launched the war on poverty, it was not just talk.

They set a deadline.

They said we will end poverty by 1976.

They cut it in half in 10 years.

We used to as a country have moral ambitions for the eradication of poverty.

Not the reduction of it, but to get rid of it in this incredibly wealthy land.

I love that you brought up other movements for abolition, because like the movement to abolish slavery or the movement to abolish prisons, abolitionists and poverty as an abomination, something we cannot tolerate, and it sees the practice of profiting from someone else's pain is something that corrupts us all, diminishes us all.

So poverty abolitionism is a political project.

You need new policies, social minutes, -- movements.

It is asking people to the best from poverty in our consumption choices, and how we live, how we push the government in certain ways.

It is something that is a belief and vision of the world that should be there in our everyday choices.

>> I have got about three minutes here.

Let me try to fit in two quick questions.

You wrote a New York Times piece where you said, poverty is not just a failure of public policy.

It is also a failure of public virtue.

Why?

>> There was a study published a few years ago that said if the top 1% of us just paid the taxes that they owed -- >> You are not saying raise taxes.

Just what you owe.

>> Stopped evading taxes.

The nation would take in an additional $175 billion a year.

That is almost enough to pull everyone out of poverty, right?

And that we have the audacity, the shamelessness to ask how we can afford to do better?

How we can afford to expand opportunities for kids.

How we can stop mass homelessness in this country.

That is a sinful question, and how we can afford it?

Even asking that question is a failure of public virtue.

>> When you say it is a sinful question, that is an interesting accusation.

How do you mean?

>> If we were a country that did not allow so much of tax evasion and subsidize affluence instead of alleviate poverty, then we might just have to be like we have got to do better, our economy has to grow.

But that is not us.

Who we are is a country that allows massive tax evasion at the front.

We as a country give more to families that have plenty already, and we have to address that, and that is a failure of public policy, but public policy reflects a kind of morality, so I think we have to own that imbalance that we have tolerated , and for those of us who profit from that, I think we have to take accountability and say, look, these tax breaks that I get are nice, but I do not want them if they come at the expense of this.

I do not want to if it means we have millions of homeless kids in the country.

I do not want them if it means all of these workers have to be paid poverty wages.

I went to live in a happier, safer country.

If that means I have to get -- give material sacrifice to get to that at a spiritual place, I am willing to make that deal.

>> The book is titled "poverty by America."

It is a deeply compelling, informative, troubling in many ways and evocative and provocative, which is I'm sure what you wanted to be.

Well done on this, and we appreciate you spending some time talking with us.

We look forward to talking with you again down the road.

Congratulations on this work, and you be well.

>> Thank you, sir.

>> Thanks for tuning into MetroFocus.

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Listen and subscribe so you never miss an episode or ask your smart speaker to play MetroFocus the podcast.

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>> MetroFocus is made possible by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation.

The Peter G. Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund.

Bernard and Denise Schwartz.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

And by Jody and John Arnhold.

Dr. Robert C. and Tina Sohn foundation.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Estate of Roland Karlen.

The JPB Foundation.

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