 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Saki and we are still on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting. We are now blessed to be sitting down with Dr. Graham Pruss. Hello there. How are you doing, man? I'm great. How are you? Thanks for coming on to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Greatly appreciate it. Really excited to be talking about what you care about. Let's give a background on Graham. Graham is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. He's working on the Vehicle Residency Project, which we will be unpacking in tons of nuance. Really excited about that. And he's executive director and co-founder at WeCount.org. Check out the link in the bio. We'll be talking about that as well. It's a system that helps communities request and donate items for people in need that need social services. And it helps with assisting homeless get off the streets. Graham is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. And he also has a lot of very interesting thoughts about applying practice. Practical thinking to anthropology and just in general. I'm really excited to break down what you're focused on right now, what you care about. But even before we get to that, let's talk about you and how you even got here. Who are you as a kid and how did you get interested in anthropology? Well, let's see. I grew up in that upper middle class American suburbs here actually in San Jose. And by the time I was a youth, I had traveled a lot with my parents around the country. In an RV, my grandparents were retirees, snowbirds. And so doing those frugal family trips, wherever we could, was often a vehicle. And then as I grew older and became a punk rocker and often kind of a contrarian with my community around me, I didn't feel like I fit in a lot. And so I started not doing as well in school, ended up failing out of high school, and actually became homeless at the age of 15. I lived on the streets of San Jose, Berkeley, in San Francisco, in parks and under bridges and in vehicles, if I was lucky, in a girlfriend's vehicle at the time, or in the back of punk rock clubs where I work security often. And so I did that. So I had experienced homelessness. And after several months, a person at a community meal offered me a quarter to help me to contact my parents. And that was the catalyst that helped me to really connect with my society and my future. I was able to retake my classes, graduate from high school. But I had my son at 18 even after that and wasn't able to go to college or anything. So I'm actually sort of a late bloomer in a lot of this. A lot of my work is based upon real-world applications because it's the life I lived. Having a son at 18, I spent years in social service offices on welfare, getting medical coupons for the birth of him or son, and housing coupons to keep housed and sheltered. And I sort of learned what it was like to stand in lines, waiting to get the assistance that you need so desperately to survive. And so when I had the opportunity to go to school myself in my 30s, I was able to transfer into the University of Washington. I worked with Jason De Leon, who I believe you spoke with earlier as an undergraduate, and was able to actually go to field school with him during the Undocupated Migration Project. That was in 2010, so it was early on in the project. I think it was the second year of the field school. And when I came back from that field school, I was rip, rare, and to go. I was really impassioned. I knew I wanted to do important work that was compelling, it was meaningful. And that for me had a deeper connection, much like Jason's work is with him. And so I had actually been bartending by this point in a community in Seattle known as Ballard, which is in North Seattle, and is a traditionally blue-collar sort of fishing and shipwright industry place. And I knew a lot of people who were living in their vans and their RVs, and who I had was serving in my bar. And they were, you know, I'd see them sitting on the other side of the bar day after day, night after night. And I'd say, you know, and then come to learn that they lived in their vehicle. And it really challenged my own preconceived notions around homelessness, based on my own experiences and what I had seen around me. Now, this was 20 years later after I had experienced homelessness. So I had developed a lot of the biases that many people have around homelessness. And I think that it was that challenging of my own notions that pushed me to get into this work. So I started to get into vehicle residency and research field residency. We could talk a little bit more about that momentarily. But yeah, that's pretty much how we got there. Whoa, so it's crazy that you had a experience yourself at 15 of having to figure out streets, street life. Because that in itself is a, that makes a man real quick. It, I don't even know. You know, I would say there's a certain amount of arrested development that comes from it too. You know, to be honest, I see a lot of the world through my 15-year-old eyes still. And it's, you know, it's difficult because it does. I think it's experiencing highly traumatic life firsthand and secondarily that you see when you're on the streets. Not just, you know, from the experiences that you have yourself, but what you see around you really, it does have a lasting effect. And I think that for myself and many of the people who I know who've also experienced homelessness, it often leaves this deeper kind of sense of passion towards social inequality, towards, you know, thinking about what it means around identity and about identities that are positioned on top of people. About, you know, when you spend enough time on a street corner asking for change and you see hundreds and thousands of people walking by trying to ignore you, it really does, I think, force a different perspective on what it means to be a member of our society, to occupy public space, and to try to get by, you know? And so, I mean, really, I think that's, for me, that was, I think I consider myself very privileged for being able to have that experience because it allows me to think about those things at that sort of more problematic way. I can test the notion even of what it means to be homeless, you know, and that kind of they versus we, you know, and the way that I see, I've come to see these experiences of social suffering is that they are social experiences, that things that we all participate in, that we all experience, we all feel from the cost of that person, the cost of the social services from that person, the cost of reintegrating that person in society, the cost of the loss of productivity, that ultimately I see that, for myself, the reason why I'm able to do this work was because somebody reached out and offered me a quarter, and that small catalyst that helped to make my change, which is part of the reason why we developed We Count as well, is what brought my potential back to the table. And I think about all the potential that we leave off the table when we don't address how we can help stabilize our neighbors and how we can provide spaces for people to connect with, you know, what's going to help them to be active parts of our society. Yeah, the quarter as a catalyst for you to figure things out in your life is crazy that the smallest sort of tiniest butterfly effects can go like that. And then also when you're talking about the we, the we versus the them, or the theys, the us versus the theys, this is something that we've had the chance to talk about a little bit. And even before we get into the nuance of the Veal Choresency Project, just speaking on that, when you're on a corner and you're asking for assistance, you mentioned this earlier, there's a lot of these preconceived beliefs and notions about what the person, who the person is, why they're there, all this kind of stuff. But we've had the chance to sit down with people on our show that live on the streets or we've talked to them on the streets as well. And a lot of times they've had serious traumatic family experiences that have led them to the point where their parents are addicts and their parents aren't there, they live in multiple dozens of foster homes along the way. Then they're on the streets and that's where they find family, that's where they find love. And so why don't you tell us a bit more about the we versus them thing as well as some of these preconceived notions. So I really like, Jason had mentioned in one of the panels he was talking about about this idea, Jason Daly on had mentioned about this idea that when we talk about migrant studies, which is similar in the work that I do, that there's this tendency to have to build up the migrant as a human being. And why don't we just start with the assumption that this is a human being. And I tend to go that route instead of saying, let's show that this person who's experiencing homelessness is a real person. Why don't we start by understanding that we're all people and that we all make similar choices based upon the options that we see before us. That there are many forces of displacement, of destabilization, of unsettlement, right? That they can be from our families, they can be historical economic forces, they can be based on our skin tone or gender. We call these structural violence, right? All these different ways that have these implicit and explicit constraints on our ability to produce healthy lives. And I think that the way that I like to think about it is that if we are all making choices that we perceive as optimum within our environment of options, then that's very humanizing, right? Because why the person is sleeping on the corner is a result of a response to environmental options which they perceive before them, right? And that is actually for me, not only is it at base humanizing because it is not they, it is we, I'm a part of that environmental option, right? That's where I when I talk about the social suffering as a social experience. But it also I think is a way that is empowering in that as a social scientist and someone who's attempting a sense of praxis of applying this into practice is that I can affect an environment, right? I can introduce new options or work with policymakers to affect the way options are provided to people. The choice is agentive, right? The person is going to make this choice as their own agent. But we can offer options that are more healthy and more beneficial, right? And so I see that like that seeing it in this way opens up new opportunities to do good work, right? To do transformative work and that by limiting ourselves to this understanding of they versus we, right? It allows us to sort of offset that responsibility, that guilt, that neoliberalism of saying this person didn't play the game right so it's their fault, right? When the reality is we're all part of the game that one of the things I often say is that, you know, there's this old saying of we're all one paycheck away, right? From homelessness. I like to say no, we're not. It's the paycheck you get right now, right? It is the fact that we are able to be successful and be able to be healthy and live in the homes that we have but not everybody has access to that same level of resources. Our paychecks are part of what makes our lives great but they're not shared by that other person out there too. And so it is the success that we have that has a flip side of people who have become have-nots and how do we help to equalize that within our society so that we can bring those people to the table so that not only is that productivity from that person, the tax base from that person but truly that intellectual work can be brought back to the table and we can actually grow as a human species from engaging all of us. Yeah, it's a really important way to look at it. It's looking at it from a systems thinking perspective or a cybernetic perspective of that I am who I am and I have had the access to what I've had and that has also had an impact on what other people have access to and what they have. And so, okay, so walk us through what happened from going out into the field of Jason De Leon to realizing that you want to do the vehicle residency project and start talking to people. So after returning from the field of Jason, like I said, I was rip-run and ready to go and I knew I wanted to do work that was compelling and meaningful. And so I actually purchased an RV and I started actually living on the streets of Seattle rather naively and I would do it differently if I was to do it again. Mainly because one of the things I quickly realized was that my experiences were not the same as people who were living on the streets I had a home to return to and also that limited my understanding of the vehicle as a home because since I had this other place I called home, the vehicle was much more of a temporary space whereas for people who were living in the vehicle it was home and that was really a significant difference. It was one of the kind of first insights into this whole sort of assemblage of vehicle residency. Another thing really quickly though that I did see that was helpful was that I saw that there was this tremendous amount of law enforcement that was being applied that not only of course the tickets and the warnings you got to move every 72 hours but that there was signage everywhere I went that was saying you can't park here and it was signage that particularly related to people living in vehicles. So I was finding that in these industrial zones where there was laws in Seattle that I could only park my RV in industrial zones. This is a really common law that you can only park vehicles that are over say 80 inches wide at the wheel base in industrial zones because you don't want those parking in residential streets for emergency vehicles coming down in the middle of the night, right? So you can only park those vehicles in industrial zones in the night time, right? So between midnight and 5 a.m. I had to park my RV in industrial zones just like every other person in an RV and then in those zones I saw the placement of no parking 2 to 5 a.m. signs, right? Which you go, well, why do you, where's the street sweeping? You know, at 3 a.m. in the industrial zone. I mean it's just, it's not there. Those signs were put specifically to remove vehicle residents from public space and that actually is what started the, what drove the archeological aspect of my research, the ethnological aspect, in that I did three years of settlement mapping and actually mapped where people were parking vehicles and RVs, trucks, fans and cars on the streets and correlating that with zoning, parking laws, resources and showing how these settlement patterns were being driven by the constrained options that were available within their environment and how then that created densities within the settlement patterns over time which then led to further community complaints which led to more no parking 2 to 5 a.m. signs which reduced the amount of space and created more density, right? And so I produced a report, so during this time I worked with Seattle University leading the vehicle residency research program and conducted two years of that mapping with that program one year as my undergraduate at University of Washington for my honors thesis in vehicle residency and then presented that report to the city of Seattle helped to lobby for the creation of a safe parking program that would provide off-street parking for people living in vehicles. I wrote the grant for that program and we ended up start developing it in Seattle back in 2012, 2013 and I applied to become the outreach provider for that program so that I could continue my research through it and from 2000, I think it was 2013-2015 I was the outreach specialist as it was called for all vehicle residents in Seattle so during that time for those two years I worked with about 1,500 people who were living in vehicles all across the city. In Seattle I should probably say the numbers of what we're looking at. So in Seattle there are roughly 12,000 people who are experiencing homelessness about half of those people are in some form of emergency transitional or permanent shelter so about 6,000 are in that, about the other 6,000 are on the streets what are counted as unsheltered. Of that unsheltered population, 53% are living in vehicles so of the people on the street over half are living in a car, truck, van or RV it's 3,300 people roughly across King County and yet there are virtually no parking spaces for people in those programs in any kind of emergency services so that's why we developed the Safe Parking Program and then I did this research to help to kind of get a better understanding of what the on the ground experiences were for people again because I knew that there was only so much I could get as sort of auto ethnographic research for my own occupation of the RV and so I wanted to know more about what people were really experiencing in their own lives so for two years I did that outreach work afterwards I worked for the social service oversight agency that's the HUD mandated continuum of care oversight agency as they're called which is called All Home and I worked with them for two years on their executive and governing board and as chair of their policy committee looking at how social service policy and social services and policy was being developed around vehicle residency and I saw that well there was abysmally no policies being developed, I shouldn't laugh it was horrible there were almost no recognition of the vehicle as a home and because of that because of this sort of what I have come to term a nomadic pathology a view of nomadic shelters as inherently sick and wrong as disease producing an amoral that there's this criminality and filth or drug addiction all these sorts of things that are built into this that because we have that settled societies have this tendency to view these nomadic shelters this way that they could not be viewed as acceptable or appropriate and so incorporating them into official state run emergency systems was almost impossible and so that's what a lot of my research has come to focus on is how this nomadic pathology disaffiliates people from their society and how it opens them to this criminalization that is justified because we see it as they shouldn't be living in that vehicle in the first place and for many people there's this very important tension between the vehicle as home and this label of homelessness and that the label of homeless is a negative identifier label that presents this impossible barrier to overcome of how do you become homed when you are homeless by definition and so for people who are living in their vehicles who see it as home not only does that not match their identity but when social services come in that are for quote the homeless they say that's not me I don't need your help so again you've got this double problem of not only do you have 53% of the population who don't actually have a parking space to connect them to services but they may not even want the services offered because the way that we're calling those services doesn't match their identity and this is the kind of thing where simple changing in our understanding of this can have a massive effect because understanding that this vehicle is an adaptive sheltering strategy that this person is using this vehicle as what they perceive as optimal shelter among a limited variety of options that these vehicles have become affordable housing and that in that case there's this major problem of what does that mean as more and more people move into these vehicles as affordable housing I think we'll get to that more in a bit but that's what I call the nomadic term Wow so what a crazy kickoff to talking about the vehicle residency project because the way that you're talking about the systems that are in place it just reminds me of our conversations that we've had with people and it's so hard to even use the word homeless again Good And you've got to figure it out The right nomenclature I prefer to say people experiencing homelessness People experiencing homelessness that's better I think about it it's an adjective homelessness is an adjective it's not a label we use it as an identity as a noun but the reality is that it's like I compare it to driving a car when you're driving a car you're a driver when you're not driving a car you're not a driver That's a good way to put it So people experiencing homelessness exactly because again these new ways of speaking about it are really important especially in getting people the services that they need So this reminds me of our conversations we've had with people who are experiencing homelessness because they're teaching us about all of the aspects to the system that are causing them the struggle of trying to get off of the streets They are trying to get off but there are so many variables that are pressing them and you started listing these variables like if you have more than an 80 inch wheelbase then you can't park 12 to 5 but then where you have to go to park no parking from 2 to 5 a.m So now you also started kind of teaching us that out of the 12,000 homeless in Seattle people without homes in Seattle that there are 6,000 of them in sheltered residencies and whatnot and then there's 6,000 that are on the streets and 3,300 of them are in vehicle residents So over 53% of the ones on the streets are in vehicles and there's no place for them to actually to park their vehicle that they live in and so now you've made this push for there to be space for them to actually be able to park and have their vehicle as their residency in spaces to facilitate the proper because there is no them, this is all us so we have to figure that out and now as you were speaking about that I was thinking about New York and LA and San Francisco and Chicago and all these other places that have equivalent numbers if not more than 12,000 people living on the streets and that's a lot of societal systemic change that I think you are pioneering So now as you're doing this research you had 1,500 people that you were talking to on a daily basis about what was going on in their lives There was a pool of 1,500 people that I would be working with over those two years Pool of 1,500 people that you were working with over those two years talking to learning about their diverse stories and life trajectories and so now what were you learning about their experiences that was like holy crap we have to change some of the things in our system I would say that the main takeaways that I got that I think were really sort of revelatory were first off and they shouldn't be I should say they should not be revelatory but they were for me and I hope that they can be for others as well that first off that these were people who were displaced from their own communities that these weren't people who had come to the city as a way to get their resources that by and large the vast majority of the people that I was meeting not just people living in vehicles also people in tents but definitely among the people that were in vehicles were people that were from Seattle or the surrounding area that were using their vehicles as a way to maintain their connections to their familiar medical, social service systems and that they used these vehicles again as this affordable housing to maintain this connection to the city and that what had happened was that over the previous decades there had been a labor market and technology shift in this in Seattle which we experience in San Francisco and LA and other of the main cities which are experiencing the same problem or same issue, I should say, challenge that there has been this labor market shift and people who have the background or the privilege of education or wealth to be able to move into that new labor market of high tech and information economy have been able to do very well and been able to succeed in that and this is where it's our paycheck now but those who are from a blue collar background or for the many different reasons of structural violence, skin tone, gender gender identity even and many more are barred from getting into that new economy or from the educational background to get into that economy or employment background and so because of that this shift has displaced this population that people have the gentrification that's when we look at it but it's not just gentrification I always look at it that because when we think about it as gentrification we respond with, well we need more affordable housing but I'd say affordable housing today is unaffordable housing tomorrow if you don't have a job would you call them violent structural impediments or the anthropologists call it structural violence structural violence and so that structural violence is what holds people back based on skin tones or it's the isms the racism, sexism, whatever ableism and it's really it's the explicit and implicit biases that are held that create constraints on a person's ability to have agency that is positive and often it constrains people to choices that have negative outcomes and so it becomes a social indicator of health that ultimately the person has there are negative health outcomes that often come from not being able to get into a great job because of restrictions based upon your skin tone for example so displacement was a reoccurring theme so I had seen a displacement occurring in Seattle and people were they were unable to as there was this large rental base as the the rents were going up because of the new economy people were becoming evicted they were then moving into their vehicles or moving onto public streets often moving in the street and then moving into a vehicle because it was an optimum shelter and then because there was no place off the street or in particular out of the vehicle is to park the vehicle and connect to emergency systems that help settle people and stabilize them because there was no process to do that this population just keeps growing and growing and this is why actually so even though we're at 53% this year or vehicle residents are 53% of the unsheltered population this year they have been actually at least 30% for the last 10 years and in the last 10 years that population because it's been rising I should say they're 30% of the unsheltered population in the last 10 years over that time the total vehicle residency population has risen by 383% so we're talking about 2008 it was something like around 800 people and now it's 3300 and that's been happening across major metropolitan cities and that's why I think that's the takeaway here is that what we're seeing is a response to internal displacement and that again that people are turning towards these vehicles as affordable housing which leads me to this larger consideration sort of a hypothesis at the end of my dissertation of what does that tell us about the nomadic turn about this sort of these individual choices becoming normalized into social trends and we even see this obviously we see a lot in San Francisco there's a lot of RVs in San Francisco I should mention that as part of my research I do a critical discourse analysis where I look at 500 articles about vehicle residency all across the country for the last 5 years looking at how we view vehicle residency in our media and in particular about how much it's being referred to as affordable housing and how that trend is becoming more normal in places like LA and I'm not sure if you're aware but they recently had to pass laws to restrict people from buying RVs, putting them on the street and renting them as apartments because there were so many people doing it and that is exactly what I'm talking about right is that what does it mean to our society to move towards mobile housing as the new version of shelter right and there are reasons why that's very pragmatic right especially when we look at things like you can move your house and you can get things like these fires in California right now there's a lot of people right now that have been displaced from these fires that are living in their vehicles and it makes perfect sense for them but I think you don't have to pay 1500, 2000 a month in rent but I think that we need to take a step back and go back to why looking at there is no they we are we right that if we're all people and we're making choices based upon our own interests then we need to look at that person living in that vehicle not as a good thing right we got to look at it as this is the response to an environmental set of options right and that has possible benefits possible detriment right it is not always just progressive right there's all this you know march towards you know a future of greatness right these things can be good and bad and that that we need to see that vehicle that has a larger social environmental pressures that that may have a larger destabilizing effect on our society because we're honestly not prepared for 3000 RVs moving from city to city yeah and you you're so at the forefront of talking about this in terms of it being a trend towards mobile housing and you're also at the forefront of talking about it in terms of the it's all about us and not about a them type scenario because when you think about it as a them type scenario you're we're taking the blame and we're moving it away from a society and we're putting it on to the individuals that are involved there but this is a direct effect of the economic and political pressures that we've created and that's why we see so much displacement and towards this mobile housing now within the mobile housing there is a there is a percentage of people that that have a desire to be in a mobile housing there's a percentage of people that are writers or artists or philosophers or entrepreneurs in some ways that they want to musicians they want themselves to become with home instead of people without home and so so then there's so there's these categories of people that are within the people that are living in vehicle residencies so that breakdown is also really important to understand there are actually people that are addicted to really addictive drugs also and that desperately needs social services to also assist in that sense so that breakdown is also extremely important to figure out and understand and just hearing you talk about this when I first heard you talking about this it's just so near and dear and close to our hearts in San Francisco and our studio is right on market in 7th street in downtown and so we see so much right there of not only people living without a home but also we see a lot of of vehicle residents and we also see a lot of the diversity of people living without home like I was just describing that breakdown so what are your thoughts about that breakdown of people and just give us your thoughts about that breakdown well I think I would push back on a little bit on that and I would say that it's not quite as hard and fast as that and that we should getting back to that whole there's no they we are all we thing that people that there are many forces of displacement they can be personal, they can be social they can be things like you had a bad relationship with your dad so when I was homeless I didn't get along with my family I came from a very privileged place especially considering many other people that I know and I was able to return to that which is a tremendous sense of privilege at the same time that what moved me into that place of being homeless was important for me important for me enough to live on the streets and that was a force of displacement now is it the same as other forms of structural violence no there's many different different reasons why people get into this and I would add that many of the many of the behaviors that we that we observe among people who are experiencing homelessness such as drug addiction or substance use as a whole not only are they reflected throughout our society and we don't ask the same questions of the person who's in the condo above the person who's sleeping on the street which is important but those just like that person in the condo people use substances as ways to manage and mitigate and medicate their traumas and you find when you work with people experiencing homelessness that many people experiencing homelessness did not use those substances before they became homeless and they began using those substances as ways to mitigate the traumas they're experiencing so go to sleep at 3 a.m. when it's freezing out well drinking yourself into oblivion is a lot easier okay how do you stay up all nights with your stuff because you're afraid of it well taking a couple hits of something to stay up all night is a good way to do it and that sort of behavior is done as a response to the environment which again what happens when you change the environment right so this is why things like you know what I'm talking about isn't um it's not that like it's not controversial this is this is what the housing first model is based on this is actually what HUD you know Department of Housing Development is focused on right now is trying to find ways to get people into safe spaces immediately so that then we can remove them from the environmental traumas that they experience on a daily and nightly basis and start to actually provide the stability that offers them long term development with with the immediate relief and that's really what I found in this research ultimately is what do we need to do we need to look at this as a two-pronged issue and we always focus on one or the other and it's not that it has to be both relief and development right really and so the relief portion is the integration of the traumas in ways um that are preventative of people without homes I would say the relief portion is providing a relief from the trauma now yeah relief immediately so that way there is no trajectory that sends people to being without home yeah or at least it at least removes them from the continuation of traumas that they're currently experiencing so at least we can in a sense you can never completely cease it because a lot of trauma becomes internalized but you can at least remove people from the environmental traumas that are experiencing around them yes and because as I'm learning about this more from you I'm seeing it as similar to the pathologies that occur within the body we've had so many brilliant um anti-aging scientists that we've sat down with and whenever we talk to them it's all about identifying the pathologies before they start and then that's how you can tweak the body over time to be healthy and so it's the same exact thing as you're starting to see that this kid is having significant trauma with his father and there is about to be a 15 year old on the streets how can we intervene and prevent that 15 year old from entering that situation and so you also make these points about substance addictions that don't happen when they're living in a home this happens when you're trying to protect your stuff or when you're trying to deal with the freezing cold temperatures these different situations so that's okay and then there's the relief and then there's the long-term development so then the development is okay so then there's a situation that we have right now with vehicle residencies so how do you develop a current place for vehicle residencies to go to but also develop a city like Amazon's HQ2 is moving into Long Island City and it's moving into Crystal City in Virginia and so when you're looking at these two cities and Nashville as well where Amazon's moving into that there needs to be some sort of a promise a community promise of hey we know that we're bringing so much economic opportunity and development to these areas and that's extremely important for your cities but also we know that we're going to be causing displacement and because we know we're going to cause displacement we're going to do a bunch of preventative measures like we were talking about earlier that are going to prevent that displacement from occurring so that might be the development that you're talking about where you develop affordable housing or whatever what would be the problem? When I talk about relief and development I'm talking about I think in a little bit different way because I'm talking about it with people who are currently experiencing displacement the issue of Amazon is near and dear to my heart as someone from Seattle doing research in Seattle who moved to Seattle in 96 when Amazon before they really became big and I worked in the dot-com boom and bust alongside when Amazon was growing up as well so I know a lot of people work at Amazon I've worked with Amazon many times in the corporate and my non-profit does as well and so a lot of that is what informs that idea of it's our paycheck now that economic success we shouldn't demonize that economic success because there's obviously a lot of value that can come along with it I think everybody should pay their fair share of taxes and be able to support our economy as a whole but that's kind of a different discussion but when it comes to what those forces what forces a company like Amazon can bring to bear in terms of displacement on new cities I saw it in Seattle I saw it for the last 20 years and I do know a pretty good idea of what these other cities are going to be seeing and it is going to be massive displacement most like I shouldn't say that the history that we saw in Seattle tends to show that there's a good chance that you're going to see similar things right and that you're going to see forces of displacement because of again this increased income base which then rises, drives and costs because of course if you have the opportunity to charge more you're going to charge more of your landlord and then the people who do not have access to those jobs at Amazon or the industries that surround Amazon which you'll see pop up as well like we did in Seattle are going to be priced out of their market and that I think that much like what we need to do in Seattle we need to do that that Amazon if you want to look at how they're going to protect against that displacement, how they can help to ensure that they won't be bringing in structural violence into these communities is that they need to incorporate those communities into that success and it's more than just bringing in these jobs because they bring in the jobs and they bring in the people to fill those jobs they need to target the communities themselves to fill those jobs and that's why a lot of the work that I do now I am a member of the I was appointed a couple months ago to the Mayor of Seattle's Innovation Advisory Council and a lot of the work that I'm doing there is pushing towards an integration of rapid rehousing of the programs that provide subsidized housing for up to a year along with year up training programs at these top 10% of our employers so that what we can actually do is ways to integrate people who have been displaced into the businesses that are causing the displacement because that's how we solve this problem of affordable housing is not affordable if you don't have a job we need to get people the jobs but you also need the immediate relief so that's relief and development get a house right now and provide people the skill set to be able to afford that house a year from now and that right there is not new that's the new deal I was just about to ask you to go into that so there were 3 million people 2 million I checked it out 2 million I was 1 million off so there was a period of time where right now we're looking at about 350 or 400,000 homeless people in the united states people experiencing homelessness we're trying to change the new culture so for people experiencing homelessness 80 years ago this was around 1935 and the new deal was tell us about how that took 2 million people and helped those people without homes and settle in their communities it's really the point so you can take a step back if you look at where that population came from it was originally it was from forces of displacement that go all the way back to the founding of the united states some of these people were indigenous populations originally some of them were whites, poor non-whites, poor people of all different backgrounds who have been displaced, who have faced these similar issues of evictions and rental costs and became this basic massive poor underclass of our society and particularly the civil war was very disastrous upon this group the destruction of the lands, of the farms people would go off to war and return to, north and south and so at the end of the civil war this little brief history those soldiers were brought back to New York so they could be cleared out through the train lines they brought everybody back to say you're no longer north and south we're back together we're going to clear you out from being a soldier and send you home they put them on railroads out of Hoboken and those became the Hobos and that's actually where that term comes from originally is from these Hobo armies that were initially mobilized as a clearance of soldiers from the civil war and those soldiers had no homes to return Tuesdays started on the road and they started looking for jobs where they could and again at the same time you had a technological shift of this turn towards industrialized farming and so as we had this move towards industrialized farming a lot of the farms that were subsistence farms that had been before were getting brought up into larger plantations with in the south they were using sharecropping and in the north and in the west we had these large fields and everything those all of that was the Hobos became this workforce that were moving across the country as the labor market shifted into industrialized mining and industrialized timber that force moved with it to become the workforce that moved into the west and into places like Seattle where they worked to become part of the lumber industry and James Spradley who did a lot of this work wrote his book you owe yourself a drunk about tramps talks a lot about that about how this sort of this rise of this this population and then what happened was is that by the 1930s as you mentioned 1920s there were around 2 million people almost us in the country the United States and they were colloquially called the tramp and hobo armies moving from city to city and what's interesting is that the initial response to that to help to stabilize that group many of us forget but it was actually called the transient service and I think it's important that we take a moment to think about what that term means because at that stage the social service providers saw what was needed was stability was settlement that there was this movement this mobility this migration of people that was the issue and that if people could be settled in the place where they were then they could be provided that development that's the relief and the development and so at that time there was this growth of these places called Hooverville which we've all probably heard of and we often see these pictures of these places as these massive sources of urban blight which is one of the most famous there's this real famous picture of the Seattle Hooverville and but what we don't know or we've forgotten is that those were places of settlement those were places where people were finally allowed to settle down and the government came in with social services and brought in educational programs child care programs job retraining programs and that those were what became eventually the new deal with its rights and wrongs the new deal is by no means perfect and enforced its own systems of structural violence redlining and other very problematic things but one of the things that it definitely did right was that it it said that what we needed to do was to not only provide these people with the space where they can be now but we need to provide them with the skills to build out the economy to build out their new cities settlement and skills relief and development and so what we did was is that we employed that population to build things like the Hoover Dam so that suddenly now these people are laying concrete and they're pipe fitting and they're putting in electrical lines well those skills is what they then used once everything was done to ship that person off to Ohio to build out their own little town and right now we could potentially use coders or designers or operations that's right and at a time when we have record unemployment specifically for that market because much of the people who are unemployed but have fallen off that roster as we know which skews our unemployment numbers those are people who don't necessarily have access to get into that high tech jobs in the high tech jobs we have record unemployment we need more people in those jobs those industries are hiring like bad and they're looking for people that they can help to sort of mold into the positions that they're looking for and we have this population who desperately want to settle down who want a safe place to be who want to fit in with their our society and really see this as home this is still their home and yet they're being moved out from their own homes because these new industries have come in so going back to the Amazon discussion right that this is what Amazon in my opinion needs to do to help to address that in place in New York and in DC and in Central City is that we need to first off incorporate the people who do not historically have the access to those jobs into the hiring practices to get them into those jobs that's first off how we address this on a structural level right and then for the people who will become displaced we need to actually funnel that population directly into those jobs as well so I think that it needs to be sort of twofold that there needs to be an initial approach of how do we hire local populations to work at these incoming industries so we don't displace them and then if there is displacement which often there is and we see that we need to specifically focus our social services to hiring people into those programs and we have these services already I mean it's work force I mean it's labor force I mean these systems and the private and public market the federal government has been running this for decades right and we you know it's not a radical idea you know it's a matter of believing that there is not a deserving and undeserving population that we are all we and that by supporting that group that we are helping our total society and that not that that person just needs to be pushed away and we need to focus on the good ones right and that's really what we seem to have been doing and it's causing a lot of disabilization. Yeah. The vision of seeing a tech giant using its abilities resources to bring people that are without a home in for with social workers and with coders to retrain I think can happen within a year I do think that it very much so could happen and I was just just envisioning what that would look like and it was really cool to think about but it's very very difficult to repattern someone's habits and their cognition to desire to code or design or do ops it's just it's not impossible it's just difficult and I would agree and I think that and actually in this I want to touch back on your initial question about sort of the varieties of nomadism maybe we could say sort of that idea of wanderlust of the person who's inherently driven towards moving and displace people who are migratory by the imperatives of their environment is to lose what to say the I think that first off that by by providing these skill sets the person may not take that job at Amazon but now they have that skill set to be able to take it elsewhere so that's the same that's really what the Hoover Dam was doing that was not about getting them to this job but it was getting them to this industry so first off there's a lot of potential even if the person doesn't get hired in that one thing but there's also this the the studies of nomadism this is why a lot of my research actually looks at this as a version of nomadism and this idea of what it means to set and to rise that when people are pushed into movement by these destabilizing forces of displacement that have been going on for thousands of years that when people are mobilized and live within these persistent consistent destabilizing environments that say you're not allowed here you got to keep moving it's environmental pressures or social pressures or economic pressures but that thing that says keep moving along that people nomadize they normalize to this migratory behavior because that's all they've come to know it becomes normative and that versus the settlement and skills and I would say that these people were raised in a settled society these people are raised with the sedentary ideals that I have and I'm sure you do as well that the success that we can achieve in our lives is based upon settled life having a job, having kids putting clothes on your kids food on your table, having a good education all those things are done by being settled down right and then we teach ourselves that's what Robbie Muvay calls the sedentary egemity and then what he says that the flip side of that is this anti-nomadism that says that anything that's nomadic is bad and so when a person becomes nomadized and becomes used to being being treated as a social other as being pushed off on society, never really able to settle down of course one would normalize that as that's just how life is because that's all you see everywhere now the flip side of that is is that it takes time to normalize it also takes time to sedentarize that being able to wrap your head around what it means to live a settled life takes effort and it takes work on the person involved but also on people who are working with them and so I always like to think of it like this sedentarization comes from giving someone a couch and a TV when you put someone on a couch and put a big screen TV and they get to sit there and watch that and after a while go man I really like watching this TV what do I gotta do to have that TV well I gotta have a job gotta have a house that's sedentarization it's when the person internalizes these ideas that they want to have that settled life well if you only see the options available around you that say you must have a nomadic life that's all you ever know that is right so it's about augmenting the lens of both the settled society to see that there is a nomadic society that does not know that there is a settled society and also to augment the lens of the nomadic society to say that there is a settled society where you can find more of a of a comfort and stability and a potentially a meaning from doing something filling every day that is driven towards value I think that it's more of I like the way you put that but I think that it's more of a it's about I think that the work is more on what we need to do with the settled society it's more about telling the settled society that you know this person doesn't want to be a nomad yeah that's what I said that was the first part and on the other side the thing is is that that work allows to space for that person who has been treated as a nomad to settle down and that becomes that relief and development all these other issues of wanderlust why doesn't the person want to settle why don't they feel engaged in their society why did Thoreau go to Walden because you didn't feel you needed to go somewhere else didn't feel this was right in that place maybe that is that a migrant is that a homeless person it's a person who's moving in their life to find new things we all do that so if you look at why do we do that we can start to understand this better if we look at the trust fund kid who's traveling across the country with the surfboards in his RV or his van hey that's awesome but I don't think there is a difference in that that's vehicle residency displacement it's a different force of displacement just like my force that drove me into homelessness was a different force than many other people experience right but by kind of splitting hairs over that we get lost in the weeds and we lose the fact that it's about how do we find ways to to settle people to be settled ourselves this entire section of our conversation has so much for me to do with what is today's new deal like a really powerful new version 2 of what a new deal was because the 350 to 400,000 people that are currently without home a vast majority of them would want a settled and they want to settle in our cities too I think that's an important piece is that we often think about this as we have all this fast farm land in the Midwest if we just move people out that you go these are people who lived in the city why are we moving them from the city why does somebody else get the right to the city and the people who don't have this new economy suddenly lose access to the city that's not right and I want to touch on this because this is something that you've been working on now you co-founded it in your executive director of We Count so teach us about We Count So We Count directly came from this research and my experiences with homelessness touching back on that story of the person who gave me the quarter I was trying to think about how do we empower the public to be the provider of that quarter to all the little me's the 15 year old me's around the world or everybody else not me but that I saw myself in that and how do we use that as a way to connect people to become that catalyst to connect people to services that can help to settle them and so we developed We Count it's a website first off it's not an app specifically so that people can use it in libraries and social service sites so that we can have low barrier access low barrier entry into that system the system was actually originally based upon the ideas of Marcel Mauss from the gift so again it's very deeply centered in anthropology in that one of the kind of there's lots of stuff that Mauss talks about but one of the main sort of takeaways is that there's three aspects of giving that are sort of universal you have a giver, a receiver and then this act of reciprocation and that if you don't have that reciprocation you really don't see a repetition of the act of giving because there needs to be this thank you release from God or maybe it's actual repayment maybe I get a gift back there's all these different ways that we do reciprocation but if you don't get that exactly you're not going to want to be involved in the future and so looking at that it was okay so we know what a giver would be that would be the donor, the donating public we know what the receiver would be that would be the person requesting this item but how do we do that as that reciprocation so six months before we built anything or designed anything we interviewed people experiencing homelessness we interviewed social service providers executive directors of non-profits public policy makers human service division people all throughout Seattle to understand what was needed and what we heard over and over again was people saying look don't reinvent the wheel don't create a new service we got a lot of social services and we don't have the funding for them all as it is it is a way to bring people back to the well to keep people connected this idea of you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink well you lead the horse to water enough times there's a good chance it's going to drink and that's I don't mean to talk about people as other animals but the analogy or the metaphor holds in that we provide the carrot to help bring the person to the water and help them drink and I'll send you a video afterwards that you can use if you're interested but basically what the system does is a person can request an item they actually they request it from the Amazon marketplace so we again activate their sense of agency and that they can request really anything they want the restrictions are no weapons no combustible materials or liquids no food because you can't ship that through safely and there's issues around that but beyond that it's socks, underwear, tents, backpacks, it's items that are under $50 but it also could be a hot plate, it could be a cell phone it could be a tablet PC and there are tablets under $50 or boots and so we opened it to really allow the person to search you can do it as a search bar you search through the Amazon marketplace whatever you want and you'll see this endless listing of these things and it's the same information you'd see on Amazon but you don't see the price and so the person can go through and they can choose what size, boots, what color boots they then request that item when they request the item the first time we present them with what's called a needs assessment questionnaire so it asks questions like are you looking for housing, are you a veteran, are you traveling with kids, it's all confidential and it's securely held so we ask these basic questions about what their needs might be and then we suggest social service locations to pick up their item, their donation that actually match their needs so then when you go on the site and there's a one kind of side of this one version of the site or one side of the site is for asking for items the other side is for donating items and so when you go on the donate side you see the request from the person we use avatars instead of pictures to avoid implicit bias because some people don't want to go give to people who don't look like them it's all a common form of implicit bias and so we do that the person can tell a little bit about their story a little bit about, you know, provide a little bio about themselves and then why they're asking for this item if they want to, they don't have to and then we have the item listed and so then the donor can go in and purchase the item directly through Amazon through a secured payment processor and the item is then shipped directly to the location to connect the person with social services and needs and then we provide the reciprocation at the end where we send the donor information about thank you for donating your backpack to Jimmy, you connected Jimmy with housing and veteran services I love the aspect of anonymity but also of it's not fully anonymous but it's just exactly just enough anonymous to not have bias and then it's also getting them what they need getting them to a social service location and offering them the resources that they need to help them get off find a home if they so decided to and you're polling them to figure out the right social service location to send them to, it's really powerful check it out linksinthebioforwecount.org and we're in the middle of upgrading the site right now so if you go there you may see an under construction but we're actually talking with some major, I shouldn't mention the names but major social media players which you are very much familiar with about ways to integrate this into their platform and actually so imagine you were on some of these social media platforms and you saw one of your local neighbors needs a $20 backpack and you could donate it right there that's fantastic and that's going to be huge for helping people and then they have to go to a social services center nearby to pick up the backpack and it goes this we've talked a couple times we use this term push right of pushing people into stuff and I really like to think the other way of pull really what we're doing is that and this comes again from my research with vehicle residents so often I see people being pushed around communities and that doesn't solve anything it removes people's agency, removes people's resources like the displacement that's the displacement is the settlement that's right that's exactly right and so what we're trying to do is create pulls into our systems to help keep people connected that's right and there's another there's there's this word that we're all familiar with the word is genius and we were talking about this a couple nights ago and I really enjoyed your definition of genius one who inspires another to great thought so it's not necessarily about an individual that is a genius but it's more so about that individual that knows how to inspire others to this great source of potential for themselves that's right the collective so yeah tell us a bit about that because it's so cool yeah so it's it's not my definition this is the original Greek definition actually so it's the original the common kind of understanding of genius as you said is generally some single person who's very abnormally gifted and intelligence maybe might be a working definition I don't know something along those lines but it's generally an individual who's very smart in some way but the Greek definition was much more like a muse in that a muse is a thing or a person or an entity of some sort that inspires an artist towards producing great art that is the same thing for a genius and actually if you look at the origin of the word genus, genus means origins right and so it becomes this origin right and so it is genius is the that which inspires people to producing these great thoughts and I love that idea because it's much more I think of it as a democracy of intellect right the idea that that we all have within us the potential towards great thought that it is genius is are people like Jason daily on I consider him a genius that you know that in my experience is working with Jason he absolutely inspired me to think more deeply about my world and to be much more critical and you know I there is absolutely no way that I would be doing my research had I not learned that sense of critical thinking in the skills that I learned from him and other anthropologists who I consider genius is a Rachel Chapman Miriam Kahn my Sven Hawkinson my dissertation chair Danny Hoffman all these amazing people I've been able to work with Holly Barker who show that anthropology can be more than just theory it can be praxis which is the other thing we were talking about please that we can bridge this gap between sort of this naval gazing staring down our noses anthropologists out of the world and get to a place where our work actually is affecting the world around us because it's anthropologists generally care that's why we get into this work hopefully you know that we do it because we're passionate about humanity and about the world around us and why we do the things we do and the history of the discipline has really been much more of this sort of extractive model of going in and finding these places to pull the data out which then we make into our careers and it doesn't sit very well with me and a lot of others too I think there are a lot of us who come from places of various forms of inequality and various forms of privilege and look upon them reflexively I didn't say you know what I've been there on both sides and then take that as a sense of responsibility for me I feel a responsibility towards social structural change I feel like for that 15 year old me and the 1500 people that I worked with in vehicles and my friends who are living in vehicles now that if I am not doing work that is applying my theory to actually create large scale structural change that I'm not doing enough work that's hard it's probably maybe too much pressure that I put on myself in that regard but it's powerful it drives me I'm not alone in that I think that's where a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are pushed towards actually executing an idea rather than just talking about it to be honest I think that's the future of our discipline of anthropology of the four fields of anthropology and as ethnoarcheologist I think in particular archeology has this amazing potential to do this work through archeology and in ways that sort of twist our minds around and make us think in whole new ways about what we see in front of us what we've seen all our lives one of my favorite this definitely gets into practice but one of my favorite quotes around this is from William Rafshie who was one of the founders of people who help popularize ethnoarcheology through his garbology work and encourage you to look more into that garbology actually so Rafshie went out and looked at these federal statistics and surveys that have been done for 100 years by the FDA about food consumption patterns and trash disposal patterns and then he would go in and excavate in that local dump down to that year and find out what people were actually disposing of and in that way what he says is that our lives consists of these two versions of reality of a mental reality of what we think is happening and we're just so sure that's real and then the material reality which is the actual stuff that we're depositing in the earth and that we can compare those and bring those realities together to create this more holistic version that is actual reality and that's what I try to do with my work of looking at this mental reality of what does vehicle residency look like how do we as a society look at it and what are the physical realities of actually living in these conditions and how does that shape by our social services and all this kind of stuff and that in my mind that being able to tie a current reality of persons living in a vehicle to past realities of mobile sheltering things like the Irish travelers the Tinkers the Gypsies and I would mention to your audience that is a racial epithet which many people push back at and encourage people not to use the word Gypsy and even on that note it's often used for cultures all across the world really and it's really just about mobility it's going to get back to that nomadic pathology it's a way to label someone as the Nomad right it's the outsider that those sorts of things that looking at that in other cultures and in our own past tell us about what we're seeing now that what what my anthropology has taught me so far and this praxis is that vehicle residency as we see it if we compare it to past nomadic cultures or so-called nomadic cultures we see that in this internal destabilization internal destabilization and this social othering creates these in these kind of persistent environments of these constraints can actually create internally separated cultures so that these cultures become distinct from their neighbors around them because they're so socially isolated that they're just constantly pushed out and the iris travelers are a great example for 500 years this was pushed and pushed and pushed until actually last year they I don't know if you're familiar with this but they had a genetic test done that showed that that they were able to officially know that they were genetically distinct from the rest of the irish people even though they were descended from them so it's kind of interesting to think about that 500 years of social social isolation and intermarriage because of that social isolation of course created this arguably genetically distinct population and I through analogy look at that and say about what we're seeing right now that what we're seeing right now I believe is that initial dispossession point it's that origin story of how the iris travelers became the travelers right it is that it's evictions it's changes in labor markets it's people being unable to afford the ability to stay in the city and then they become displaced and live on the sides of the roads right and then the technology shift and they move from being in a tent into a vehicle because it's a lot better option right and that's what we're seeing now and it's I think that it's something that again from that practice look that thinking about what that may tell us about our lived reality is something that we should be really concerned about as a society you know there's this idea that nomadic nomadic behaviors are an existential threat to settled life and I think there's some truth in that in that that nomadic life needs this open non-bordered world so that they can move so people can move throughout that world to collect the resources they need when they need them because because it's a non-extractive form it's it's what Anatoly Kozanov called a productive form that he said that it was that nomadism is saying there's not food here so I got to go over there to produce it to find new forms whereas the settled world extracts it from that thing right so if we are living in this settled world of this extractive form and people are moving towards this nomadic form that means that you have a group of people that no longer see borders, that people that move freely places to be able to move widely to be able to get the resources they need and become even more further destabilized by that and if we actually sort of operationalize that what does that mean in reality to now you're talking 3000 RVs moving city to city right our country is not prepared for that. The United States doesn't have the infrastructure we don't have the social services developed for that and arguably I would say that as I've already shown in my research so far that sort of thing perpetuates itself and becomes more and more and if we go down that route it leads to further instability so this is where I really think we need to head that off of the past we need to really focus on how can we find ways to settle this population to stabilize this population before we are looking at this new American traveler you know and yeah that was such a good synthesis of what we talked about in your research I feel very enlightened about what's going on in the world and especially in the United States I feel very enlightened about what's happened throughout the history of nomadic people and I feel as though it is in some ways it is a desperate time that and we need to put the measures together to prevent further displacement and to put together the relief and development, the settlement and skills that are needed to solve this and and get drop the them and the they and get to the we and the us and yeah it's such a pleasure talking to you about all this Graham. And if I can add a positive note on that I think that there is a positivity in all this I think that we can see that these change what is learning experience and there's things that we can take from this but that even beyond that I really love this idea of creative destruction of make you know doing rid of getting rid of what's not working to make space to use those resources to build up what is working I don't know if you know the story of 3M right of them using that every year they go and they take 15% of their products off the line right and they take no matter what they take 15% and they take all that money and they put it in R&D to build up what is working even better right and I like to think of that these sorts of moments of crisis that we experience of change are opportunities for us to reimagine the future right these are breaking points where we actually have an opportunity to break from the past to say you know we are not cursed to relive the lives of our ancestors we are not we do not need to build futures on our grandfather's bones right we can build a new reality and we can learn from these things to have a world that is more equitable that has processes that don't create these inequalities imagine if we took that 3M model and we applied it to everything in life take 15% of things that aren't working in civilization and invest that into 15% into R&D for what is working in civilization and keep moving the ball forward I think we do a good amount of that right now but we definitely need to think about that more often as an integral part of what we do because I think there is this tremendous amount of complacency at times of the way things are and I think it's very interesting that entrepreneurs or artists or people that are just basically unsatisfied with the current paradigm of the world are the ones that go like we got to change that shit the ones that go and just build it and do it and that's why we love talking to people like you and to people that are building the future and talking about the important research that you're doing and you know I really recommend everybody to take a look at Graham's work check it out in the bio also check out WeCount.org much love everyone thank you so much for tuning in Graham thanks for joining us on the show it's been super fun it was awesome I loved our conversations it's been awesome me too me too yeah I'm so happy we met a couple nights ago absolutely and everyone check out the work also give us your comments we'd love to hear from you in the comments below let us know what you think about the episode go and do your own investigations into vehicle residencies and into people that are without home and go and talk to them go check out our episodes that we've done on street life the foreign street smarts go check out those episodes and see what we're talking about how you can help them talk to service providers how you can help them pass some of your time actually going and volunteering time to these efforts to humanize ourselves and also go and manifest your dreams into the world build the future thanks to AAA the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting this has been super fun down in San Jose thanks everyone and much love see you soon peace that's great wow man love it yeah thank you