Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Howard Hussack. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime contributing editor of

City Journal. Howard's the author of a brand new book called The Poor Side of Town and Why We Needed,

which will be out on September 21st from Encounter Books. Howard, thanks for

joining us. Great to be with you, Brian. Let's get right into it. Your book, which is imminent,

combines public policy and a lot of stories, proceeding from the notion that home ownership

can be an important source of wealth and rootedness and stability

for poor Americans. You document the ways that misguided housing policies, from slum clearance

to urban renewal to exclusionary zoning, made homeownership very, very difficult, if not

impossible for too many Americans. So tell us a bit

about the structure of this book and sort of what the main takeaway is. Well, that's a challenging

question, even for an author, Brian, but I'll give it my best shot. What I've tried to do is to

describe the trajectory of American housing policy in ways that tended to and have

diminished the types of housing that we have, types of housing that accommodated the poor,

allowed them to own modest homes, to accumulate wealth, and to advance through upper mobility. Well, how did that happen?

I focus a great deal in a way that I don't think has been done before on a series of individual

progressives. I go back as far as Jacob Rees, who was the famous muckraker who exposed housing conditions on the Lower East Side of

New York, and started the ball rolling toward the idea that what we needed to replace private

housing, it was going to demean and place poor people in excorable conditions. And what I demonstrate is that Reese never actually

talked to, for his famous book, How the Other Half Lives, never talked to the people of the

Lower East Side. How do you experience this neighborhood that you find, the authors, so object.

A lot of poor people in the Lower East Side were going about

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