 I'd like to welcome you here to this event this afternoon called The New Suburban Homeless, How Four Closures and the Great Recession Have Impacted American Families. We're very pleased to have Monica Potts here with us today to feature her in her latest article in the American Prospect Magazine called The Weeklys. And if you're on Twitter, either in the room or on our audience out there in cyberspace, you can follow us at assetsnaf or use hashtag The Weeklys to start the online conversation. I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at the New America Foundation. And our work focuses on policy ideas to help families move up and out of poverty and towards economic security. One way to do this is to build up a pool of assets that can be tapped strategically over time. And for many families, home ownership is a central aspiration. It offers a meaningful connection to stability, access to neighborhood amenities, and a means to build net worth. But it does also bring risks. And I think we've seen that in the experience of the Great Recession. We need to both recognize these risks and find ways to mitigate them. And these should probably include some protections so that people are prevented from losing their assets and having their resources stripped away. But it also, we need systems in place that when families do fall on hard times, they're able to provide a safety net there and then a springboard to help families rebound. The public assistance system we have is just riddled with holes. Right now it's failing in some fundamental ways. And we need to provide some greater support and attention to helping families get back on their feet economically. And really, as I said, the recession's been a test and we're failing significantly. To assess performance, we often need data, information. And I like data, like analysis. But sometimes there's no substitute for getting out there and observing and reporting, asking people questions, listening to them, telling their stories, and then making connections. And this isn't easy, but I've really been impressed with Monica's approach. For the last four years, she's been with the American Prospect Magazine. She's currently their senior writer. I know she started there when Mark Schmidt was editor, I think four years ago. You've been three years at the Prospect. Okay. And the magazine's currently undergone a pretty impressive redesign. So we've got nice copies for you to look at under the current leadership of Kit Rackless. And so now it has excellent articles and it has kind of a coffee table worthy appearance. So I recommend everybody subscribe and grab copies on the way out. So for her latest piece that's in the monthly, in the American Prospect this month, she spent time living with families outside of Denver who had just lost their homes. These were formerly financially stable families who have become the new homeless. And these clearly were not the best of circumstances, but she listened, she learned, she made connections, she told their stories and she came up with a really interesting provocative article. So it really chronicles what these families have experienced, explores what happened to them when they lost their home to foreclosure. So it's really a fine piece. Also wanted to draw your attention to a couple other stories she's written in the last year. One dealt with the significant wealth loss of minority families in Prince George's County, Maryland, right outside the Beltway here. And another was on a tour about it, she took us on a tour of the poorest counties in the country, in Kentucky, Owsley, Kentucky, and introduced us to some really interesting families and their lives there. That piece was awarded a Sydney by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which awards financially conscious journalism and certainly deserved that recognition. So it's really a body of work that she's building up here that I think is really impressive. Also want to note from the podium here, we had some news at New America yesterday where we've just announced Anne-Marie Slaughter will be our next incoming president, the third president of New America since our founding in 1999. We're all excited about this. She's the former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Policy at Princeton University and director of the office of, let's see, policy planning at the State Department. And a lot of people got exposed to her through her kind of magazine article of the year in The Atlantic around balancing work and family issues. So we're really thrilled that she's going to be joining us in the fall. One of the founding principles of New America was, as an organization, to kind of elevate new ideas and ambitious ideas into the public debate. Asset building was one of these ideas that there's kind of value from looking at issues of poverty and mobility and security from beyond an income lens. We've also had a commitment to kind of raising new voices, looking at issues in different ways. So we've had a long list of fellows that have been engaged in this work, writers, journalists, academics, an early fellow at New America was Catherine Buu, who has done a lot of work on looking at poverty issues from multiple perspectives. I know many people admire her work. I think Monica admires her work a great deal. Currently, Jason DeParle is a fellow with us. He's on book leave from the New York Times, and he's writing a book on global migration. So really, I'm just bringing all this up to say this is a commitment we have to elevating these kinds of discussions and Monica's work and other work that happens in the American prospect as really in this spirit of giving voice to important stories and voices. So pleased to have you here with us today. After she talks about her piece from the podium, we're going to hear from Janice Bowler. We're fortunate to have her here as well rejoining us here. She's going to give her reactions to the piece. She's currently economic policy director at the National Council of La Raza. And she's been intimately engaged in a lot of the policy issues in response to the recession around the functioning and the ill functioning of our housing finance system. So she's looked at some of the policy issues that are really in play. I'm looking forward to hearing her reactions to the story as well. And then we'll open it up for discussion with all of you. So, Monica, thank you. Thank you guys so much for coming. And I just want to thank Reed and New America for putting this together and Janice for joining us. So I just wanted to start out talking about this is an issue I've been sort of reporting around for a long time. Reed mentioned that I had written an article about the decline of Black wealth in the Great Recession. And that was something very much tied to the fact that there was a housing boom and then a bust. Almost all working class and middle class families, almost all of their wealth is tied in their homes. And for African-American families, this was really the first generation where they were allowed to purchase homes without discrimination in every market. And so they lost almost one generation. The entire generation of Black wealth was erased in the Great Recession. And so I had also been reporting on the housing crisis, the lack of wealth in all kinds of communities, and the lack of affordable housing. And so I knew that all of these things were going to combine to be something really terrible. And when I saw the rise in suburban poverty, suburban poverty increased by more than half around the country during the recession. I knew that there would be a great rise in poverty in communities that weren't used to dealing with high levels of poverty. And so I thought that there would be sort of few resources to spread among a lot of new families in need. I thought that that would put pressure on the poorest families who would be the most in need because there would be this whole new population of people to help. And I also thought that the suburban communities might be sort of mentally and psychically unprepared to deal with the level of poverty. And I found that mostly to be true when I went to Colorado. And I chose suburban Denver because that area had seen levels of poverty on par with what we saw nationwide. But also because I thought that the housing market had seen sort of also dramatic levels of boom and bust. And so these people, the people that I met by and large there had a hard time thinking of themselves as poor and had a hard time thinking of themselves as homeless, partly because this was an entirely new situation. And because they knew so few families before that they would have classified as poor. They thought of themselves as working class. They thought of themselves as middle class. And that really sort of changed the way that they responded to their new situation. So I actually reported in Jefferson County for most of the fall. I was there both because it was a swing county during the election and also to report on this poverty rise. And I very quickly found out that homelessness was a huge issue. I talked to people in the schools and I learned that from 2001 to 2012-13, in this school year, the rise in homeless students went from 59 when they first started counting them to 2,812. So more than 2,800 kids in school this year are homeless or in transitional housing. And some of that is that there's been a rise in awareness about suburban poverty and homelessness. But some of it is just there's a huge increase in need and very little resources to get those families housed again quickly. So I also spoke to a number of shelters and charities, all of which saw an increase in need, and all of which saw an increase in need among populations they had never served before. So families who were homeless for the first time, families who were homeless and had never sort of experienced any level of housing challenges before, and families who even had been sort of donors or volunteers before were coming in for food from the food bank and food from soup kitchens and for help getting new shelter. So again, that also drains the resources for the people most in need. And it also means that there's increased need at a time of decreased giving and decreased help and decreased federal money and state money for these problems. So this was actually also true nationwide. There was a rise in suburban homelessness nationwide and rural homelessness. So there aren't enough shelter beds. Some charities give out vouchers for hotels in the area. And some hotels have just become sort of impromptu shelters for families. And that was the situation of the hotel I went to in Wheatridge, Colorado, which is in the northern end of the suburbs. It's right off the interstate. There are a bunch of cheap hotels there. They all have a reputation for being nice and affordable. And all of them had families like this. So if you sat in the lobby of any number of hotels along the interstate in Jefferson County, you would see families who are living there, children who are going to school there. You would see school buses pick kids up there from the lobby. You would see families coming back from work. It's everywhere. And after I wrote the story, a lot of people have been tweeting me and telling me that they see this in their communities too, in Florida, in California, in New Jersey. And so it's really a national issue. And these hotels, by and large, aren't set up to deal with families in need. Some of them do a really good job of working with their local charities and their local agencies to connect these families to services. But for the most part, this is a place where people go and they're sort of hidden away. They're hidden in plain sight. I spent five weeks there. I spoke to six families a lot. And I spoke to more families infrequently. One of the most common and surprising things was that a lot of families told me that they hadn't realized they were homeless for a long period of their homelessness, or they still didn't realize that they were homeless. So one family told me that they had too much income to qualify to be homeless, even though they didn't have a home. One family told me that one woman told me, who was a single mom, told me that she'd been living on her mom's couch for five years and other relatives' couches for a period of a total of five years. And she hadn't realized she was homeless until she went somewhere to get help. And they said, well, you know, you're homeless. Let's get you a Section 8 voucher. So I decided to concentrate on two families for narrative reasons, but also because the story of Bonnie and Andy and their son Drew, which is in the article, is the most dramatic. They had owned their home outright. They took out a home equity loan. It was subprime. They had to refinance. And they ended up owing $68,000. They started to miss payments, and they struggled to make payments. They started working with an agency that told them they could help them settle their debt and keep them in their home. That agency disappeared, and they never got help from them. They never sort of went through official channels to challenge their eviction, and they lost their home in February of 2012. They've been homeless since then, and they've lived in different hotels since then. At the same time, there was another family in the hotel who had been evicted from their rental home because they had stopped paying rent. And that family ended up being housed, primarily because they found a home that had been owned by the Differs and County Housing Authority. So it was affordable, and they could get in without a down payment. But by and large, most of the families I spoke to had trouble getting into homes because the rental market was incredibly tight. Rents had risen really dramatically. They had been paying $7 or $800 for rent on an entire house, and the rents now are $1,200 for a luxury condo in that area. So it's just dramatically increased, and it's way beyond the ability to meet the needs of these families, what the average rents are. There's almost no affordable housing. The Section 8 program in the county is incredibly overtaxed. Only about 40 or 50 slots open up every year. Actually, I think 30 and 40 slots open up every year, and there are 2,500 families on the waiting list. So all of them, all of the families had been working up until their housing crisis or up until the Great Recession, and they lost their jobs and hours were cut. Many of them were still working and making working-class incomes, but it wasn't enough to afford homes in the area. Many made too much to seek help from programs. They made a little bit too much for food stamps. One mother made $12 too much a month for food stamps. They also needed a guide and a counselor to kind of help them understand sort of what their options were and what was realistic, and they didn't have that. The families that sought help from the schools got it, and they were very happy with the help that the schools gave the children to help them get to school on time and to help them have food on the weekends. But for the most part, families were worn down. They were worn down from seeking for help. They were worn down because they were living in a hotel, which, even though it's a roof over your head, there are a number of ways in which it's not desirable, and they were worn down because they felt like the country had forgotten them, and that was by and large what I found, so. That's pretty much it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Let's see, come have a seat. Oh, oh, sorry, sorry about that. You're a star. And Janice, I want to offer you the opportunity to start us off here with some reactions and response to Monica's piece. Sure, well, let me start just by thanking you really for doing this article, because as Reed said, putting a voice and a face on these families is so important, and you did a beautiful job painting a very clear picture of a tragic situation, so I want to thank you for that, and Reed, for hosting the event. Several years ago, I worked on a report with Roberto Carcia from the UNC Center for Community Capital, and we titled it The Foreclosure Generation, because that's what we feel like we're really facing is a generation of families and kids in particular who are coming up in these kinds of circumstances, and we really wanted to understand what were the challenges, and even though, well, there are a couple things. One is I was very sad to see in three years that it's gone by since we did that. Our report, not much, has really changed, and the country really hasn't recognized what these families are facing. The other is that it's these circumstances, we didn't do interviews in Denver, we were in Florida and California and Texas and elsewhere in Michigan, but the experiences were largely the same. So there's, and you can find that report, there's some copies of the Executive Summary out front, or you can find it on NCLR's website at nclr.org. But a couple things that I want to lift up in particular. One is the, you mentioned the issue of schools, and I found this in our research as well that schools were really overwhelmed by the problem, but in some cases also really underwhelmed because they couldn't get a handle on it. They didn't know necessarily when kids were homeless, and so they knew that the problem was sort of out there, but they didn't know which kid and they didn't know what to do about it. But the fact of the matter is, is that when a family is instably housed, they are entitled to support under the McKinney-Vento Act, and schools have modest resources that they can put to use to help make sure that that kid doesn't have to change schools multiple times, which is, or can have consistency in education. So that's a federal. That's right, that's a federal act, and there's resources available to schools. I think your experience, that's not nearly enough, sort of once you tap into the problem, you'll find that you go from being underwhelmed to completely overwhelmed, but that is something that I don't know we've really focused on enough from a policy perspective. Another interesting thing was the note that you ended on. I mean, this family got what's clearly a predatory loan, and we can talk more about that, that's a story that by now a lot of us know well. But then they also got scammed again by a foreclosure rescue scam. And so that has also been a quiet and pervasive problem that we've done very little about. And I want to raise this up because it's, the issue runs right in the face of what we're doing with our housing counseling infrastructure, which is we built it up a little bit in this time of the foreclosure crisis. It is now more robust and sophisticated as it's ever been, yet thanks to the sequester, we're going to see funding cut for this program. So hopefully there was actually just an announcement by the White House yesterday that they're going to allow some hamp dollars, that's the, what is hamp, hamp? Home Affordable Modification Program under Treasury. There's leftover funding in that program. They're gonna be able to use it to fund some foreclosure prevention services. But actually the services for homelessness prevention and other things are funded through the HUD budget and that's getting slashed. So the last thing that I wanna say is really end with this, something that you mentioned Reed, which is a recognition that our social safety net really is not where it needs to be. And we are at serious risk of losing people twice, which is that there's giant holes in our safety net. They're falling through that, but we're also seeing an economy that's prepared to leave them behind. And so we don't yet have a way to take families who have seen their credit reports devastated, sort of re-enter the economy. We're seeing a housing finance system poised to leave the next generation of home buyers behind. And so this is a much bigger problem than I think people really realize. The other place where I think it's a huge problem is in funding access to higher education. A lot of people turn to their homes to help their children go into school. That asset is gone. So this ripple effect of what it means and how we're actually gonna help families move into the middle class is eroding right before us. Thank you. I think I wanna open up the discussion to the room now because it's an article in a presentation that lends itself to a lot of discussion. That there's a number of policy points to be made that I think Janice has begun to raise. And I think we wanna weave those in to the discussion as well. But let's see a show of hands who might have some questions. I'll call and you will move the mic around. Let's start right here. Yeah. There's a mic and you can tell us who you are if you'd like. Hi, my name is Shanti Abadi and I'm from the National Fair Housing Alliance. I had a question whether you encountered anecdotally any instances of housing discrimination when these people were seeking homes either based on their source of income or families with kids. Cause you mentioned that the pricing was a major issue but I wanted to see if you had seen any other obstacle. I did actually. I forgot to mention that part of it is also that their credit is very bad now because they've all been evicted or foreclosed on. But also there was a family there with five children and they said that landlords would tell them outright they weren't gonna rent their homes to people with five children. Those children were older too. And I didn't have anybody articulate to me problems of finding a home for other reasons, other discriminatory reasons. But, you know, I have no doubt that that plays a role especially in a place like Colorado where there are a lot of tensions around new immigration. And I think that that is another level to the problem that a lot of families have. What was the ethnic makeup of the Ramada Inn when you were there and other places nearby? It reflected the ethnic makeup of Jefferson County which is mostly white and a lot of the families that were white and then a lot of families that were mixed and also Latino and then a smaller number of families that were African American. Other suburbs around Denver have larger African American populations and so when I went to hotels there it sort of reflected that. The Denver Metro area itself is very diverse. And yeah. It's interesting that even our homeless are segregated. Yeah, that's right. Right here. This gentleman here. Hi, I'm Ibrahim Mookman with the Hospitality Outreach Program where we train people in hospitality training. And we had a situation recently of an organization that was trying to help homeless people. They provide them with cell phones because we help them, you know, after they graduate, get jobs and they have to, almost all the employers now require that they go online. And in this particular organization said that they couldn't give cell phones to people who live in shelters because they could only have one cell phone at that particular address. I thought that was a crazy policy of an organization trying to help people who are homeless and to institute something like that that is incongruent with what they were trying to do. Did you run across anything like that? Kind of crazy shelter policies, I guess is what you're asking. You know, the shelters there were really good and they worked really hard to help families. Some of the rules that they have are for reasons that from the outside, I think, seem weird but make sense internally when you think about it. One of the big problems I saw was that a lot of shelters that take families won't take teenage boys. And so you see families split up for that reason. Families with boys over 12 kind of have to do, they have to separate. I saw a lot of that. I didn't see a lot of things with belongings or anything like that. So, no, I didn't see that. But it does kind of raise the issue of how these public assistance programs are working, how they're delivering information. A lot of the information gaps are really profound and providing real impediments. Then the different programs have different rules that don't align with one another. In fact, you know, create some disincentives for behavior that might be beneficial. They make people spend down all their resources before they can get some support in some cases like the TANF program. And the TANF program is called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It's supposed to be there when things like a recession hit. In America, the way it's set up, this is a block granted to the states, the case rolls didn't move through the recession. They were static during the greatest moments of economic disruption that we've had for decades. EITC, which is another program that's designed to kind of provide some support for working families, when your income goes down, your benefit goes down. The only program that really worked counter-cyclically was the food stamp program, the SNAP program. The benefit's quite modest, small, and yet it was doing a lot of heavy lifting in this recent experience. And then all these programs have different rules and people that are supposed to even administer them don't understand them. So anyway, I feel like your point raises the issue of a lot of incongruity in how we generate information and how these programs are designed to operate and then interact with one another. Monica, what was your sense of how the families kind of understood and interacted with some of the public assistance programs? Well, a lot of families decided not to try to seek help from TANF. It was capped at $462 a month for families. And that's the maximum benefit in Colorado and that is almost worth nothing. They would have to work for that. They would have to give up some of their assets. They would have to really be pressed for time in a real job search. Some of them were sort of doing kind of work under the table for people and they would have to give that up, or they felt like they would have to give that up. So they very much did not want to take part in TANF. With food stamps and with Medicaid and another Colorado program called Old Age Pension, which is for people over 60, they had better success getting those programs, but it was still a job. They had to go to the agencies at the far end of the suburban ring. They had to sit down and give over all their information, sometimes multiple times to the states. Now, states are trying to make that process easier. Colorado is one of those states, but by and large, the families had sort of a, what they felt was a trying relationship with a lot of state agencies, and they also, they didn't like having to rely on them. That was another thing, I think, mentally, that they had to overcome. We found that as well with families that we interviewed. It was like the families that you talked to. It was the first time they'd ever had an encounter with the public safety net system, so they really didn't know what to do, they didn't know where to go, and in a number of occasions, they didn't even know they were eligible for things until they were talking with the counselor who was doing the interview of them, and so for a lot of the families, we talked to the state children health program, and health insurance program as CHIP, was a really big deal. Because that became a place where people would access and get information for a whole range of things that they were eligible for. That's right, and where I think maybe they might be reluctant to accept support for themselves, it's a different thing when it comes to your kids. So a lot of them felt like if I can just get my kids covered, then we'll be fine. But it raised other issues. A lot of the families that we talked to were foregoing serious medical care because they couldn't afford it, and so I remember one story that really sticks out. The husband was telling the story of his wife who had a tumor on her ovary, and they couldn't afford to get it taken care of, and their insurance was keeping their fingers crossed. Yeah, right here. Here's a mic coming for you. I'll also just mention before you start that this is where the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, I think has potentially very consequential. I mean, this is gonna be a new central point where a lot of people are gonna have to go and kind of verify their income to determine the subsidy for the healthcare insurance, and it could be a place where they're connected with other services. So when we think about reimagining what the public assistance system can look like, I think the health system will be a key access point. Yes. Alejandro Becerra, National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. The communities that were most heavily affected by foreclosures were in Arizona, Nevada, California, Florida, and New Jersey. Unfortunately, these areas were heavily populated by Hispanics and Asians. Based on your experience and Janice, can you tell us how these communities, each community has reacted or managed to address being homeless? And secondarily, HUD and HHS have taken pride in having made advances in addressing homelessness. How do you see their response to homelessness? Do you want to start? Sure, so let me give a general overview because I really can't speak to what the individual states have done, but I earlier mentioned the McKinney-Vento Act, and one of the reasons why I think it's so important, and it was highly valuable to the families that I interviewed, which we're all at the, you know, is because their definition of homeless is a little bit more flexible, and that's been a challenge for our community just broadly in order to receive some of the benefits that may otherwise be available to them under quote-unquote homeless programs. So McKinney-Vento, the criteria is that you're unstably housed, so you're living in a hotel, you're couchsurfing with relatives, but for many of the HUD programs, and I think they're looking at this, but I don't think it's changed yet, it has a much stricter definition of what is homeless, and so for a lot of our families who are more likely to double and triple up into homes, they're not considered than the worst case needs. So I saw that in families that we were interviewing that there were, in some cases, two families, in one instance in particular, two families that had lost their home, they both moved in with a sibling, they now have nine people under one roof. Under McKinney-Vento, they're fine, their kids can get some support for consistency of education, but they wouldn't necessarily qualify for a voucher, for example, because they're not on the street. I'll also note that there have been advances in how HUD and others approach the issue of homelessness with trying to identify a continuum of care model, where families can be kind of moved along, and their different varying needs can be met. I know that there's been some analysis of that approach, that it's gotten some good marks for some reforms. I think what's the challenge here is that this is kind of a new set of families with new profiles, new experiences, new demographics, and really there seems to be nothing for them, that there's been no accommodation from the experience that they've been through. They really seem, through Monica's eyes, to be really still out on their own, and really their prospects for kind of getting back on their feet and stabilizing seem really challenging. Yeah, right here. Hi, I'm Barbara Cherguino. One of the things that occurs to me is that there are, like you said, there's the newly poor, and then there are those who are already poor, but kind of naturally speaking, for those who are already poor, people have to prove that they have nowhere to go before they can get any housing help, and that means including staying at your mother's, or your brother's, or your anybody. That's already a requirement, so it's not a new problem. It's just that these people have never had that problem, so it's not new that you would be expected to go live with your relatives, et cetera. One of the problems with a lot of this, trying to help the middle class is that frankly, you have to help the people who are already poor before. Your comment reminds me of contrasting your article in Kentucky as well, and I'm wondering if you could speak to some of the differences you kind of observed with these families in Colorado and in Kentucky. Yeah, you're absolutely right. For starters, I'll just say that I met a lot of people who had been relative hopping, and it's incredibly disruptive to them in their children's lives. It's not an ideal situation, and some people have been having to do this for a long time, and it really speaks to a need that's been there for a really long time, and that's absolutely true. And I think what was different about the suburbs versus Owsley County where I was, Owsley County has a poverty rate of 40%, and the rate of people who are near poor, so within 200% of the poverty line is about 70%. So the vast majority of people there were very low income, or low income and very low income, and they had a different attitude about sort of what it meant to be with resources and without resources and how to seek help, and the stigmas were just different, and so nobody felt shame seeking help from Head Start for their children, and nobody felt shame sort of being on food stamps to feed their children. A lot of it is I think what Jenna said earlier is that families feel good about helping their children, but they feel bad about helping themselves because they feel like they've failed in some way. The vast majority of families I spoke to in the suburbs really felt that they had failed, and that was a large part of how they responded to people who were working to help them, who people who would have worked to help them if they sought help from them, and to the people in the hotel that they encountered and how they were treated, they were just completely sort of beaten down by the entire recession, and I think that speaks to sort of culturally, more broadly, the stereotypes that exist around poverty, that what it means to be successful in America, what it means to be middle class in America, families struggle against that when they feel like they've lost their footing in the American economy. I found in the interviews that we did with families so you hinted at, so we talked to people within a year of foreclosure, many of them had already moved three and four times, often between relatives, and it created a lot of pressure on their relationship with those family members, but also amongst spouses and between parents and their children, and so we saw in some cases families had separated, we certainly saw a lot of them that broke up because they had to, they couldn't all fit in one place, and I'm wondering if you saw that and if you can talk a little bit about just the family well-being and kind of what was the toll there? Yeah, there was actually one really large family in the hotel, it was a set of grandparents, a set of parents and five of the six children, the oldest was in college, and they had doubled up ages ago, like 10 years ago because they found then that their resources were stressed and it helped that they were able to be together and the grandparents could watch the children while the parents went off to work and the children benefited from having that a lot of adults around, and they were split up, so the two oldest boys were in the hotel with the parents and the grandparents were in the hotel and their daughters were living with friends and relatives around the county, they were really sad about it, the girls came to the hotel every day to visit their grandparents, the grandfather's not well, he has a lot of different illnesses and he was suffering health-wise in a way that his daughter very much thought was part of the separation, he thought she thought it was good for him to have his family around and they couldn't all be together and part of the reason that they're having trouble finding a home is that they want to all stay together so they need a bigger home, but at the same time, if they had to split up, that would cause another set of problems, they wouldn't be able to depend on each other financially, they wouldn't be able to depend on each other emotionally and also to support the children, so that was a really big problem and people are really sad and I know that sounds kind of silly, but being sad really hinders your ability to sort of get better and get well. And they feel guilty, right? And they feel guilty, yeah. I mean people, all this talk about whether or not people take personal responsibility over these situations, but the people we talked to took this extremely seriously to the point where they couldn't recognize the systemic problems of predatory lending that had done this to them. They really owned it and felt extremely guilty. They take all their responsibility really on themselves. And in fact, yeah, let's go right here in the front. All right, thank you. Edward Smith, Institute for Higher Education Policy. I just totally commented about how concrete poverty is and how it strains loving bonds and family bonds resonates with me. So thank you. I'm wondering if you can comment on any families that perhaps were newly residents of suburban, the areas in which you conducted the interviews, perhaps five years or less and perhaps were in poverty prior to moving to, I guess, the outskirts of the MSA and their experiences trying to, I guess, get on track and perhaps not being able to in the first place aside from those that had already had homes and lost them. Yeah, you know, I did speak to a few families who, well, a few people, individuals who fit into that mold and they were people also who had taken retraining programs especially in the community colleges in Jefferson County and they were having an enormously hard time moving into the middle class. Actually, one of the families who lived in the hotel, the mother had lost her job when she was a grocery store clerk and when the automated machines came in, she lost her job and she had been making a pretty solid living doing that. She went to college to retrain and then wasn't able to get a job that was that much better. Her salary was about the same as it had been before she was, before she went to school and I spoke to other people, mostly younger people who were moving into the suburbs and, excuse me, trying to move up and they've found that hard too because all more people are competing to try to get into the middle class either again or anew. We have two right here. Hi, Kristin Joyce. Could you talk a little bit more about some of the barriers to receiving services out in the suburbs that might be different than what we would expect to see in urban areas? Sure. Partly, the agencies aren't as around. If you live in the city, you will see government agencies and the government presence is just a little bit different. That's partly... We're not in the malls? Yeah, we're not in the malls and so, you know, all of the social services in Jefferson County are in one big building at the end of the freeway. So if you don't have a car that's working, it takes you two hours to get there. You know, if you don't have... If you don't have a car that's working, it takes you two hours to get anywhere where it would normally take you 30 minutes. And so, that was sort of a structural problem. The other problems were that people weren't used to interacting with the government in that way. Jenna spoke to this a little bit, but, you know, people are used to being homeowners and complaining to the government when their trash isn't picked up on time and that's the interaction that they have. They don't know about programs. They don't know that they qualify for programs. And when they find out, it's incredibly taxing to apply for these programs at times. Again, states are trying to make this better, but the forms are confusing. They're not easy to fill out. And a lot of families give up because they feel like it might not be worth it and then they realize they're hungry and they try again, so it's kind of a rotating cycle. I don't know if you guys can... Hi, Lisa Holland from the Community Action Partnership. You kind of answered it with the question that was just asked, but what I was gonna say is you said that the hotels were mostly ill-equipped to offer and connect these families to social services and then you mentioned that they're hard to get to. So have you heard of anything being done to address that? Perhaps bringing it in, bringing some of the workers to the hotels to meet with people or some central location because clearly this is a problem that has to be addressed. That sounds like a good idea. Having outreach, maybe someone that could provide case management services to say, look at your situation and assess it. And here's all the things that you might be eligible for. I know some states are moving to try to do these one-stop shops or benefit banks and other states are interested in making sure their case rules don't increase even during the recession. But Monica, what did you observe? Some hotels work with the county and work with local charities to connect people to resources and counselors. Some hotels do that better than others. The, as far as outreach from the county, you know, they are also overstressed. You know, there is a lot of need that they can't meet and so outreach is not the first priority that they see. But you know, some people do flag these families for people, you know, some of the teachers at school at different times notice that the kids might be living in a hotel and they would sort of try to put that on someone's radar. But families are afraid that the kids are gonna be taken away. Some families are. They're afraid that the system won't be good to them and so I think that's another big barrier. They might, they often try to hide from people who are well-meaning too. Well, and it's not a totally surprising reaction either, right, when the public dialogue has been so centered on shaming the poor and shaming people for, for being poor, for needing help or just even temporarily needing it. So I think of right now the conversation we're having about the federal budget. I mean, we've already reduced, our deficit reduction plan has been three to one, cuts on spending versus raising revenue. And just a couple of weeks ago, Congress passed and the president signed the sequester into law. Like they just quietly accepted something that was originally supposed to be so painful that it would never come to fruition. And that's gonna be our starting place for the 2014 budget. So if we look at what the house budget proposal that's been out there sponsored by Paul Ryan, I mean, almost all of the cuts have come from safety net programs. And so the conversation seems to be dominated right now that if you need these programs, there's something wrong with you and government shouldn't be doing these things when really I think we need to reorient to say that if we don't make these investments, we don't, first of all, what are we as a society if we can't care for the most vulnerable among us? But even beyond that, if we can't help these people rebound, our entire economy is going to suffer for it. When we look at who are the homeowners and workers and students of the future, we need to be making those investments now. I would also just add quickly that all of the families I spoke with believed that there were benefits someone was getting that were easier to get. They believed that someone somewhere was having an easier time getting help and they were the only ones suffering. And they didn't understand that this was really all it is. The food stamps, the Medicaid that they were getting, it's the same for everyone and it's not very much. Right here. Go with him and then we'll get to Mark. Blake Warnick, National Housing Conference in Center for Housing Policy. I heard you say something about how rental affordability was really one of the driving issues as much as unemployment was in putting these people in these weekly hotels. I was kind of wondering if you'd heard of any policies that states and localities, particularly these areas that are pretty unfamiliar with this problem are testing to address the affordable housing supply issue. Not Colorado. A lot of cities are trying to do mixed income housing and more affordable housing. I used to work in Stanford, Connecticut. That city has an ordinance that any developer has to devote 10% of the properties they wanna build to affordable. But it's affordable to the area. It's not really said exactly how affordable what that means. Well, formulas vary from area to area. And so those things are the best I've heard of. I know that that Sean Donovan, the director of the Housing and Urban Development Office has said he wants to make a commitment to building rental housing again, but I haven't seen a lot of progress. Mark? Thank you, Mark Schmidt. Monica, one thing that struck me between your Asley County story and this one is you could see in Asley County it's multi-generational poverty. You could see going back in 20 years and the children of the people you wrote about being parents in more or less the same situation. This doesn't seem sustainable. Like this is probably not gonna look the same. And I know this isn't what you do because you're a wonderfully straightforward reporter. But I wonder if you and Janice can speculate a little bit about where this goes. If we, let's say we have a decent economic recovery and a decent economic recovery in Colorado. Are these people able to get back into the labor market? How much ground have they really lost from, I was struck when you said in 2008 they were employed and weren't able to afford houses at that boom price. Is there any way you could see them getting back to where they were in a more manageable environment or are we looking at a situation of a longer term, maybe even multi-generational poverty and what is that gonna look like? Cause it's probably not gonna look like hotels or at some point they're not really hotels anymore. So pulling you out of your natural zone. I'm fine going there. I was very, I left the hotel very depressed. I'm very worried about the children who are there now. I think this, I think the children who are homeless right now, it's going to be very hard for them to recover. The school learning period that they've lost. You know, they aren't able to concentrate on school very well now. Their family is lost. In some cases a couple generations of wealth buildup. That a lot of families aren't gonna be able to buy homes now for a long time. So even families who might have been ready to invest in a home. And this is especially true for areas where the boom was really bad and so the fall was really bad. They're not gonna be able to buy homes that they can pass on to their children now when it might be the best for them to do that. So I think that this isn't sustainable but I don't see a huge rush to sort of deal with the fact that most of the jobs we are creating right now are low-wage jobs that you know that we're in a state where families are having a hard time getting the good middle class jobs that they used to be able to get. That we're not in a state where we're sort of recognizing that a lot of the people who lost their jobs in the recession were 50 and older and does it really make sense for them to spend the next five years trying to return to the labor force? And so I'm really in the next 10 years I think hotels themselves aren't sustainable but I think we're going to see a lot of people who are stuck in a state that would have been working class before but it doesn't look like what we thought it was. Yeah I would, I agree with that completely and would like to answer the question in two ways, sort of the bad news and then maybe some good news. I think where I started was really that we're in high danger of leaving a whole group of people behind economically and that's going to bite us in the end because those are big chunks of people that are not contributing to our tax base and our economic productivity and it's not a small problem. Latinos lost 66% of their wealth. We've got on a whole range of indicators, tons of research coming out saying that the next generation is not going to be better off than their parents when it comes to their health, when it comes to their assets and economic mobility. So we're already starting to see the warning signs on the wall that we've got a real problem and we simply cannot ignore that. The Alejandro's here and I often quote his work so I'll do it now, 50% of first time home buyers by 2020 will be Latino families. Yet we carry more student loan debt, student loan debt that we get without getting the degree, high rates of long-term unemployment, having gone through the foreclosure crisis or being children of parents that have gone through the foreclosure crisis. We can't ignore what is a widespread problem and expect to have a robust growing economy. We cannot forget these people. What I think is maybe the hopeful note is that I'm constantly struck by the resilience that I see amongst our community. And I actually wanted to share with you a little bit a quote from the report that I did of this one family in particular that continues to haunt me. I think about them all the time. But in particular, we haven't really talked about what the housing market looks like moving forward but that's a real concern that I have that home ownership simply won't be available to many families in the future. And when we asked families, not necessarily about the house but broadly, the American dream, whatever that means to you, is it gonna be available to you in the future? And some people definitely felt like it wouldn't. Immigrants in particular that we talked to were very resilient and this is a family that had lost their job and been kicked out of two places since and had a pretty tragic story living in rural North Georgia. And when we asked this, and they were immigrants, first generation immigrants, when I asked them, this is what they said. Oh, I'm sorry. I built it all up and then that's the wrong quote. I'm sorry. Let me see if I can get it. Here it is. This is the Nunez family in Northwest Georgia. He said, I'm the type of person that could fall and fail but I'll not stay like this. I know that sooner or later an opportunity will come up. I believe that this has affected me a lot but that doesn't mean that I'm gonna stay where this situation has me. I have to find a way, as I told you, I'm looking for ways. Maybe I'll sell water or something. I'm that type of person. I like to work hard for my things. I have no problem with that. I don't like to depend on other people and bothering other people in order to get what I want. And I think of this family often when I think about this shaming around being poor or sort of framing it as if people aren't taking personal responsibility for their lives and trying and giving it everything they got. And I do think there's some resiliency there that we're gonna be able to build on. Very long-winded answer to your question but I had to get that out there. It actually, the family that you chronicle, Bonnie and her husband and child, also seemed that resilience comes through. I mean, I think one of the challenges here though is what the prospects look like for the hard road that is ahead of getting back to stability and income's gonna be part of it. But the fact that we didn't help with more efforts to keep people in their homes to stabilize them I think is really gonna be a profound impact. But that felt like a resilient family that you were talking with there. Yeah, they really were. I think they did feel like they were gonna make it back and that was really good. And they probably will because that's what it takes is that kind of resilience. But yeah, on a broad scale, I don't know if that's the only thing we're gonna hope for. Resilience isn't policy. Yeah, exactly. And yet the nine-year-old there's one quote in the piece where he figures out how insane it was that the bank didn't make a deal with his parents who wanted to stay in the house, wanted to stay current. And he knew, it seemed like as a nine-year-old that it was gonna be a lose, lose. The bank was gonna get less money down the road. The community was gonna have a road. They were gonna be out. And it's just like, my gosh, if he could figure it out. And actually Janice and I, we had events here and other places where we were talking about this at the time, the need for principal reduction, for mitigation, modification of loans. Treasury left money on the table that had been allocated. It's just a travesty. And now we've had all these mortgage settlements. But it's well, after the fact, it's not gonna help these families. And hopefully we'll be able to deploy those resources effectively down the line. Okay, here and then in the back and then maybe those will be the last two. Hello, my name's Larry Jurgino. I was, what I think we may be observing is institutional rigidity in government programs here. We have a new class of client, a new need that emerges. And governments are not renowned for their flexibility, adaptability, and agility generally. Is the kind of poignancy that comes from the stories that we hear today going to allow us to rethink the social safety net in a different way so that we create other mechanisms of action that don't rely on government in such a profound way to provide the social safety net. Yeah, yeah, maybe so. And maybe though that we, I don't think we can let, this is what we almost do for a living here. We don't want to let the policy makers off the hook. We want a system, use the lessons of this experience to inform a more thoughtful, responsive system that's really designed not to fail, but to provide support at these key junctures. But it's true that it is, the mechanisms are slow. Let's see, yeah, last comment in the back. Don Appleman with USDA's rural housing service. And you kind of touched on this in your last couple of comments, but when you were working with the families, which I'm assuming here were primarily former homeowners, did you see any common threads or kind of what was the lesson to be learned as far as the type of financing that they got? Were there time bombs that were built into their loans that went off? Why did they become homeless and their neighbors didn't? Yeah, good question. They did have loans with adjustable rates that went off unexpectedly for them. And they also, many of them were also renting from people who were foreclosed on too, and they found that they had sort of very few rights when foreclosures started to happen, or at least they knew a few rights. They had some rights that they didn't know about and didn't know how to challenge the being evicted because the homeowner was foreclosed on. As far as loans, I mean, it absolutely struck the people with bad loans before, and many of them were the result of predatory lending practices, so. Yeah, I mean, I- I mean, this is well-documented now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The extent that we allowed predatory lending practices to just overtake these communities and these families, and we have mechanisms in place now to stop it with the new CFPB and other regulations if they're empowered and allowed to do their job, right? Yeah, no, that's right. In fact, I think that all I know about this, the Bonnie and Andy's loan is what I read in the piece, so I can't comment extensively, but it was pretty clear to me. I mean, it was $48,000 with a balloon payment, and they refied, somehow got 20,000 added to their loan balance. That's pretty bad. This was a loan they didn't understand, and probably didn't maybe not even need all of it at that particular time, and this is what, you know- Well, then it's designed to fail. It was designed to fail, yeah. Anything with a balloon payment like that for a working-class family, there's no reasonable expectation that they would have the ability to repay that back, and that is a new rule that is a change thanks to Dodd-Frank, that that kind of lending shouldn't be happening in the future. They also, they got the loan in the first place because their income was falling, so they really shouldn't have qualified, I would probably say, you would imagine, so, I mean, there should have been other ways to help them mitigate the loss of their income. So in addition to the public assistance system, the housing finance system and the oversight of that marketplace needs to, you know, change so that these kinds of things don't happen again, and we don't kind of replicate the experience that we've been through. You know, we need to take some lessons learned, and Monica's, I think, helped us do that. Really, thank you for joining us here today. Janice for coming. You for being here, and appreciate your time. I want you to pick up copies of the magazine, American Prospect, on your way out. Thank you.