A Solution For the Chronically Homeless, and Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

About 1.2 million people in the United States experience homelessness in a given year—you could nearly fill the city of Dallas with the unhoused. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing—providing not only a stable apartment, but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. The New Yorker contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals as they transitioned into a new supportive-housing building in Brooklyn. She found that this housing model works and argues that it could be scaled up nationally for less than the cost of emergency services for the homeless. But “no one,” Egan notes ruefully, “wants to see that line item in their budget.” Plus, Joe Garcia, an inmate serving a life sentence for murder in California’s High Desert State Prison, reads from his essay “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison,” recently published by The New Yorker.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.5	By one measure, something like 1.4 million people end up in homeless shelters every year,
0:23.7	and many thousands more are living on the street.
0:28.4	You could nearly fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused in this country.
0:36.1	The problem seems gigantic and tragic and absolutely intractable, but homelessless, in fact, is not intractable.
0:37.3	There are solutions. No one solution is going to work for every not intractable. There are solutions.
0:41.2	No one solution is going to work for every person or every city,
0:44.5	but we could greatly reduce the scale of this tragedy.
0:48.8	That's the good news and the bad news, according to Jennifer Egan.
0:51.5	And she's been reporting on the issue for the New Yorker.
0:53.2	Hey, how are you? I'm good.
0:54.2	What an amazing piece. What an amazing piece.
0:55.7	What an amazing piece.
0:56.4	Oh, thank you so much.
0:58.5	Jennifer Egan is best known for her many novels.
1:01.2	She's the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
1:07.0	Jen, I have to make an admission.
1:08.7	When I started out as an editor, I had this fantasy, maybe from my childhood of reading Esquire in the 70s or Rolling Stone, that I would get these novelists to write nonfiction. They'd go out into the world like Norman Mailer covering the march on the Pentagon or things like that. And in fact, very few novelists
1:29.5	seem to want to do that very often these days. But you have been writing about homelessness
1:36.9	for, on and off, for a couple of decades at least. How did you get interested in this? And why did
1:43.6	you want to pursue it as a writer?
	...

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