UPDATE: OTM has received numerous inquiries from listeners who want to help Jeffrey and Kelly. If you’d like to donate, they have set up a PayPal account here. Please note that neither OTM nor WNYC is affiliated with this account. We do not control the money nor do we monitor how it is spent. Donations are considered a gift to Jeffrey and Kelly, and are not tax-deductible.
We have a problem as a country, a problem made up of small inadequacies and inequalities that compound and intersect. There is and always has been an eviction crisis. American renters endure nearly a million evictions a year and they defend themselves from roughly three times as many eviction filings. The problem, broadly and historically speaking, is putting people in homes and ensuring that they can stay put. It’s a problem we’ve had for a very long time — long enough to have solved it, long enough to at least comprehend it. But we haven’t, and we don’t. Not yet.
Within the past several months On the Media has traveled to Richmond, Chicago, Indianapolis, Camden and Atlanta in search of the symptoms, and perhaps a cure, to this particular plague. We did so with the help of Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and founder of The Eviction Lab. He’s our partner in this project, and so we start the series with a conversation between him and Brooke. We also hear the story of Jeffrey, a security guard in Richmond, Virginia whose ongoing housing troubles teach us a lot about our eviction crisis.
This is a segment from On the Media’s June 7th, 2019 program, Introducing: The Scarlet E. To hear other episodes of The Scarlet E and to learn about the eviction stats in your own state, visit onthemedia.org/eviction.
Support for “The Scarlet E” is provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Melville Charitable Trust. Additional support is provided by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and “Chasing the Dream,” a WNET initiative reporting on poverty and opportunity in America.
Support for On the Media is provided by the Ford Foundation and the listeners of WNYC Radio.