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Most Americans want the country to build more public housing for low-income families, but they do not want that public housing (or any sort of multifamily housing) in their neighborhood. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to champion public housing in the abstract, but among homeowners, they are no more likely to welcome new housing developments in their own backyards. One study found that conservative renters were in fact more likely to support a proposal for a 120-unit apartment building in their community than liberal homeowners. Perhaps we are not so polarized after all. Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Of course, public squalor is not found in equal measure across the United States. In many communities—most, in fact—the parks are well fertilized and manicured, the snow and trash are removed in a timely fashion, the schools have new textbooks in the fall and heat in the winter, and 911 calls summon ambulances. Things work, at least by American standards (which, you learn from riding the trains in Europe or connecting to the Internet in Seoul, are not the highest in the world). Opportunity can be hoarded, then, not only by abandoning public goods for private ones, but also by leveraging individual fortunes to acquire access to exclusive public goods, buying yourself into an upscale community. In many corners of America, a pricey mortgage doesn’t just buy a home; it also buys a good education, a well-run soccer league, and public safety so thick and expected it appears natural, instead of the product of social design.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood. If an aging couple’s nest egg depends on how the stock market performs, it’s not hard to see why that couple would support legislation designed to yield higher returns, even if that means shortchanging workers. Social ills—segregation, exploitation—can be motivated by bigotry and selfishness as well as by the best of intentions, such as protecting our children. Especially protecting our children. These arrangements create what the postwar sociologist C. Wright Mills called “structural immorality” and what the political scientist Jamila Michener more recently labeled exploitation “on a societal level.” We are connected, members of a shared nation and a shared economy, where the advantages of the rich often come at the expense of the poor. But that arrangement is not inevitable or permanent. It was made by human hands and can be unmade by them. We can fashion a new society, starting with our own lives. Where we decide to work and live, what we buy, how we vote, and where we put our energies as citizens all have consequences for poor families. Becoming a poverty abolitionist, then, entails conducting an audit of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem—and to the solution.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Help from the government is a zero-sum affair. The biggest government subsidies are not directed at families trying to climb out of poverty but instead go to ensure that well-off families stay well-off. This leaves fewer resources for the poor. If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it. We should at least stand up and profess, Yes, this is the kind of nation we want. What we cannot do is look the American poor in the face and say, We’d love to help you, but we just can’t afford to, because that is a lie.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

This is a case where the packaging is just as important as the gift, and I don’t doubt that the way benefits are delivered and taxes are collected affects how we see them. Paying taxes does hurt, and perceiving a tax break as fundamentally different from government aid is easy to do. But it’s a bit of magical thinking. Both welfare checks and tax breaks boost a household’s income; both contribute to the deficit; and both are designed to incentivize behavior, like seeing a doctor (Medicaid) or saving for college (529 plans). We could flip the delivery system to achieve the same ends, extending welfare to the poor by cutting payroll taxes for low-income workers (as France has) while replacing the mortgage income deduction with a check mailed out to homeowners each month. The federal budget is a giant circle of money, a whirl of funds flowing to the state from taxpayers and back to taxpayers from the state. You can benefit a family by lowering its tax burden or by increasing its benefits, same difference.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Those who benefit most from government largesse—generally white families with accountants—harbor the strongest antigovernment sentiments. And those people vote at higher rates than their fellow citizens who appreciate the role of government in their lives. They lend their support to politicians who promise to cut government spending, knowing full well that it won’t be their benefits that get the ax. Overwhelmingly, voters who claim the mortgage interest deduction are the very ones who oppose deeper investments in affordable housing, just as those who received employer-sponsored health insurance were the ones pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It’s one of the more maddening paradoxes of political life.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Today, the biggest beneficiaries of federal aid are affluent families. To benefit from employer-sponsored health insurance, you need a good job, usually one that requires a college degree. To benefit from the mortgage interest deduction, you need to be able to afford a home, and those who can afford the biggest mortgages reap the biggest deductions. To benefit from a 529 plan, you need to be able to squirrel away cash for your children’s college costs, and the more you save, the bigger your tax break, which is why this subsidy is almost exclusively used by the well-off.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $600 billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low-income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent).

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

There is not one banking sector. There are two—one for the poor and one for the rest of us—just as there are two housing markets and two labor markets. The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we are not. Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated. For some, a home creates wealth; for others, a home drains it. For some, access to credit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it. It is quite understandable, then, that well-fed Americans can be perplexed by the poor, even disappointed in them, believing that they accept stupidly bad deals on impulse or because they don’t know any better. But what if those deals are the only ones on offer? What good is financial literacy training for people forced to choose the best bad option?

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

“Predatory inclusion” is what historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls it in her book Race for Profit, describing the long-standing American tradition of incorporating marginalized people into housing and financial schemes through bad deals when they are denied good ones. The exclusion of poor people from traditional banking and credit systems has forced them to find alternative ways to cash checks and secure loans, which has led to a normalization of their exploitation.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond