BOB GARFIELD This is On The Media, I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE It seems our nation has finally arrived at the point where nobody can plausibly contend that America is what it claims to be–much less what it ought to be. So what ought we to be? We first launched the project of examining our founding falsehoods with a limited series Busted: America's Poverty Myths. Now we're producing another. It's called The Scarlet E: Unmasking America's Eviction Crisis.

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DA'MON My name is Da'Mon. When I first started, you know, having housing problems is when my grandma had left to West Virginia. Because when she was here she was the main person that actually helped with everybody to have a stable home. But it had changed dramatically. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Eviction sucks all calm from life, trailing chaos in its wake. And the research tells us it eats children most of all. In fact, the data suggests that the presence of children actually increases the likelihood of eviction. Da'Mon is enrolled in Changed The World, a support program for homeless youth.

DA’MON At the time my mom, she had had to get surgery on her back so I had to be there. So she couldn't go to work to make the money to pay the bills. That day when I came back from the hospital, they actually turned our electricity off. And I have to basically sitting in the dark for like almost a month. So I was taking care of my mom like that. So that's when we lost the house.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Since the mid-90s until very recently, lower incomes mostly stagnated as median rents soared. Starting this project I thought I understood the gist of the problem. The lack of jobs? Nope. Hollowed out industrial centers? U-huh. How about a lack of available actual housing? Not so much. The lack of affordable housing? Unquestionably, but why? It turns out it's not so much about poverty as it is about extracting wealth from people who earn the lowest wages, especially black and brown people, by charging more for less. Richmond is not a pricey place to live, but it's the second most evicting city in the nation.

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JEFFREY When I started down here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, my first job was security. I was promised a certain amount of hours, certain amount of pay and that didn't happen. We got caught up in the whole, 'well, we work you this week but we might not work you next week. Or we work you next week and then you might not work again.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Jeffrey's got natural resolve, but there's desperation beneath the calm. A couple of years ago he moved his family of five to Richmond so his wife Kelly could care for her ailing mom. Then he sprang for more training to up his pay. But he also was carrying a $900 rent, which because of his unreliable hours actually was more than he was making. He got behind. In Richmond, the median amount for which a landlord files eviction is just $836.

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JAYLEN When l we woke up that morning, they knocked on the door and say we got to get out. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE His son Jaylen was nine, getting ready for school when the police knocked on the door.

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JAYLEN We had to take our stuff out of the house. We couldn’t take all our stuff. They just said, 'just get some clothes on and leave.' [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE After the kids left for school, Jeffrey and Kelly packed the essentials, work stuff, medicine, some clothes and retreated to a nearby bus stop to keep watch on the possessions heaped on the lawn. Stuff they could neither carry nor store, much of which, wedding pictures, kids trophies and awards, a decent TV, they knew they'd never see again. Then the kids returned.

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JEFFREY My son looked at me and said, 'Dad, this is not your fault.' [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE They couldn't stay with relatives because they were renters too and their leases restricted occupancy. So Jeffrey, Kelly, Jaylen, a 9 year old daughter and another in high school both with special needs now live in a pay by the week motel. Five people, two beds, one room 21 months and counting. And then abruptly, kicked out. Now they live in another hotel for 100 hundred dollars more than before. Kelly's frustration is bone deep. They just needed more time.

KELLY He got the position that he was trained for so he was promoted and making the income now. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE They are caught in a snare–one that's entrapped millions of others.

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KELLY The one thing that hampers us now is the fact that we've seen, chhhh, probably about 10 apartments and every apartment, if you've had an eviction, they disqualify you.

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CHRISTIE MARRA Anybody can fall on hard times.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Christie Marra is with the Virginia Poverty Law Center.

CHRISTIE MARRA That can cause them to miss a rent payment, which can cause them to get evicted. Now they may get a better job a week after they get evicted, right? But now they've got what I call the Scarlet E. They have the Scarlet E. And when they go to look for their next apartment or house that Scarlet E pops up and the reputable landlords often don't want to rent to them and they wind up renting from people who are cutting corners, who are overcharging. And it just starts the cycle all over again.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE Two years ago, the Federal Reserve found that 44 percent of us couldn't cover a sudden 400 dollar expense without borrowing or selling something. And so if you don't have family or friends you can tap, anything unexpected–health issues, accidents, car trouble, reduced work hours–can trigger calamity cascades. J reached for the mic to interview his dad.

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JAYLEN Is it hard to be working, do stuff to pay for the room?

JEFFREY Um, it is. We try to do our best, I think. And kind of keeping you guys not worrying. But behind the scenes is--is a lot of stress and aggravation and making phone calls and reaching out. Um, so yes, it can be hard at times. But as your mom and dad that's what we're here for. How do you feel when you see mom and dad stressing about trying to pay for the hotel room? How does it affect you?

JAYLEN I feel sad every time they say trying to say to kick us out. I say, 'why?' [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, classifies families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent as 'rent burdened.' According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, that applies to nearly half of all U.S. renters, which means they probably scrimp on other vital expenses to hold onto their homes. Now obviously the more you make the less you’re burdened. If you're comfortably above the poverty line maybe you'll have some leftover for healthy food, medicine or emergencies. But the minimum wage is not likely to put you there. In fact, there is no state in the union where you can rent a modest two bedroom apartment working full time, hell - more than full time, on the minimum wage. Even a $15 minimum wouldn't do it in the vast majority of states. Jeffrey makes more than the minimum wage but when we called him to follow up a couple of months after our visit, he was still contending with that Scarlet E.

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JEFFREY It's almost like a spin cycle that you just don't get off, you know?

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm.

JEFFREY We still reaching out to agencies or waiting for agencies to call me back. And we're putting in application fees, we're trying every which way possible to reach out to this person that person.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmmhm.

JEFFREY You know, as a father, I feel like I'm failing my son Jaylen–the one you met.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm.

JEFFREY He's actually ashamed to tell his friends that he stays in a hotel. He stays at a friend's house and the parent wants to drop him off. Well, he give them a house that's not a hotel just so they won't know that he stays in a hotel. Out of all the things that kids should normally have to worry about, a roof over their head and food in their stomach should not be one of them. And is kind of disheartening because people are coming in after us and we're finding out, a couple of weeks later, 'ay, I've found me a place.' Well, I'm like, well, what are we doing wrong? And that's the frustrating part. You know, you see all these good stories--

BROOKE GLADSTONE  Mmmhm.

JEFFREY --things happening for good people and then you start to re-evaluate your life, re-evaluate if you've done things correctly. And then my wife have always taught our kids that no matter how life throws you a curveball you have to manage to stay in the game no matter what. [END CLIP].

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BROOKE GLADSTONE Most likely families like Jeffrey's live in your community, you just don't see them. They may be in shelters or broken up or couch surfing or pay by the week motels. The blunt truth, millions of hardworking men and women cannot afford a family. Does that mean they haven’t earned one, that they don't deserve one? Is that the American way? That's not right. That can't be right. “No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.” That was written by sociologist Matthew Desmond who is the expert, the advocate, the guy on eviction. He joins us in a minute.

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BOB GARFIELD This is On The Media, I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now I want to introduce you to Matthew Desmond. He is our partner in this eviction project and the inspiration for it. His bestselling Pulitzer Prize winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, limned the whys and wherefores of eviction but especially the people. By following for many months, renters and Milwaukee's worst trailer park inhabited by whites mostly and renters in Milwaukee's black inner city. Not long after Evicted took off, we called him for our poverty series. A couple of years later he called us for this.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE So what's our job here, I mean mine and Eve's and Katie's and Jon's, the team that's making this podcast.

MATTHEW DESMOND Yeah. Yeah, we're in the middle of a housing crisis that is affecting big cities, small cities, rural communities. What's really causing this housing crisis, you know? Is it a simple story? Is it just a story about supply and demand or is there something else--.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm.

MATTHEW DESMOND --going on? I think there's moral questions out there--about, you know, if this is going to be a business, you know, if people are going to make money off this, how much should they make? And how much inequality can we tolerate? And what are the stories about what's working all around the country? And maybe most important, what--what is the wreckage like, you know. What is this problem doing to our kids and our schools and our families? For me anyways, like the reporting on this story is stuck in a bit of a rut. 'Gee, it's really expensive to live in, fill in the blank.' Yes, but what else? What other stories can we tell? And I think that was our task, to try to push us out of that rut. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Since the last time we worked together he launched the Eviction Lab at Princeton. A database that represents the largest collection of U.S. eviction court records ever compiled for the public. The lab has since made headlines with discoveries both startling and shaming. For this series, we're hitting the road, but since Matt from his data lab is functioning a bit as our Virgil, I thought you should get a sense of who he is. Because in charting his course so compellingly, Matt Desmond, like it or not, essentially has become America's eviction guy.

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MATTHEW DESMOND I'm that guy. Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE What made you that guy?

MATTHEW DESMOND I don't know. I was raised in a in a small town in Arizona and money was tight around our home and our table. But we always had enough and we always had a story. And the story was about, 'you work hard, you go to college you get a good job. America's here for you. America's fair. It's right.' You know, I went to college with that story and I thought I might want to be a lawyer. And I started taking classes in history and economics and sociology and I--I got a different story. You know, I got a story about inequality. I got a story about the saliency of racism in America. I got a story about social mobility being higher in other parts of the world. You know, I was confronted with a question of where do I live? You know, what country is this? And so I went to Arizona State University. I had to work my way through college but when I wasn't working, I was in the library. And then I just started hanging out with homeless guys around my--my college campus.

BROOKE GLADSTONE As one would do. I mean, why?

MATTHEW DESMOND I think that for me it was like if you want to learn you--you go to the sidewalk, you go to the street. Now you don't just go to the library. I didn’t even really want to meet folks material needs. You know, there are a lot of folks in the community doing that or trying to do that. I wanted to hear them out. My senior year, I still had all these questions that I didn't think law school would answer. And that's what led me to become a sociologist, led me to--to study homelessness. And here we are today.

BROOKE GLADSTONE So you think the homelessness interest really acquired force because of the guys you met on the street in Tempe?

MATTHEW DESMOND Maybe. I think there was probably something about my upbringing. I hated all the decisions that the family had to make when money was tight. Million decisions about what bills to cut and how to skimp a little here and hustle a little there and I hated that constraint. I hated, um, the stress it put on my parents. I hated the shame I think, that the family could take on. I think that got in there somewhere too. And I--and I don't think it was just the friends I made on the streets of Tempe. You know, when I read about hunger in America in a country that has so much, you know, in a country where that's unnecessary. Michael Harrington wrote about this a lot in The Other America. He talked a lot about the unnecessariness of all this suffering in America and I resonate deeply with that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Now I know it's not about this for you, but I also know that anybody who does even a cursory reading of your bio is going to know at one point you guys didn't have a roof over your head.

MATTHEW DESMOND You know, it's this isn't about me but it felt like a little dishonest, you know, not to tell people that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm.

MATTHEW DESMOND So this happened when I was in college. We got underwater and my parents just stopped making the payments. You know, we--we really loved that home. I think it was a $60,000 home. It was--wasn't a lot of money but you can see the little painted desert from it and I remember Easter egg hunts it and raising chickens, you know, in the backyard and growing pumpkins. They moved into a small rental in town and I think I was, you know, that was a moment that was encased by shame and disappointment.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm. Conceptions that don't get challenged.

MATTHEW DESMOND Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE One myth is that evictions are filed only as a last resort.

MATTHEW DESMOND Landlords are just making it right. They're just scraping by. Is that true?

BROOKE GLADSTONE Let's talk about what you know.

MATTHEW DESMOND That will just take a minute. I know very little.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well the data that you've gathered has some inherent limitations and that makes the conclusions hard to draw. Some states didn't have or declined to share the data with you. And even though legal evictions are trackable, informal sort of cash and key evictions are not. So distinguish between those two and the numbers you can get and the numbers you can't.

MATTHEW DESMOND All right. So you know when I was living in Milwaukee and I would spend time with landlords, they had a lot of ways to evict a family. I spent a time with a landlord that would pay you to move and help you move. That's a pretty good eviction, you know, if you've got to get evicted. I met a landlord that would just take your door off. Just imagine you don't have a front door you're living in, you know, anywhere in the country. We need front doors on our homes. That got me thinking, 'gosh, OK there's all these evictions that are processed through civil court, housing court or eviction court but there are all these evictions that no one sees.' They occur in the shadow of the law, informal evictions we call them. So I did a study in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and it's a big issue. For every formal eviction that goes to the court, at least in Milwaukee, there are two informal evictions that are executed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Wow.

MATTHEW DESMOND And so that's an inherent limitation in our data. Another inherent limitation is just the federal government doesn't collect numbers on evictions. If evictions are higher in Indianapolis than they are in El Paso, we have no idea. And so our little team here at Princeton started building this data set made up of these formal court ordered evictions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm.

MATTHEW DESMOND We got about 83 million records, hustled, purchased data and work with states and worked with counties. We learned that there's eviction data stored in trailers in West Texas. You know, this is the state of our knowledge right now. But we try to cobble together and create the first ever data set of evictions in America. Now 83 million evictions is a lot, but it's not everything.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Over what period?

MATTHEW DESMOND From 2000 to now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You told me that the rate of formal evictions seemed relatively flat--.

MATTHEW DESMOND Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE --while the cost of rent climbed a steep upward path.

MATTHEW DESMOND Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE But if actual evictions are two or three times greater than that, maybe they moved in tandem?

MATTHEW DESMOND So I mean we're banging our heads against this problem in the lab--I gotta--I've no answer for you. This is a mystery to us. If you look at evictions across the last 15 years, the rate is pretty darn flat. Legal formal evictions. In some cities there's movement. But you'd think if you have this drastic rise in rents and drastic rise in utility costs, you’d think that eviction line would move–and it just hasn't. And so it's a mystery for us. You know, I think that if you're living in Portland Oregon, this really hot housing market and the landlord raises the rent 30 percent, 40 percent, that's not an eviction. That's not going to show up in our records. But you probably can't live there anymore. We're missing that. And I think it's really important that we figure out other ways of kind of digging into this problem. But it's still something that we're like don't fully understand yet.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well one thing that we do know, we know that more than four rent burdened people in 10 spend more than half their paychecks on rent. Some spend 70 percent. Some spend even 90 percent.

MATTHEW DESMOND Right. If you're paying 50, 60, 70 percent of your income on rent. What are you not doing? And we now know from studies that are coming out of Johns Hopkins University and other places that the losers are the kids. When you're paying 30 percent of your income on rent and housing costs, you invest in your kids you buy them school supplies after school activities. For me, you know, I've been studying this problem for a while and one statistic that's just sobering is the clear finding about what families do with they finally move into public housing or receive a housing voucher that allows them to pay only 30 percent of their income instead of 60, 70, 80. And what they do with their freed up money is just take it to the grocery store. And their kids like get healthier and become less anemic. And so I think that one way to measure the housing crisis is through evictions. But another way has to be even if the family isn't evicted, the housing crisis is still making their lives much harder day in and day out.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well here's something that confuses me. We know that the cost of rent has exceeded inflation for years.

MATTHEW DESMOND Mmhm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE But why does the cost of low income housing rise even faster than expensive apartments?

MATTHEW DESMOND Where to start with this question? So in a lot of markets the rent for an apartment located in the poorest neighborhood is not that different from the rent in a middle class neighborhood or even the best neighborhoods in the city.

BROOKE GLADSTONE What do you mean not that different? Are you saying that if you rent in a crappy part of town, a crappy apartment costs almost as much as a decent apartment in a decent part of town?

MATTHEW DESMOND It's exactly what I'm saying. For example in Milwaukee, a two bedroom apartment in a very poor neighborhood, I'm talking poor like 40 percent poverty or higher. The median rent for that place is about $600 right now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhmm.

MATTHEW DESMOND If you go to a middle class neighborhood in Milwaukee the median rent for a two bedroom apartment is about $650, $50 more and you get massively more safety a lot less poverty, a lot better housing conditions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Why is that?

MATTHEW DESMOND Yeah. Why is that, right? That's a huge question. One of the things we think is going on is landlords in low income communities face higher risks. They are dealing with older housing stock. They have a higher risk of non-payment. They have to confront the realities of poverty. Sometimes poverty can be violent. Sometimes poverty can mean drug addiction. They don't know though if you're going to be the risky tenant or if I'm going to be the risky tenant. So they might price up all their apartments to hedge for risk.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhm.

MATTHEW DESMOND But because their risk is still absolutely rare, it's more common but it's still absolutely rare. Most of that risk charge just assumed is higher profits by landlords in poor neighborhoods.

BROOKE GLADSTONE How much higher profits?

MATTHEW DESMOND We've been studying this through a nationally representative survey of landlords that the census does. And what we found is that you can take a property that's in a affluent neighborhood, like 8 percent or less poverty, and you can take a property that's in a poor neighborhood, 27 percent of poverty or more, vastly different kinds of neighborhoods. And you can subtract expenses from the rent. Subtract everything you could think of. You know, roofing job, plumbing job, nonpayment vacancies and the apartment in the poor neighborhood after all expenses still yields about double the profit than the apartment in an affluent neighborhood, nationwide.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Wow. Well then why don't those poor people move to the better neighborhood?

MATTHEW DESMOND Well you know, I've spent a lot of time following around families after they get evicted and watching where they go.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhmm.

MATTHEW DESMOND You know it's interesting. They don't start looking for housing in the worst neighborhoods.

BROOKE GLADSTONE They don't?

MATTHEW DESMOND They're the most disadvantaged renters in the city. They get a fresh eviction smack on their record. And they don't start looking for housing the worst neighborhoods, they start in integrated neighborhoods on the edges of the inner city, for example–if--if they're from the inner city. Or the start in slightly nicer mobile home parks if they got evicted from a mobile home park. And then they get a bunch of rejections. They get no after no after no. And I remember spending time with a woman that I call Arlene in my book. After one eviction, she applied to 89 apartments, you know, before one person said 'yes.' And by that time you just take whatever you can get. And so a lot of folks are excluded from better off places not on account of their income exclusively but on account of their credit, on account of their eviction history or their conviction history. They might have some time behind bars and on account of their race. I mean, you know social science can fill out a small library full of studies about the saliency of racial discrimination today.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Mmhmm.

MATTHEW DESMOND And so you know it's not that poor, especially poor people of color, it's not that they're living in the worst neighborhoods because they're the only places they can afford. It's because they're allowed to live there. And you know it's weird, it's always been this way. You know, if you go back and you read like Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives. Right?

BROOKE GLADSTONE Yeah.

MATTHEW DESMOND New York City, it's 1890s. The rent in the Tenements is actually higher than better apartments uptown. You see this again and again and again. Thom Sugrue, historian at New York University has this book about Detroit and he shows that as late as 1960 rents in black neighborhoods were higher than rents for better apartments and white neighborhoods in Detroit. Era after era, this kind of pattern repeats itself and then we're confronted with it again and then we puzzle over like it’s a new thing. It's not a new thing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE When we first talked about this, you said that you could superimpose a map of the great migration over a map of the highest eviction areas today and the contours would almost exactly match.

MATTHEW DESMOND I mean, that is chilling for me, just chilling. When we first got these national data and we mapped it on the United States, I don't really know what I was expecting. But I spent a lot of time in Milwaukee, I thought evictions were incredibly high there. One in 14 renter homes in the inner city of Milwaukee's evicted every year formerly. Right? Huge amount you walk down any inner city block, look on your left look on your right, one of those families is not gonna be there by the end of the year. You crunch the numbers and you look and Milwaukee isn't even in the top 50 highest evicting cities in the country. You see South Carolina exploding, North Carolina exploding, Georgia–up the Mississippi to Detroit. Tulsa, Oklahoma is in the top 20. Albuquerque, New Mexico, I think one in twenty-one renter homes is evicted.

BROOKE GLADSTONE These are hot markets.

MATTHEW DESMOND These aren't hot markets. Right. Who in God's name is talking about Albuquerque and Tulsa when we're talking about the housing crisis? The main finding is this old American story the systematic dispossession of poor people of color from the land. It's really interesting, you know, if--if you rented a home on the north side of Milwaukee, your rent would be $700. If you bought that home at a conventional mortgage, your mortgage payment would be about $70. You know, there's this idea of like, 'wait, you know could we expand homeownership to low income families. Could they afford it?' It's like, compared to what? You know. I was talking to a nonprofit organization the other day and they wanted to invest in Baltimore. Do you think we can invest in homeownership opportunities for low income families in Baltimore as a wealth builder? And I said as a wealth builder I don't know, but as an approach the affordable housing crisis, absolutely. You know, that house might not be worth a lot more than it is now in 30 years, if you're talking about investing in the most distressed communities. But to stabilize those communities, to say this is your house, you're going to pay a lot less for it but it'll be worth a lot more to you. It's not the only solution but I think it should be on the table.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Ultimately any stable neighborhood gets gentrified.

MATTHEW DESMOND You say any stable neighborhood will be gentrified?

BROOKE GLADSTONE I think so.

MATTHEW DESMOND Do you live in Brooklyn?

BROOKE GLADSTONE Yeah.

MATTHEW DESMOND That's what happened. Though Brooklyn is the weird thing. You know? Brooklyn's--

BROOKE GLADSTONE Is it?

MATTHEW DESMOND --the weird thing. Gentrification by which we mean Harlem, U Street corridor, the Mission District in San Francisco is gentrifying. It affects the cities that most of our reporters and academics live in, you know. And so we focus on it a lot, but a lot of cities around the country, gentrification is not the concern. And most evictions are not occurring in gentrifying neighborhoods. You know, they are occurring in poor, segregated neighborhoods, for even there folks can't afford a roof over their head. So if we care about displacement and instability and school mobility, gentrification isn't a top order.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Touché. You have just shown me what has frustrated you about so much of the coverage of this issue, which is that it's done by people like me who live in urban areas whose problems are specific to those zones.

MATTHEW DESMOND No, that's right. That's exactly right. I was listening to a podcast the other day. Smart folks and they're in D.C. and they're talking about the housing crisis and they couldn't help themselves but just kind of keep referencing D.C. as their lodestar. I love D.C. I think it’s a really important city too but D.C., New York, San Francisco, they are not like Tulsa and Albuquerque and Richmond, Virginia. Although those three cities have much higher eviction rates. And so I think we need a language like of humility about the housing crisis a little bit. Like we kind of recognize that the health market is complicated. It's tricky to get your hands around. I think we need that kind of reverence for the housing market, that it's tricky. And it's not just about neoclassical economics. And if we live in a place like Chicago or San Francisco or L.A., we might think about going to Indianapolis once in a while.

BROOKE GLADSTONE What does eviction mean? What does home mean? It's not something that's easily talked about. Who else, other than that guy, to tell me?

MATTHEW DESMOND I was talking with my 9 year old the other day, he just had something cool happen, you know, he had a victory happen in his life. And I said, 'hey, did you tell your friends at school about it?' And he said, 'no, I didn't.' And I said, 'why not?' And he said, 'well, you know, at school you kind of have to act. And at home you kind of like yourself, you know? I think that's what home is. Where we're our true selves, where we let down, where we relax. And the absence of that, where home is something that is a complete burden. There is a monkey on our back in the form of rent we can barely afford. While you're spending most of your income to rent a place that has roaches or plumbing doesn't work or the door falls down. I think that has an effect on us that makes us feel small and not ourselves, not our full beautiful selves. Home for me is the wellspring of a lot of social problems and it's the promise. This -- it’s where we’ve rooted the American dream, and I think like that went awry down the road but the impulse behind that was not wrong.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE Some psychologists believe that place identity forms the basis of self identity. That home, wherever, whatever it is, establishes, interrogates, confirms, and ultimately shapes our view of who we are. So home is under your roof and on your street. But it's also in your head, with the ultimate power to sustain or to scar you–but you knew that. Like I love my home. We've lived here 24 years, raised the kids here, plan to die here. But when a hard rain bounces off a roof and rattles the windows. That's when I feel gut level gratitude. There's a Victorian expression, 'safe as houses,' Which back then meant certain, beyond a doubt. Would that were so. Evictions are pouring through America's roof like rain down a subway grate, leaving our house lousy with mold.

[CLIP].

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Hello, sheriff's department, Eviction. Come to the door.

MALE CORRESPONDENT No, no, open the door. Open the door. You gotta let us in first.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT And it's ridiculous. I had nowhere to go, no nothing. And this is how they--.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Get dressed like you going out for the day--.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Like I explained to them that my husband just passed and everything. When I told them that--

MALE CORRESPONDENT I want them off my property now. You're not gonna be in my house ever again.

MALE CORRESPONDENT If you go back in there without his permission, he's going to call South Holland PD and you're gonna get arrested for trespassing. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE In the next few weeks, you'll hear us on the ground in Chicago, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Camden, New Jersey, and Richmond, Virginia. And what you'll take away, we hope, is a whole new way to frame the issue of eviction. One that extends beyond the basic rules of the market to the courts and the legislature–the very foundations of the nation. Cause eviction isn't just a plague, it's a prism that reflects and reveals who we are. Oh, it's a plague too, but we can treat it. It most certainly is treatable. Just because it's always been with us doesn't mean it has to be.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE The Scarlet E is produced by Eve Claxton, Jon Hanrahan and Katherine Simon. Our technical directors Jennifer Munson. Our engineer Sam Bair. Our original score was composed by Mark Phillips. We had more help from Emily Mann, Megan Pauley, Gretta Rainbow and the eviction lab team.

BOB GARFIELD On The Media is produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Micah Loewinger, Leah Feder and Asthaa Chaturvedi, with help from Xandra Ellin and Chloe Nosan. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

UNDERWRITING Support for The Scarlet E is provided by the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Melville Charitable Trust. Additional support is provided by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Chasing The Dream, The WNET initiative reporting on poverty and opportunity in America. Support for On The Media is provided by the Ford Foundation and the listeners of WNYC Radio.