Press release from Pisgah Legal Services:
(August 10, 2017 – – Asheville, NC) Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize Winning author, will be this year’s keynote speaker for Pisgah Legal Services’ 7th Annual Poverty Forum, “Evicted: Housing Crisis in WNC,” on Thursday, September 28, 2017. The Forum will be held at UNC Asheville.“It’s no secret that decent, affordable housing is a critically important issue in Asheville and across Western North Carolina,” said Jim Barrett, Executive Director of Pisgah Legal Services. “We are very excited to welcome Matthew Desmond as this year’s forum speaker. He is a brilliant sociologist and dynamic storyteller who truly understands the relationship between unstable housing and poverty.”
Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize Winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, tells compelling stories of vulnerable people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and argues that a loss of housing isn’t merely a symptom but is a direct cause of poverty.
“Last year Pisgah Legal Services helped more than 2,900 local people with serious housing crises such as unfair evictions, unlawful foreclosures and terrible living conditions,” Barrett continued. “Our forums bring attention to the struggles faced by low-income people living in our mountains to encourage activism and to generate ways that we can work together to make our communities stronger.”
Desmond will also speak on Sept. 29 at a free Affordable Housing Summit, also held at UNCA, for developers, planners, advocates and government leaders to discuss strategies needed to provide better housing in the region.
Matthew Desmond, PhD, is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for revealing the impact of eviction on the lives of the urban poor and its role in perpetuating racial and economic inequality.
A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, Matthew Desmond’s New York Times bestselling book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City draws on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data.
Evicted won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the National Books Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, the Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writers Award, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. It was named one of the Top Books of 2016 by nearly three dozen outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal.
The September event begins with a cocktail reception at 5:30 pm, and the forum follows at 7:00 pm at the The Sherrill Center/Kimmel Arena at UNC Asheville. Tickets are $50/person for the reception and forum, $15/person for the forum only and are available at www.pisgahlegal.org starting on August 15.
PLS wishes to thank the more than 60 sponsors who help make this event possible, especially Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, Homeward Bound and Mountain Housing Opportunities.
Pisgah Legal Services is a nonprofit law firm that helps low-income people meet their basic needs, such as protection from domestic violence, avoiding homelessness, finding safe housing, and accessing health care and subsistence income. Pisgah Legal Services has 20 attorneys on staff, and relies heavily on the pro bono legal services of 300+ volunteer attorneys and the help of more than 50 office volunteers. PLS’ main service area includes six counties in WNC, with offices in Asheville, Brevard, Marshall, Hendersonville, and Rutherfordton. For more information, call Pisgah Legal Services at 828-253-0406 or toll free at 800-489-6144 or go to www.pisgahlegal.org.
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More Information
The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Asheville is $1,180 a month, the highest city in the state.
$15,080 = the annual salary for a full-time minimum-wage job.In 2015, 15.4 percent of the Asheville metro region population was living below the federal poverty threshold; that’s $25,257 for a family of four.Almost half the people in Buncombe County pay 30 percent or more of their income for housing.The average income of a Pisgah Legal client is $11,719 per year.Vacancy rates for apartments in WNC have been as low as 1% in recent years.Some parts of WNC have a waitlist of five or more years for public or subsidized housing. In 2016, 1,187 families were on the waitlist in Buncombe County.Studies show as many as 57 percent of homeless women in the U.S. report domestic violence as the immediate cause.In 2016, Pisgah Legal attorneys and volunteers worked to prevent homelessness and stabilize housing for 2,967 people in WNC.
Desmond pontificates many solutions to the problems he sees, but he does not say how he would pay for any of it.
The federal government has been divesting itself of public housing and housing assistance for several decades, even with liberal administrations HUD funding has been cut every year since 2005. States and cities are certainly in no position to fund any more public housing or subsidies. The massive amount of money that would be needed to fund his programs would have to come from huge tax increases on already burdened middle class and upper middle class people. (the super rich certainly are not going to pay for it).
I don’t see there ever being enough votes in the House or Senate to expand the welfare state, in fact I think HUD and Section 8 will be a shell of their current selves by the end of Trump’s first term. I read an article recently that stated that only 2.5 percent of our total population (in the US) is rent burdened. While that is a large number of people, when taken as a percentage of our entire population it is not a crisis most people are dealing with. I think most of the people in that 2.5% have always been rent burdened due to being unable to support themselves in meaningful jobs that pay a substantial wage.