In Conversation with Matt Desmond: How We Can End Poverty in America

baby driver okay good afternoon everyone it is great to see you all here in this room at the urban Institute and also welcome to the people who are joining virtually I want to thank you for joining us in this conversation with Matt Desmond how we can end poverty in America my name is Mary Cunningham I am the vice president of the Metropolitan Housing Community Center here at Urban I'm gonna actually start us off with some housekeeping notes we are broadcasting and recording this event the recording slides and additional content will be shared after the event for those who are watching virtually we've enabled live captions and that can be turned on by clicking the CC button on the bottom right corner of your media player we want to engage with the audience both online and in person so to ask questions as a virtual attendee please put your question in the Q a box at any time for those of you who are attending in person you can access the event dashboard and QR codes right in the middle 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introducing Our Guest today Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P during professor of Sociology at Princeton University and is the founding director of the eviction lab his last book evicted poverty and profit in the American city won the Pulitzer Prize among many other Awards he's the recipient of the MacArthur fellowship and a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine more than a long list of awards which are really quite impressive Matt has changed the way we think and talk about poverty and housing and Security in America he and his team at the eviction lab have built a data set on eviction filings across the country that has been used to both understand the problem and Challenge and to start a conversation about Solutions these data were critical to informing the policy response and keeping people housed during the pandemic through his beautiful writing he shared stories of struggle humanity and the hope of people surviving the deepest poverty and deprivation and he's created emotional and moral connection for all of us he reminds us that this work is about people not just data and statistics there's going to be two parts to the conversation today Matt and I are going to start off by discussing his new book poverty by America and then I'm going to invite my colleague Myra Jones Taylor for the second half of the conversation which will focus on the role of evidence and storytelling and fighting poverty and how we can have a greater impact as Scholars researchers and policy walks so without further Ado I want to Welcome Matt has been to the stage [Applause] yeah it's my better side I think hey everybody thanks for having me I'm in a Juggle paper and iPad because I'm not confident enough in just the iPad yes so let's start off by talking about your new book it's very different book from evicted um and I want to hear from you and I'm sure the audience wants to hear why you decided to write this book um you know when I when I lived in Milwaukee writing evicted I met you know grandmas living without heat in the winter I saw kids evicted in a routine basis I remember being on an eviction once and we showed up to this house it was like this rainy spring day and we went in and there was just kids living in the house and the mom had died and the kids had just got on living and they evicted the kids and they put all their stuff out on the curb and someone called social services and landlord changes the locks and we were off to the next eviction and I think you know seeing those kind of things really drove this question of like why inside of me why and I felt convicted I had studied poverty all my adult life I taught classes at two universities I'd read all statistics and and spent time in very poor neighborhoods and talked to Union reps and Community organizers and I just still felt like I didn't have that question answered so in a way this book is a book that I wish existed for me and it's my answer to these two questions that were driving me crazy why is there so much poverty in this land of abundance and how can we finally put it into it right before we're going to get into the book but before we do I want to ask just a follow-up sort of personal follow-up evicted was you know widely lauded it is in my mind one of the best non-fiction books right up there with random families and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks it's just such an amazing book was it scary to sit down at your desk and decide I'm going to write a second book to follow up um no I think that what was challenging was trying to write in a different kind of register I feel I feel pretty comfortable writing about like things I saw like here's a scene I saw let me try to bring you into the scene and I feel pretty comfortable trying to translate like technical stuff to a broad audience but this book required a kind of moral register that um I really need my community to pull out of me sometimes you know folks that I'm writing in community with my editors and my colleagues to really push me down that I think that was a a voice I really needed to try to cultivate in this book yeah it's a very different book and I think you've succeeded in cultivating that voice it's great um so let's get into the book The United States is a wealthy country and it is really difficult to um reconcile extreme inequality we see it every day it surrounds us we're walking through DC you see homelessness encampments and you know that's an extreme version there's lots of poverty we don't see every day but we read about why is there so much poverty in America because many of us benefit from it you know some lives are made small So Others May grow and um many of us on the left and the right and in the center we've been pretty comfortable with absolving theories of the problem as if there's all these tens of millions of people that don't have enough to make basic necessities and it's nobody's fault and I think that I've grown quite wary of those absolving theories of poverty many of us consume the cheap goods and services the Working Poor produce many of us are invested in the stock market and don't we benefit when our savings go up and up even when that comes at the cost of a human sacrifice we have a welfare states that that's incredibly imbalanced we do a lot more to subsidize affluence than to fight poverty and many of us like those tax breaks many of us benefit from those tax breaks and then the country continues to be segregationist you know we build walls around our community and concentrate affluence behind those walls and that leads to a concentration of poverty too and so I think that there's so much poverty in America not um in spite of our wealth but because of it which means many of us are connected to the problem and the solution so let's talk a little bit I mean that is the I think the central thesis of the book The Theory of change which is that we're all um accountable and um complicit in poverty as it is um and you ask us you know you try to hold us accountable in the book and you ask us to take a poverty audit of Our Lives a look at the decisions that all of us make on the day-to-day and how those might affect poverty um what are some of the changes that we can make what are some of the things that you suggest in the book so we can shop and invest it differently with an eye towards living in solidarity with the poor many of us know the kind of shoes to wear and the kind of coffee to drink to Signal a political affiliation Without Really asking if that matters for the workers themselves and make the coffee or the shoes you know many of us know where our cucumbers come from it's a local organic cucumber without asking how much the farmhand got pick in it and so I think Consulting organizations like B core or Union Plus can give us some guidance on that I think those of us that our bit of benefiting from the lopsided welfare state can really start taking a hard look at our own tax breaks and start having different conversations with our neighbors and our co-workers and our family members about those tax breaks we just paid our taxes and most of us who paid our taxes we were like crap I got to pay my taxes and like that's just how we talk about taxes taxes should hurt Reagan famously said and they do her but what if next time tax season rolled along you know and your neighbor lean over the fence is like dude do you see the property bill this year what if you responded by being like dude I can't believe I get a mortgage deduction for my home and I don't need this thing and I wouldn't have a problem with it if there wasn't like this eviction crisis and kids weren't getting evicted every day in this country so I'm donating my deduction to local eviction defense and I'm going to write my congressperson saying that they should wind this down for families like me now that'd be a different conversation across the fence line but I think that's kind of how we change the common sense and then you know we have to turn away from segregation we have to finally Embrace broad inclusive communities which is not an abstract call it's often a call for us to haul our Tails down to a zoning board meeting at 10 o'clock or not or eight o'clock on a Tuesday evening and stand up and be like look I I'm not going to deny other kids opportunities my kids get living here yeah I mean so that kind of speaks to one of the concepts you talk about in the book opportunity hoarding and I'm a parent of a fifth grader in public school uh in a title one school and um I see opportunity hoarding all the time and I find it a really big struggle to figure out how to eradicate it like having those conversations are um really difficult and I'm not sure if I have the tools to persuade people what would you say to someone like me who you know thinks about these issues um feels the complicity but also feels like it is like intractable to change people's minds so I think true thing I think a few things on this um a lot of us like in this room in particular we respond to a question like that by being like well the data actually like Rucker Johnson yeah Rucker Johnson study shows that you can you know and uh I'm I'm one of you I like data a lot too but there's this other data that we kind of ignore sometimes in the policy World which is it's it's social psychology data that shows that it's easier to change norms and beliefs right so it's easier to be like Yo dude we're just not doing that anymore then to be like actually you know and so you know and we see this in climate movement right many of us care about climate change if we believe in it but we don't act on it until like we're driving down our street and we're like did Cheryl did Cheryl put solar panel put solar panels on maybe we should get solar panels like that stuff can be contagious and so I think that part of this is trying to actually make that kind of opportunity hoarding uncool and I'm not being glib about that I actually think it's a strategy for us and there's a ton of social psych literature that's you know like when you go to hotel tells and there's like a little sign on the mirror and it's like people like you hang up their towels and you're like well I should I get my towel you know and I think that the more we can make it uncool bit by bit the more we could try to change change those Norms I I think this starts with us though and a lot of times this question is like man that guy that's just like a little richer than me I wish he did his part or like the guy that's a little more right of centered me I wish they did their part and I think that if we did more of our part we could bring a lot more folks into the tent so you're saying be the change you want to be in the world I guess I have a problem I think I'm a bumper sticker I think that's excellent advice I mean I and I do think it works I think demonstrating in your actions people follow or um and sometimes they don't and maybe you know the New Yorker in a review of your book wrote that the book's force is a gut punch so what do you say to the people who don't feel the moral weight of your argument um and demonstration doesn't work what do you do then I think if we got enough that you feel that to actually move that would be quite enough you know I mean one of the book one thing the book is trying to do is get us to be a little less Satisfied by our level of activity on this issue you know so if you look at zoning right in the abstract Democrats are more likely to support like public housing in the abstract but they are no more likely than Republicans to support an affordable housing development their own neighborhoods you know studies show that conservative renters are more likely to vote Yes on multi-family property in their Community than liberal homeowners so maybe we're not so polarized after all you know um and so I think that you know it I think that there's part of me that's like if we just started more aggressively energetically and unblushingly attacking this issue and demanding the end of poverty in this land of dollars I think that would matter a lot I also think that there's a lot more consensus here than we often think like on issues of basic economic Justice right so the statistics show that most Americans believe that poverty now is the result of structural failing not individual moral failing most Republicans and Democrats believe that most Republicans and Democrats want a higher minimum wage which hasn't been raised in 13 years most Democrats and Republicans think the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes in their fight and so there's a little story in the book that I love that comes from our friends at one Fair wage and they were doing this um protest in Albany New York a bunch of African-American and Latino women from the service sector protesting in Albany and it was the same day like there was a stop to steal rally right and so a lot of white guys in Red Hats came over they're like what are you guys doing what are you protesting and they're like we were fighting for higher wages and the maggot guys were like we want higher wages too and they shook hands and joined their protest now this isn't to dismiss our real differences but I think on these issues on the issues of like basic economic Justice and fairness I think there's a lot of Americans that wanted into poverty so those statistics are reassuring I'm going to need to make sure I highlight those in the book one of the things I did highlight in the book as I was reading it is just your um Coalition of the statistics on tax evasion and I would want I would love for you to tell the audience a little bit about because I think often the next thing is how do we pay for this how do we do you know even though we are you know the wealthiest country in the world would there is still this uh idea of we can't pay for it so could you talk a little bit about some of those very persuasive data that you put together sure so a study came out a few years ago that showed that at the top one percent of Americans just paid the taxes they owed not got taxed at a higher rate just stopped evading taxes so successfully that we as a nation could raise an additional 175 billion dollars a year 175 billion dollars a year is more than enough money to reinstate the child tax credit that decrease child poverty by 46 percent during covid 175 billion dollars a year you could double our investment in affordable housing and still have money left over 175 billion dollars a year is almost enough to pull everyone below the official poverty line above it you know and this is just the top one percent you know and so and it's just about tax evasion not avoidance or any of those shenanigans and so I think that we have to reject to this lie of scarcity we have to cultivate a new language and stop repeating and accepting this kind of fabricated scarcity and stop using our grown-up voice to say well like you know land of scarce resources that's not this land actually and so we're kind of acting like the farmer who has like a mean dog that crawls on like a pile of hay and then so when the cows come to eat the hay the dog growls the cows and so the farmer reduces their rations and he kind of snatches hay from the side of the pile and feeds the cows like with what little he can do that's kind of what the poverty research industrial complex is but we should just move the dog and so I think that this is a this is a major this is a major part of the new work we need to do I think so you are asking us to um to make different consumer choices to make different decisions every day in our lives about where we live how we show up in the world um but you're also asking to build a movement in a lot of ways that I hope that the theory of changes all of those those actions add up to building a movement and at some point we are demanding something of our policy makers right so let's shift to Solutions we talk about money but what are the um if you had to give one success story because I think a lot of times people are see poverty or homelessness as an intractable problem it's like always going to be with us something that we just have to live with because that's the way it is because we don't know how to solve it so what success stories would you give or a success story in the policy world would you give to that person who's sitting on the plane next to you that says oh we'll never solve that problem uh well covid was a big success story right so the child tax credit basically we had a guaranteed basic income for moderate and low-income families that cut child poverty by 46 in six months six months um the emergency rental assistance in covet was a huge success story so we worked with Treasury and White House on that Weekly in the eviction lab and you know we saw the government basically double Hud's budget and get that money directly to renting families it reached over 10 million families reduced eviction rates to the lows they've ever been on record ever ever and so there are people that you know we'll repeat cliches about poverty about the poor will always be with us or it's intractable but I think there's another problem that those of us may be in this room need to face up to that we are really good at the language of critique fluent in that language and pretty bumbling sometimes in the language of repair or promise we need to clear our throats and celebrate there was a lot of people talking a lot of stuff when the era was like stumbling and not getting out the door and everyone was tweeting about it and writing about it and then when it hit families and it started working no one said anything and I think we need to cultivate that language if we want to win over that guy on the plane I want to mention whether it's success stories I think it's important for the work we can do which is the Great Society and the war on poverty the reason those programs one of the reasons that those deep investments in the poorest Americans work so well was because they weren't fighting poverty alone the job market was really delivering for American workers during that time you know one in three workers were in a union during the war on poverty wages were real wages were increasing by two percent a year you had a good job you know you could increase your you know in the company you can add some benefits but as we've moved away from that moment as workers have lost power and jobs has got a lot worse it's like our anti-poverty programs have to do a lot more work just the triage the pain and I think for us it's a learning lesson you know it means that we we don't just need deeper anti-poverty Investments we need different ones including ones that attack exploitation in the labor and housing markets if you had a magic wand and you were waving around markets what would you change would it be unions what would you change in the market either the labor market or the housing market I think that for me it comes down to expanding people's choices so they have more choice and Power about where to work how to live and how to get access to Capital so I would immediately end the financial exploitation of the poor by regulating overdraft fees on banks which are account for about 11 billion dollars a year that money is basically pulled from the pockets of nine percent of Bank clients uh where the poor made to pay for their poverty again just sidebar who benefits from that we do because our free checking accounts aren't free actually and so I would do that I would make sure that poor families don't just have this one best bad option which is to rent from a private landlord and Fork over most of their money to rent and utilities and that could be that's a lot of different things because what works in DC is probably not what like rural Alabama needs so you can think of investing building out more social housing investing in co-ops making on-ramps for first-time home ownership I like all those things at once depending on the markets and I think giving workers a seat at the table you know and this means making organizing easy investing in things like sectoral bargaining so we can organize all of those warehouses or all those Baristas at once and doing things like worker representation at corporate boards you know one of the big conversations we're having right now is AI and what's that's going to happen to Market and one thing I'm shocked by about this conversation is like how like where are the workers at the table where's democracy in this like our workers going to get the same say anything about something that might drastically impact their lives I think we should design programs to give them voice we can do in the market where does racial Justice fit into this it's Central it's like impossible to write a book called poverty by America without also writing a book about racism in America you know one of the big stories here is how racism has so successfully divided low-income communities from from one another you know a big story about the labor and the loss of worker power isn't just an attack by political adversaries and isn't just about the economy changing away from manufacturing it's also about the fact that old labor is racist you know and blocked a lot of black and non-white workers from their rank shot themselves in the foot and didn't allow for a full robust multiracial labor movement to emerge or when you talk about segregation what you're talking about there often is racial segregation right many poor whites are much more economically integrated at the community level than poor black families are and so I think this is really just Central to the work we do which is like a poverty Abolitionist Movement has a lot of solidarity with an anti-racious movement so that brings to mind the concept of targeted universalism can you talk a little bit about that and explain that I think that's a really one of the concepts that you talk about in the book that's really interesting targeted universalism is a idea that comes from Jean a Powell the legal scholar at the University of Berkeley and it's kind of a simple idea to communicate but I think it has some pretty profound implications and so pal is like okay look there's targeted programs like food stamps they're very efficient they work but they're divisive because if you make one dollar over that cut off you're like how to the out of the game right and that causes a lot of just uh you know infighting in a way between families that are below that cut off and families right above it that are that are still struggling and so and then you've got Universal programs which reach everybody but are not efficient that are super expensive sometimes and um and so he's like why don't we why don't we split the baby by looking at this idea called targeted universalism and it's like instead of us instead of going through the through the means let's look at the ends what do we want what's our goal and maybe our goal is everybody in America should have a safe and decent place to live that's our goal okay what's safe and decent we can Define that like safe you know affordable maybe it's 30 40 whatever we kind of decide as a country so the folks there's going to be a lot of different roads to that goal you know depending on your family circumstances where you live in the country your income all that kind of stuff and so Target universalism is just to recognize that one size doesn't fit all then let's talk about the ins and Imagination and imagine the goal and then let's find all these different means to kind of to kind of reach it so I think that's kind of a new way of thinking about policy design in a way in a way that kind of gets through these kind of other like polarized yeah bifurcated obesity we usually accept yeah it's very interesting I want to shift gears there's a ton of people in this room who work around DC there's a lot of people on Zoom as well who work in organizations that are working to end poverty and I want us to shift the conversation a little to what we can do in our work every day and how we can be more effective I'm going to invite my colleague Myra to the stage this might be a chance for you also to as I introduce Myra to have some water mat so Myra Jones Taylor leads the urban institute's policy impact strategy as the organization's first policy impact officer she works with researchers and policy experts across Urban to help maximize the impact of their findings and evidence-based recommendations while helping tell the story of how their La their work changes lives and strengthens communities so before this role Myra was the chief policy officer at zero to three where she led the development and implementation of the organization's policy agenda she previously served as Connecticut's founding Commissioner of Early Childhood leading the cabinet levels state agency that serves children from birth to five and during her time as commissioner she expanded access to high quality preschool for 25 percent more three and four-year-olds um she is a new America National fellow and she writes and speaks about racial identity systemic racism and social inequality and she has a joint doctorate in American studies and anthropology from Yale so welcome Myra thank you Myra is a new colleague I'm super excited to have her here at the urban Institute because I really care about the I think we all do I can speak for all of us at Urban we really care about the impact of our work and so tell us about your new role at Urban Myra well first it is such an honor to share stage with you evicted as I told you earlier is really the book I think all ethnographers aspire to write and poverty by America is the book we need today so it's really it's a joy and an honor yeah so I have a cool job at Irvin my job is to make sure that all the incredible evidence and solutions that we develop here across many issue areas and many different modalities and ways of doing the work have impact I think a lot of people think about impact as the way you do it is maybe through the number of retweets or the number of citations you have in a you know a peer-reviewed journal relationships on the Hill Media hits at Urban we actually believe that impact is when people are better off that people it's measurable that people in communities feel it they experience it it's tangible their lives are different they are better off um it's hard to do that when we're a little far removed and so what I'm what my team and I are working with across our colleagues across the organization is to be a little more strategic about how we get our work into the hands of people who can we call change makers who can really make sure that that impact happens I think a lot of the times there's a kind of a Field of Dreams approach to getting research out it's if they build it they will come if we disseminate it they will read it those of us know that doesn't always work so how do we think about how we're engaging those people who are on the front lines the decision makers people in community who are most affected by this work how are we thinking about engaging them so that our work is more impactful oh we are so lucky to have you here um I want to talk a little bit about the role of evidence and advocating for Change and Matt you I'm going to ask you to put your hat on as the leader of the eviction lab I know you have a great team there and I wonder if you could share some lessons from your experience leading that lab around how evidence has made a difference and also what the limitations of evidence are so we launched the eviction lab in 2018 I believe because I wrote a book on eviction and then I'd go around to like Houston or Baton Rouge in LA and people would be like well what's our eviction rate like how we like is Milwaukee weird like what's what's going on we had no National Data on this which is insane like imagine if we didn't know how many like Americans like got in a car accident every year or got cancer every year like that was our state of a state of the knowledge so if you were living in a community that was impacted by this you knew it was real but a lot of the American public just didn't have a number to get their hands around it so we collected all the eviction records we could uh from all 50 states it was important for us to get all 50 states um a lot of the places that have the best data are also the places that have like the most active like political organizations and like we really cared about the Albuquerque's and the tulses and the Richmond Virginia's of the world in a way and we we put we cultivated that data set and we we published that now we published it before we did anything with it we didn't publish any studies first we didn't hold on to it we saw it as a public good so I think that was one of our first lessons like get the data out as best you can as soon as you can and then we also invested really deeply in our website we wanted tools that like an eight-year-old could use basically and so we did a lot of investing and working with web teams to design a website that was really Nimble and intuitive and like just with a few clicks you get all this information you could see evictions in your neighborhood you can compare your city with other cities and I think that really paid off too more than a million people have been to our website now which is pretty good for an academic nerd website that has data and um and we've generated over 2 500 news stories and I think one of the final lessons is like build it curate it answer your phone when people call and then get out of the way actually get out of the way and so getting out of the way is a hard thing for academics to do because we want like all these Clauses in our sentences and all this you know like but I think that we were just like here's your evictions you know and some journalists got it wrong but like I lost no sleep over wrongly reported story because I was like here's another story about eviction and like we we went for like zero to a lot and so I think that getting out of the way allowed journalists and Community organizers to tell their own stories instead of like citing a study and I think that really mattered actually um I think some limitations are the data that the data can be really the data are often flawed and messy and and so we did a lot of listening to community organizers where we have data and they call us up and like look your your data your evictionary for Louisiana is way too low like this is what we're seeing and so like listening to them be like how can we address this how can we fix this so a lot of ground truth thing was really the ground true thing is like a lot of what the eviction lab does every day and so I think that listening to organizers on the ground is really powerful and also um data give you like what I'm sorry I'm being long-winded here I'm just thinking my wrap up one of the things that data like data data um control the kinds of questions we can ask and so there's a famous quote by Harold Cove taught at Yale law uh which goes when you when you can't measure what's important you make what's important what you can measure and for poverty researchers I think that's really important because if you ask me what's the data say about eviction I would be like well you know someone's race really matters gender and kids but like people aren't evicting themselves and so I think we need to build other kind of data sets about like power ownership exploitation like for the past 60 years the poverty data industrial complex has really built these massive data sets on the poor themselves and it's really controlled the kinds of questions we ask around this and I think we need to expand the aperture and we're trying to do that at the lab now I think that's a really important Insight I think one of the things that um we probably both learned during the pandemic is that there's practically no data on landlords and like we were sitting in the middle of the pandemic wondering if people were paying their rent and we really had at the beginning of the pandemic very little information about that and so we had eviction data from the lab but not a lot of data on landlords balance sheets if people are paying the rent so expanding the aperture is a really uh terrific insight um Myra do you want to take a stab at that question I feel like you talked to policy makers a lot and that was you know one of the things you did first when you came to Urban was talking to everyone in our ecosystem and really trying to understand how uh the U policymakers use data what do you think is the role of evidence and social change yeah I mean I think you know if you think about today when truth is Up For Debate when facts are relative to what you want to believe right it's hard to say does evidence matter yes it does we are all doing important work I think you know one thing one thing you said Matt is so relevant here is that actually um data can get you so far it's incredibly important to have when I speak when I was a commissioner for example people would come to me and talk to me and try to advance certain things I relied on data to fact check to make sure what they're saying was relevant I also used it to make the case when I was speaking before Appropriations right so it's really important but there's a there's a limitation to it in that it only moves people so far the numbers can only compel people so far especially if there's you know people who aren't really all hip to paying attention to evidence in some ways so what you said about how we engage people on the ground I think is so critical and that what I heard you say is it actually makes the evidence it makes the research better it makes it stronger when you understand the context so that's one thing I would add I was just tracking something on Twitter a couple days ago a advocate in the housing space was responding she was testifying and she was responding to a question from the junior senator from Ohio and he seemed skeptical about housing matter they're about housing first not housing matters housing first initiatives and she very straightforwardly relied on the evidence she leaned into and explained why housing first is actually far more effective than requiring somebody to get clean or have mental health support before they get housing right and I was so excited to see this and then I thought now a smart Advocate is watching this and then thinking of all the people who are going to call his office and invite the junior Senator to go speak with people who have actually benefited so the data move well it's important to hear but he is not going to be moved most likely unless he hears from his constituents and so really Savvy strategic approaches to using evidence is pairing it with the people different people who can be those trusted Messengers I saw that clip too I want to give a shout out to Diane yantal at the national welcome Housing Coalition Great Clip um yeah and really effective answer uh to a question that's been asked too many times sure um well you're hinting at storytelling um let's talk about storytelling I feel like when I think about storytellers I think of you Matt Desmond I also Myra is you're both ethnographer done ethnography or ethnographers maybe you don't identify that way but um tell us about the role of Storytelling um in in this uh in policy change and made me mad I'll start with you well I think that there is an importance of bearing witness and kind of taking a hard look at the stakes and making sure that abstract discussions really kind of come around a human form and I think that there's this old lie in the academy that you have to have some distance from people to write about them rigorously and objectively and distance is not our problem we have plenty of that I think you can fall in love with people and learn a lot from them and write about their lives in an honest way but we also have to write different stories now I'm convinced I ran across this line by Tommy orange the novelist where he writes it's like these kids are jumping out of the burning you know Windows of burning buildings falling to their deaths and we think that the problem is that they're jumping and I read that I felt so convicted I was like man that sounds like the poverty debate and so I think we need to find a way to tell stories about who lit that fire and who's warming their hands by it and so I think that changes the way we do journalism and do policy work and do scholarship in a way that that that means telling different kind of stories about this issue am Ira yeah so I do identify as an ethnographer still maybe former but that was my training my um my phds in anthropology and I actually took my work so I was an anthropologist did all this work in New Haven in the field looking at child care providers and then completely um was not planning on doing this I went into policy doing you know overseeing this exact set of policies and the women I spoke with there were almost all women were very skeptical about a lot of the policy changes that was happening and then I become the person in charge of implementing these policies because they're already in the books and I already to do it but I brought those stories with me and we actually push back quite a bit on some policies that I knew were racist that were inherently going to be problematic for people of color in particular and we slow rolled a lot of those uh fast forward 20 years later the same policies that we slow rolled in many other states had implemented um now people are back backtracking against him and also saying they're racist so I like to say we were ahead of the game I say all this to say one sociologists anthropologists out there go into policy it's really important if you're doing ethnography you you are connected to the problems in ways that folks who go and get their you know MPA may not have that same kind of connection so that's a plug for ethnographers but I also think there is a real opportunity and understanding what it takes what you did in your book I mean to really understand the full picture I'm sure it was hard for you to sit and be in those evictions and stand there but you were able to tell a story that I would have never understood without you doing that so thank you for that but I think there's a real opportunity to um to think about our proximity and you think about the idea of being proximate to to the problem of course Brian Stevenson and his work so I think there's a real um push to do that more we are absolutely a little too distant from this work I want to underline something that you just said in that answer which I and I'm not I think you said this too in terms of the quote about distance but um I asked a question about like how is storytelling effective and I sort of came that frame but in part of your answer what you're also saying is listening is really important um and that without talking to people without making sure that we're doing the work on the ground that you really don't understand people's experiences and so I just want to highlight that because I think that's important something that we often Overlook and it kind of leads me into the next question that I have which is um you know how do we tell people's stories and Matt I'll start with you but how do we tell people's stories without exploiting them when when is it time to tell people stories or stand aside and if we're telling people stories what advice is a Storyteller yourself how what advice would you give people because I think it's something as a researcher people I've struggled with that I think that we struggle here at Urban with which is how do you really tell people's stories and also make sure that it isn't exploitive which is a big theme in your book I think we have to be accountable to those people in a real way in a real genuine way I remember writing a New York Times magazine story a woman named Vanessa Sullivan she was a single mom in Trenton um raising three kids working as a home health aide and it was a story about the working homeless and I gave a book talk in Princeton a few weeks ago and Vanessa came to the book talk was still we're still in touch and she came she's a very tall person and so I kind of was easier to see her in the audience and so the I give book talk and the first question uh this woman stood up and she said I volunteer in Trenton which if you're in Princeton means something you know I volunteer in Trenton and we give a lot of these tutoring to these uh these kids and we should start tutoring the moms we should start mentoring The Single Moms you know what do you say about that so I look out and I see Vanessa and I'm like I have to respond to this question in a way that holds me accountable to her a single mom in Trenton and I think that when I wrote evicted everyone saw that book before anyone else did everyone in its pages journalists have a different kind of ethics on this but in the academy we can do this and um and so I brought the book back and we I went over every single line with everyone that was in the book and sometimes I read the book to them and sometimes they read it while I was sitting across from them and we talked about it and I wanted to make sure that the book they felt that it did them Justice and one of the most memorable moments was crystal Mayberry who's in the book she asked me to read the book to her not because she can't read she just like it was like a power move like total Crystal thing to do and um and so I read her her story to her and her story ends in a really dark place right she descends into Street homelessness and has to turn to prostitution to make ends meet you and I stopped reading and I looked up at her and she's like yeah you know there's some personal stuff in there but that's how it was it was such a brave thing to say so I think being accountable to people and holding yourself you know and sometimes I've also been in conversations like that where people told me to take things out of the book and I didn't and it was like a debate but it was like a conversation so it's not just about like it's not about bending but it's also I think about like being in real relationship and then you get a platform and then you can use that platform to to bring in other stories so the last time I was asked to testify in front of Congress I was like I'll testify but you have to bring someone that's personally been evicted to testify too and and then you know one of the things we do with the eviction that no one really knows about is we divert a lot of funding to the economic hardship reporting project which funds stories about eviction or homelessness of poverty by journalists who have experienced those things themselves and so I think that trying to leverage platform to expand the tint of expertise is really important too have you gone back and talked to folks that are featured in the book and what is their reaction to sort of the visibility that it's gotten um is there negative positive yeah I my first book event was with Arlene who's kind of the main tenant that you follow in the book and she came to the book event and sat next to my wife and she was really just confused by why there were people in the room interested in her story so there was kind of At first she was just like why do these people care about me and then she was kind of um like put off after a while because you know like there's this phrase like you put my on blast you know like you put my stuff out there you know so so we struggle with that together you know and and then she kind of you know I would go and give a book talk and someone would ask like how's Arlene and when that happened I would like text her or call her but like someone asked about you tonight you know and that really meant a lot to her and then one thing when the book would do things in the world like move a bit of policy or something I'd let folks know and so um I think Arlene you know come to kind of saw like her story is doing something really powerful in the world and so she had this habit after a while of like going to the public library and if and and she'd go to a librarian in librarian and she'd be like have you read this book evicted and if librarian was like yeah she's like I'm Arlene I'd be like what they were like this moment and so you know it's not it's not linear right it's not always like uh easy conversations but I think that creating something in the world that people ultimately could be proud of is really important to me um Myra tell us about we talked a little about storytelling we were talking about data how about reaching policy makers what is the most effective way to kind of cut through the noise and really make sure the evidence is getting in front of policy makers I think some people think I wrote a report like I used to say uh you know if I wrote a report and it sits on a shelf does that mean you know no one reads it does that mean I wrote a report um and you know the tree follow it and so constantly asking that question tell us about what you know ways that you think are effective ways to like really make sure that data and those stories are getting to the right people who have the levers of change yeah you know so one thing that I did when I first got here you mentioned it was not only talked to my colleagues internally at Urban but also folks outside who use our user work rely on it and there are quite a few where we do incredible work here and one thing that a few people said both in the administration on the Hills senior staffers said come talk to us and understand what's the nagging questions that we have I think often what we do this is we broadly the think tank research non-profit world right I'm going to turn this way there are quite a few of you yeah so I hope that's okay camera so um there you know we spend a lot of time just looking we put this report out and we're going to go and talk to you and you are going to listen and we're going to share all of our wisdom and it's going to be this incredible thing and you're going to do so much with this work right yes that sometimes does happen but what will actually have people engage you more I think is if you actually it's relational you're understanding what they are really grappling with so this one senior staffer said to me come sit with us at a time when it's really quiet on the hill and make this a regular practice of sitting down and asking us questions and then what you'll find what we'll find is that Urban may already have that research we may have it on the Shelf it's something we've done 10 years ago we didn't and all of a sudden this is the policy window right because we know sometimes it's not rapid response this is work that takes a long time to develop so sit with us and tell us if you have that research another another times it's whoa we never knew that that was what you're grappling with and so we can start to craft better research questions to answer that question and funders love that right they want to know that we're being responsive that we're engaging folks on the hill so I think that's one really important way and this is my ethnographer my training and me but this is all about relationships this is understanding that this is not a one-way street that this has really change happens in the context of a broader ecosystem and so much of that is about relationship then make sure it's good I mean you know like you said you spend a lot of time on your website make sure that what you're doing we have an incredible data visualization team here not everything needs to you know requires a really fancy databiz investment but sometimes that's going to be the thing that's really going to attract people sometimes it's a picking up the phone and talking to folks and there's a whole range in between now do you want to add to that how to more effectively reach policy makers besides be Matt Desmond yeah there's that I'm sorry that's not fair kind of like it's like hitting a nail with a hammer and then like sometimes the nail goes in a little bit but a lot of times it just doesn't yeah and you just got to be okay with just like yeah you know keeping keeping it on the I really think the focus on relationships is important and like follow through and follow-up I think that's and I I also think like we shouldn't be afraid to tell stories um I do think that um I do think if the book uh did anything on the hill it was because people connected to the people and the stories and then the data kind of give this a broader a broader context but I do think that's an underutilized tool in our toolkit sometimes for those of us that do this work yep I would add I think often there's a transactional thing that happens on the hill sometimes with flyover fly-in days where an advocacy group will have their folks come in and they'll meet with members and then they get nothing out of it right the the people who have been left their families to go testify and it's so exciting but there's no that's it and something that we did at my former organizations shout out to zero to three we brought in we had something called strolling funder where every year we would bring in families from all 50 states to come meet with their members and talk about what they needed paid leave Child Care child tax credit whatnot but they didn't just get that time where they're coming in and meeting with us I'm meeting with members we trained them they got incredible skills on how to become Advocates and so many of those parents went off left their jobs and became professional advocates for their families for their community so I think think you know you talking about how you funnel funds to this journalism project for people who have experienced this themselves like there are so many ways to share in the abundance of you know that you talk about in your book so my next question was about the scarcity mindset we talked about that we covered that so I want to change it a little and um talk about framing because I think framing in a lot of ways you know you talked about the scarcity mindset we need to reframe that issue um how do you approach framing I think a lot of times people write what their data says table one says this and um how do you think about framing is that something that comes naturally to you or is that something that you really think about um and do you have a process give us your secrets okay so I think that I think that I think that those of us that want to abolish policy need to start controlling the questions that get asked and a lot of times in our work our work is kind of like this like uh like no actually uh you know and um and someone else has already asked the question and then we like are responding to it and I think that we need to ask the question and so you know in the eviction research world like a question I'm fascinated with is like who's doing all these evictions who's who owns who owns the city and who's doing all the evictions and when you go down that rabbit hole you can get to like a claim like in Tucson we went down that rabbit home we learned that the top 100 evicting buildings evict three-fifths of the city so then that's kind of it now we're kind of under different now I've now I'm kind of controlling the question like now you're like who are those guys why are they you know what should we do about those guys that's kind of it we are very far away now from like you know why aren't people paying the rent you know these kind of questions and so I think that the one of the big parts of framing is like who gets to decide the question and how can we start asking different questions that set a different conversation then the old one that's like driven the poverty bait for the last you know 100 years basically I think that's a big part of it and I think being in touch with communities really matters because they have questions you know and and I think like a lot of times their questions are really fascinating and some of the best ones so I think being in in contact with a lot of different constituents on this work is important for the frame I do think you also were asking a question about craft and there may be a little bit too and I do think that for me anyways there's no political impact outside of craft and I think we really do have to take the Aesthetics and the beauty of what we do kind of seriously if we want to break through I think the whole audience of people who are interested in that I think and Myra I'm going to come to you on the question okay I'm all ears here yeah just answer well um it will shock you to realize that the best writing usually isn't done in the policy world and um so I think like we're getting a palette cleanser you know and finding writers that we feel uh have this like observational genius like they can look at the world and cut through stuff I think that's really important in the policy world like the old economists were great at this actually like the mid-century economists had this beautiful way of of writing about these really complicated issues but with Clarity and conviction um so I I think that finding that that riding and connecting the making part of our daily practice really matters and I also like it's a lie that peop like authors write books like I write in community and so you know this last book went through these massive book workshops where writers like Kanga Yamada Taylor and Tracy cotton and Kathy Eden and Luke Shafer and Jason apparel and Sarah Silverman like read early dress of the book and it just like gave it to me you know know and the whole chapters were decimated because of that and all chapters are written because of that and so I think writing in a community of of people that love you but also really to hold you accountable including at the sentence level I think really quite matters Myra how um how what advice would you give people about framing about how to be better frame up issues and present some of the data that we all talk about and write about yeah you know I think there's an interesting push right now to and we do incredible work around Community engaged methods where we really bring the voice of community in and I think as an ethnographer I am so happy to see that and I also bristle a little bit not not by what's done here at Urban really truly um when people see that as I'm just gonna take up story and plug it in and that's going to be the lead and then I'm just gonna follow up with a lot of data right and then that's just like color um it's really that is equal form of evidence um that I think is is really important so framing conversations framing stories with the lived experience of people who are whatever experience your prod your the issue that you're covering is really important um I also there's this amazing book influences your superpower I don't know if people on my team have heard me talk about this it's a great book influence is your superpower okay and she she writes um about how facts can only get you so far and there's a whole way of engaging people that influence them and this can be in any context and she talks a lot about framing and how you tee up people to have the conversation to hear um that will actually change the way they hear if they can really hear what you're saying and I'm going to come back to something you wrote in your book which I think is so fascinating and really um a major reframe of this issue which is we are going to lose something those of us who have abundance are actually going to have to give something up which is not the frame that we usually hear and yet it feels so indisingenuine when we you're really putting it out there in a way that I I appreciate and it's hard so all of these poverty abolitionists which I love which would be the hashtag maybe up there too is is about giving up something and that's the moral charge that you give us in this book that I think is I hope people really pick that up in this book and it's a it's a big reframe from the way we've talked about poverty you also talk about when we usually write about poverty we write about the poor and this is a different story too so I just think it's important in this context you know and then thinking about research institutions Lee why are we doing this are we doing this work because we think it's an interesting research question and I think that's fine in some in some settings but if we are in a research institution outside of Academia I think it's incumbent upon us to take it a next a step farther and that we are really committed to actually seeing change we want this work to have people end up being better off and that's a reframe in many ways in the way we do our work in researched institutions broadly that's a really I mean I think you know Matt you do talk about that point in the book which is we are going to have to give something up but you also which I I think is absolutely true and I think it's good to admit that um but you also talk about Raj Teddy's inventor study um and in a lot of ways we're losing something can you talk a little bit about what we're losing by not ending poverty I mean for those of us that are struggling in in our crushed and exhausted by poverty the end of poverty is like a whole other existence right it's finally being able to breathe its safety it's um it's literally life you know a lot of the research on what happens when you raise the minimum wage to stand by Health researchers is like incredible people stop smoking more babies are born healthy you know it's like it's you were literally stealing life from people but for those of us that have found some security and some Comforts in this country the end of poverty is something that we all are should Pine for as well you know um that's a Freer country that's a safer country that's a country where you don't have that ickiness that you feel when you kind of are participating in the systems and you know it it's a country where you go out to eat and you sleep in a hotel and you know everyone's taken care of you know that's a country where you don't have to worry about your kids all the time and like invest in this like social attainment machine because like that's the only game in town um and so there's this old book called The Book of Sands and it has this line in it which says if you want your people to build a ship you don't gather the the team and you don't assemble the wood but you make them long for the edge of the sea and I think that one of the challenges for us in this work isn't just to say you should do this the right thing to do which I think which I think has currency but also like isn't this a country you want to live in like doesn't this this thing drags us all down um and I think that's that's part of the narrative challenge too um I'm going to move to audience questions I have two more questions Myra this one's for you um who are our most important Partners in making change um and I'm going to come to you too man I don't want to answer that on the well I'll start by saying I think it's always the people who are most directly affected by whatever policy change whatever we're talking about they are the ones who know best about some about the actual experience of the conditions um and a lot of the solutions can be found by talking to people who you know have this experience I would also say it depends though on which levers to pull or who to engage at which time and so I talk about this internally here at Urban a lot about we are part of a change maker ecosystem an impact ecosystem and urban when we say change maker we don't just mean decision makers on the hill we mean folks in community we mean Advocates we mean funders the whole range of people who are working to affect change in this country positive change in this country and so we think about that ecosystem and we need to make sure that we are engaging all of them and that we're engaging them at different levels at different times when it makes sense so it doesn't necessarily make sense to go to your state legislator until and share all the data that we've we've shared we've dreamed up unless the people on the ground The Advocates are going to kind of be the wind at your back and so there's a whole I think there's this whole strategy around how you engage people at what time when but it's all contingent on having relationships existing relationships it's not it cannot be transactional because it won't stick it won't kind of have the kind of heft I don't know you seem skeptical so push back you want to add to that oh no I was just like yeah it sounds great okay that was my that was my sitting that sounds great okay good yeah I'll tell you what does your skeptical face look like so we know it's like this yeah um so the last question for me and then I'm going to turn to the audience and I have this magic iPad where all of your questions are just popping up in here um but I want to start with Matt tell me how you measure the success of the eviction lab and your work there that's a great question so uh I mean real metrics like literally how many people are coming to the website you know how many news stories have we generated where in the country are we we're missing so we know we know where we've gotten deep coverage like the year after we launched there were 60 stories in Virginia about eviction like we're like we're getting we're getting through in Virginia and we've got a lot of uh bad things about Virginia yeah you know which is great I mean you know well they passed this massive affordable housing Bill while the governor was like circling the drain because of an old photo that came out of him in blackface in college but even during this like crazy political moment we still got a lot of stuff passed in that state legislature so I think that you know one of our one of our Inns is like here's a little metric of narrative change there's just more out on it and for those of us that have been on this game a little bit I haven't been a game for a long time and I'm getting a little gray hair and like when I wrote about evicted like Obama didn't talk about housing Hillary had a housing platform but she had a platform for like tying your shoes and everything so it kind of didn't count but she had a thousand platform but then you know Biden said the word evictions in his first state of the union so I do think that The Advocates and the researchers and the whole Community Focus us on this have really pushed this issue to the top of the national agenda in a place that wasn't two years ago we judge it by that and then we judge policy impact you know and we kind of say we can kind of Trace where we can see you know we launched the eviction lab we focused on these metrics we got the attention of Virginia we changed the law there um and we're focused on you know when when the eviction moratorium was launched and initiated a lot of that movement cited our research to justify this historic move that dropped the death rate during covet by 11 according to a Duke study so I think we kind of keep our seats there and I also think we also keep receipts on the fact that who's using us and are we reaching different kind of constituents because we don't want to just be used by folks that have two phds in computer science at MIT like we want to be used by a lot of different folks and I think that's one metric of our success too great Myra do you want to add to that yeah I mean I think you are in the fortunate um position with the work at the eviction lab and that you can actually take it a Next Step farther and you can actually track at least during covid the number of evictions that have the number of people who are housed as a result so you can do this incredible through line and something we talk about here at Urban is you know we are a research institution so if I think about this how impact happens right there's policy or population level change here you can think it happens through narrative change policy change practice change even legal change increasingly in this country and there are a whole host of change makers that are making this happen right in this ecosystem um oh I just completely lost my train of thought this is something I always talk about shoot where was I going with this blue line impact thank you thank you Matt I appreciate it I'm glad you were there's a test but we are a few steps removed right we're not government we're not a direct service provider so it's hard to track that impact and yet it is incumbent upon us to do that because we know we are having impact um we know that people are reading our our research and so one thing we're really excited to think about love to think about with someone like you is how do we track that so you had 60 reports in Virginia right you can then track the policy change what are those networks who are those people that were using that who were reading that how were they changing how is that affecting the way they talk about eviction the fact that they say it how is that affecting the policies that are now being promoted in zoning laws so it's not just about evictions right it's also these walls that we talk about and we think about um if we're talking about a broader housing push so I think there are so many ways that we could be more creative more sophisticated in how we're actually tracking this our work and our impact and it is hard and I want to be really clear it's not the job necessarily of researchers right like that's the job of these other folks like myself and my team and colleagues across the organization where we come in and we do some of that work and we we provide that extra oomph to it but it's so important so that we're not we can really test what's more effective and what conditions and what is like maybe we shouldn't be doing that again because it's you know I when I was in advocacy there are times where this is during build back better and we would be sitting there and we were so close to getting child care we're so close to getting child tax credit and then it all kind of crumbled and it was a really devastating series of conversations and there are times when we are in these calls throwing spaghetti on the wall what should we do next and sometimes that's what you have to do this is not an exact science but wouldn't it be great if we had a little bit more data to think about what is going to be effective in which conditions and what we should be pulling on and maybe not trying or tracking and other times so I know yeah that's your skeptical look just brought to mind this idea of where in the research Community I feel sometimes that when we're judging impact we ask so much of a policy you know like there's studies like does Housing Voucher increase labor market participation I'm like that's not their job actually and you know does food stamps increase literacy I don't know like you know it's like so there's there's often there's like I think we also have to question like what's our level of like the ROI language and how you know are we asked you know sometimes it's like we're dosing a project so little it's like we're giving a cancer patient like three Tylenol and we're like well it doesn't help you know why what's wrong with the time at all it's like nothing it's just like you have to dose this thing and so I also think that it's like sometimes you have to do it just because it's the right thing to like it's human decently it's the level and the metrics of return are really hard to get your head around to I would just say in the early childhood space which is where I come from there was a both a real advantage and a disservice the return on investment language was has still continues to be used for advancing child care one dollar for you know for every dollar spent in Early Child Care thirteen dollars or seven dollars but what it did was it knit tunnel vision talk about the television talk about in your book it narrowed the focus of that we're thinking about it in one way and we're missing the Fuller context of why we have early why we invest in young children because we had we pegged it to that one Roi and that getting back to your book there is a moral reason behind all this which is kind of hard for us is hard data and you know I won't put myself in the serious serious data wonk place I feel like I'm a little removed but what is Our obligation what is our moral obligation for this work why do we do this work if not to see that people are better off and I think that doesn't mean it changes the rigor of our research it doesn't mean that we're you know teaching to the test but it means that we're doing it with real conviction and that we maybe lean into it a little differently you get into I was going to go to the audience and I have one more follow-up question because that raises I I was taken by some of your language in your book Matt where you describe things as sinful um and that is not language that you know researchers academics usually use and I was um you know I I think that starting to think about you know where do we go how do we go to that moral level that moral weight and I wonder where you look for that guidance who writes really well on that do you feel comfortable in that space um your start you know you definitely start at it in the book uh Baldwin and Orwell I think have a real uh you know Baldwin rights with this beautiful righteous anger I feel like no one does it quite like he does it and Orwell also has this like like ethnographic approach to this where he's like man I saw this I can't believe we do this you know and um and I think that they're they're I'll like I'll pull whatever level lever you know and I think that I think there were times where I think that the moral language just came came out of me in a way and it felt I I try to make it urn you don't want to wrap on the chalkboard you know and you're hoping when you when you go to that register the reader's like already there and so they feel more like of course instead of whoa you know yeah okay we're gonna get go back to being a little wonkier um so this is a question from the audience for many of us we work in particular sectors food Justice housing Justice on labor issues or Transportation but we know all of these are intimately interrelated how do you recommend building policy approaches that cut across areas and I'll start with Matt why not it was the luxury of having two people on stage I mean I this is tricky because our policy makers are also divided in the same way and often like for me like if you go look at the 502 plan that the USDA does about homeownership in Rural America I'm like well why can't we do that like in urban America and people like well this is a USD project not a hyper and I just like what are we doing um so there's a part of it it's like the siloing is often very like just how the government works and it kind of there's a there's a translation importance there but it's also like we're all focused on the same families right those of us studying food insecurity and eviction and educational inequality are all studying the same families and it points to how poverty is this correlated adversity right this tight net of social social maladies and I think that combining forces means that we could accentuate the moral power of the work in a way like this is like poverty America for a lot of Americans is really bad right now it's really bad and kind of describing that through kind of getting out of our silos maybe is one step that I would say and no no I was gonna say it's something that you do in the book I think and part of that is I mean I you know you're a deep expert in the housing field and then you do bring in a bunch of broader issues and some of I'm I'm thinking about a time during the pandemic when we're all thinking how are people paying their rent there's no housing assistance yet and then it was like duh unemployment there's unemployment insurance and some of it is just talking to other people like talking to our you know the urban Institute is made up of a lot of people who have expertise in different things and we don't often talk to each other and Advocates don't often talk to each other they kind of just dig their heels into that one issue um so Myra you know you focused on children and your former job and that is focusing on the person tell us if you've have lessons about bringing all the different sectors together yeah so when I was commissioner you know my charge was to focus on Child Care supports for children with disabilities is home visiting and but to your point all of these children were showing up in different systems they were showing up in our need for housing they were showing up in our TANF cases they were showing up in all of these different systems to say they were not doing well and yet we weren't looking at them we're looking at them in total isolation and so being a cabinet part of a Governor's cabinet I was able to talk to my counterparts and Social Services talk to my counterparts across the organization of the agency or the state government to start thinking about how we could get young children inserted into their mandate and so one example we did this was around homelessness actually where young children weren't showing up there were no really any child Advocates who were at the table my agency really wasn't at the table until we started looking in and showing that babies are more likely to end up in how in homeless shelters than any other demographic and the great thing about when you're working with babies is for some folks who are a little harder about adults they will soften when it comes to kids and so we're able to trade on this sounds a little too tactical but we were able to use this to get to widen the net of people who were engaged so people who we knew were big baby Champions or early childhood cared about young children we were able to talk about the need to for Supportive Housing for broader family housing because it was affecting young children so I think there are strategies that we can use to think about what's the common denominator or what's going to move people and young children often are away in and often they are can just be tokenized too so you really have to be be careful about that I will say during the child care pushes there was a lot I was also thinking why are we not engaging the unions why are we not engaging SEIU why were you not aging all these and so to create a broader tent is a way to have more Force you have more people who are coming to the table and so how do you show that commonality of these issues was really important and and highly effective I think for bringing especially some people who are less likely to care until we talked about young children so math this question is for you um and I I want to make sure people are walking away with um actionable ideas about what they can do and this person asks what's the small thing I can do in my neighborhood to help reduce the impacts of poverty I think that you know your neighborhood better than I do and I think that you know taking a page out of like the gay rights struggle like well where do you have influence like where what could what could you do and the thing you have influence so I might not have influence at um the University of Wisconsin uh maybe I can't well I'm in Alum so maybe I can leverage a little bit of influence but but like at Princeton I could ask like well are we paying our landscapers okay like I so I think that starting starting with your influence a little there as well and be willing to have awkward conversations I think that's how we're going to change now look I don't think we're going to solve climate change by all drawing our laundry and I don't think we're going to solve poverty by all making these steps but we all talk about this and are we're like well we know what to do and we have the resources the political will so how do you build political well this is how we do it actually these little small things like I can't see a world where we get the inflation reduction act the most important thing Congress has ever done to fight climate change without a lot of us being like you know what am I eating what am I driving do I need to take that flight I think that build up a political will that that forced lawmakers hands and so I think that this is this is a part of that so I think I think thinking about how we shop and invest is a bit of a step you could also join like local anti-poverty organizations and if you're interested in getting connected I built a website it's called endpovertyusa.org and you can find anti-poverty organizations all over the country putting in the work my room I'm going to start with you here um how could the Grassroots or public movement fight against the corporations and the lobbyists that drive so much of the agenda in Washington oh boy really I gave my math some hard questions you did yeah I mean thinking about your time you know talking to policy makers on the hill um you know how can we make sure the agenda is really what we want it to be and not what lobbyists want it to be yeah that represent corporate interests yeah I was going to say their lobbyists come in many forms I had lobbyists who advocate for young children so not so there are lobbyists who actually do um who Lobby for good things but they are not corporate Labis they don't have the kind of resources that a corporate lobbyists do um so that said yeah I mean I think part of it is is I think this sounds so trite but there is power at the local level know your community know your folks start from there because that honestly is um that's what legislators want to hear when I was in state government they didn't want to hear from me as a commissioner they don't want to hear from honestly the urban Institute at times they wanted to hear from the person in Bridgeport who had had this particular experience so start to engage at your own kind of locus of control where you know best and then I think it is having those tough conversations showing up I mean I love the you mentioned this a few times the Tuesday at eight o'clock meeting and showing up at your zoning meeting to push back one of my dearest friends from college was doing this in La where they're trying to increase affordable housing and it was just not going well and so I bought him a t-shirt that said NIMBY is a disease because he was just he shows up in these meetings with this but he goes to these meetings so I think there is a way to start engaging and then look around come to the urban Institute I mean I think what I really hope from this conversation is the people who are seeing themselves as poverty abolitionists will say okay I know I have a story but I need some data I need some of the evidence go to the eviction lab go to in poverty in america.org I'm going to put in a little plug for you you'll get there okay good um come to we have incredible resources to help you kind of stand up when you're there to testify and know that it's your personal story and you're backed up with evidence because I think they do do a one-two punch um yeah I feel like this feels so pollyanish but it really does take it's these individual acts that just start to build on each other and do your research connect with folks um yeah so I think the audience has gotten a lot of good advice on the steps that they can take I think that um there's probably still some pessimism um that's sort of evident in the question that I have in front of me around the theory of change um you know the person says I'm deeply pessimistic about the willingness of white middle and upper middle class parents to embrace Matt's arguments I'm surrounded by friends and colleagues who moved to the suburbs so their kids can attend higher quality school or pay extremely high costs to send their kids to private schools they may say that they're concerned about poverty but they're not willing to risk opportunities for their privileged kids to help the poor what will it take for people to actually take action and you've answered this I think question a little bit I don't know if you want to add to that answer but I also want to ask you an add-on to that which is what do you say to the pessimists to help turn them into optimists so there's two questions there so I I've been getting this question and when I get a question a lot like this I often think what is that question doing not how to answer the question what's it doing and I think that if we took this seriously that would be enough and um and I think that there's always going to be someone that's like that and one of the things I hear in this question is a bit of hopelessness and I I get it I get it but I think that our hopelessness is useless it's useless and I think that if you look at the 1960s it was pretty hopeless the country was divided Congress was a mess government obstructionism and interaction wasn't just the outcome it was the goal we were anti-democratic in fact not just in threat in fact we are barring blocks from the voting booth and in that situation we got major pieces of civil rights legislation and we got the modern social safety net in the Great Society and War on poverty and it got so much done guys so much got done despite all those odds it was because the Civil Rights and labor movements put unrelenting pressure on Congress despite the lobbying pressure despite the racists in Congress and so I think that that's should give us hope you know we've been here before we've been polarized and divided there have been moneyed interest in our government since Thomas Memorial and still there have been moments of of power so part of this work I feel is just imagining a possibility of a better future that's a discipline in and of itself and so when I was listening that you talked eloquently on corporate interest I was reminded of you know when I started this when I started coming to this town and advocating for like deeper investments in housing affordability and the pay for was like performing the mortgage interest deduction everyone in this town was like that will never happen it's impossible their corporate interest won't do it it's impossible it's impossible and then what Trump just did it Trump's like reform you know like things that like liberal housing Advocates have been asking for years or weren't touching because they thought it was a third rail so things are like impossible until they're suddenly not and I think that's a big lesson we could learn from folks on the ground too yeah I think that's where we're end things are possible things are impossible until they're suddenly not so thank you thank you both for being here Myra thanks for being a terrific colleague and for being here at Urban helping us think about these issues on impact and Matt thank you for writing another wonderful book thanks for having me um and um Mattis can be here until about two o'clock we have a table set up so if you have books that you'd like signed Matt is generously going to be around to sign some books and so I want to ask you all to put your hands together and think that in my Rush [Applause] thank you [Applause] foreign

Channel: Urban Institute

Views: 1,903

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Id: VC7zaN6owFM

Length: 87min 44sec (5264 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023