If you're like most Americans, the number one thing you spend money on is your rent or your mortgage.

Housing is our biggest expense.

And with millions of people furloughed, laid off, and unemployed, it's hard to pay.

I'm unable to pay my mortgage, my utilities, my daughter's college tuition.

Having this weight and this burden of having to pay rent for who knows how long without any income,

it's a looming storm cloud over me pretty much every day.

And I was just starting to get money saved up and having actually savings account again, and then boom.

We're stuck in our homes, but can't afford our homes.

But even before the pandemic, a lot of people were having a tough time,

eaking out money to keep their families in a decent place to live.

We're entering the COVID pandemic with the biggest wealth gap that our country has seen in a hundred years.

If you are literally living paycheck to paycheck, and then you lose that paycheck,

and you have nothing to fall back on, then you are in a very, very dire situation indeed.

Welcome to the uncertain hour.

I'm Chrissy Clark, and this is our pop-up emergency season, a history of now,

where we try to make sense of this most uncertain hour, when inequalities that already existed in our society are suddenly set in high relief.

On the show, we've always been obsessed with the policies that affect who gets ahead and who gets left behind in America.

And these questions seem particularly urgent, as our cities are exploding in protest and outrage, in response to some of our deepest and most long-running inequities.

One place America's inequality is most evident is in where we get to live and how much it costs us.

And that's what this episode is all about, housing.

This week, we're going to look to history to try to understand how housing has become so unstable for so many people.

We're going to look at the housing policies that were put in place as our nation emerged from other economic disasters,

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