There's a callousness that happens in housing discussions that's gross to me. The way people say like well that's just the cost of living in a desire-able city, you could always move. It sounds like people have very little understanding or empathy for other human beings.

My parents and I immigrated from another country. The consequence of that was they lost their home, they lost their parents. All we had was vhs tapes we'd record and send back and forth for a little over a decade before my grandparents died.

I understand the tongue I was born with, but I really struggle to speak it meaning I struggle to express myself to some of the closest people to me and I often, however I assimilate, belong neither here nor there.

I moved with my own family across this country and back and it was a painful absence and the homecoming was recognizing how much time we lost together.

We talk about cities like people don't live there with their friends and families. We talk about cities like they have no poor people, they have no working poor, they have no working class people in them. Like they're home to nobody.

We talk about leaving like it's nothing, like it should be so easy.

It's not surprising to me that people who sterilize poor and working people having homes in a city as just having the benefits of incumbency would in turn see displacement through the lens of a sort of manifest destiny for young (white) professionals and the upper class.

People don't want to leave their families and their homes. They don't want to leave where they grew up. They want to be able to survive and make it around the people they love.

Also, if you're poor in New York, or you're literally living in a shelter in New York, our policy from state to state is such that you almost can't afford to be poor or homeless anywhere else but New York.

Leaving a city that doesn't give a shit about you is risking winding up in a place that gives even less of a shit and has even less of a support system.

But leaving that aside, migration is not incidental. There are policy choices that visited disaster on people's lives throughout this country.

For most of the 2000's, our housing policy was insane. The history of it is basically that we poured money into the financial sector, the financial sector got individuals to assume all of the risk and lose everything while the government bailed the financial sector out.

Then institutional investors bought up a ton of different types of housing in this country including mobile homes, single family homes, multi-family construction, properties that used to be held as housing stock by cities.

Downtowns across this country were devastated and we poured so much money into the financial sector but left a lot of small towns and rural communities to functionally fend for themselves.

VC poured a ton of money into New York and Silicon Valley, while a huge swath of this country saw every area of life, every area of business, dominated by a few remaining institutional players who would wipe out any individual that would ever try to make something for themselves.

People left their families, their communities, their homes. A lot of places had to just to make desperate, tough bids to rebuild themselves with what community remained.

We hollowed so much of this country out, made so few paths truly viable, and it's had a dramatic effect on what life looks like and can be in this country and we often just set that aside and accept all of it as inevitable.

And we're still just telling people, well, if you can't make it here, then fuck off, say bye to your family and your home and go somewhere else. No, we won't invest in anywhere else. No, we won't put money or resources into anywhere else.

Our country is anti-people, it is anti-families. Even our immigration policy, that the white nationalists that run it call family reunification "chain migration."

Literally people immigrate, try to build decent lives for themselves, and then they try to bring the people they left behind with them so they can spend time with them, spend their lives around the people they love, and our government sees this as insidious and harmful.

People in this country are more physically disconnected, alienated and alone, and we keep making policy choices ensuring that for any chance of survival, you'll have to work fifteen different jobs and keep moving to the few places we pour money into, away from people you love.

We need to build a ton of housing in this country, public and genuinely affordable, but we also need to scale down the role of the financial sector in American life and invest in this country more broadly than we do today so that people can make all types of decent lives.

What we don't need to do is keep wishing poor people away, keep talking about issues as though they only apply to the top 5% of Americans, and keep penalizing people who just want the opportunity to build a decent life around their families and the people they love.