Rent Is High, Rights Are Low

disagreement here as well. All right, let's get into it.

because I read and process things a different way. So it was it just changed my perspective. But I do appreciate this caller. First of all, Craig was kind of cute. Thank you, Craig.

It's the current administration under Queen Circe or King Jeoffrey. I know for sure though they're Lanisters. Those are Lanisters in the office.

loves the dogs. Andrew loves the kids. Wait, wait, Andrew. Andrew does not love the cats, but he loves you know. If you don't know what that's about, go back some episodes.

Trump administration is Ramsey Bolton on steroids. They were methodical, and how they broke down theon gray Joy and I think that is the equivalent of what we're seeing the Trump administration due to our society right now, Like they have him up on the thing, you know, where they had him like stretched out, Like that's what it feels like the Trump administration is doing to our society. I would say they're Lanister is just for the subtext of incests.

You know, this very weird lust that this president seems to have for his own daughter. People forget about that because it's been so much mess. So that's where I would say they're like the Lanisters, but in terms of their cruelty and the imagination of their cruelty, on their sub human treatment of people that we've seen from the iced deportations to these concentration camps that they're building, to how they're how the Big Beautiful Bill is going to

impact people with their medicine and medicaid. I would say they are the scum of Winterfell. Uh, the North remembers will always remember, So I say they're Ramsey Bolton. And I invite Angela to Binge because it is an interesting show.

three worst of the Lanisters. I'm gonna push this one and say, Queen Denaris last episode crazy hit and in the sense that they took to fire and burned it all down, like it's not just one, that the enemy is not one, right, like she she could have had the enemy as one if the intention was simply to take out the castle, right, but when they really took stock of it and sat into themselves, when she set into who she is, just as the Trumps, now that he knows who he is, what he's gotta do the

second Trump two point zero. The man took fire to everybody, and everybody's in the receiving end right now, innocent poor middle rich well healed and not healed at all. So I'm sticking with.

you all. It's like Trump can die, but trump Ism will live, and so you still have like all these young people who adopt his ideology. You still have all of these people across America. Everybody's like, oh, I think the election was stolen. I hope so, because I if it wasn't, then that means there are nearly one hundred million people in this country who supports what this man

is doing. And so I do kind of understand when she said, you know what, and they were telling her, and she was looking down at all the people, like some of y'all rock with me, but most of y'all don't your card and burned everybody.

the greatest number. And then I think is she got again closer to the throne and more healed in her seat. The real true Uh style of leadership came forward and I think Trumps are the same way, and their fire is not to eliminate the the enemies. Their fire is to eliminate anyone who would stand in their way. All the institutional structures that are built to hold them accountable. They want to extinguish them. And so I'm Queen de nerus.

We will revisit this topic around housing. But I don't know about you and Tiff and Angela, but from friendship circles or extended friendship circles to reading articles, people constantly talking about housing availability where they live, whether that's in Atlanta, in the city proper that is going through its own regentrification and a mass exodus of people who have always lived in the urban core now having to try to find a place that they can afford outside the urban center,

which again creates multiples of problems. Angela, I don't know if you've seen the Seattle data on affordability of housing, but some of our most prosperous cities in the country are also where we're finding the greatest exacerbation of the lack of affordable owners home ownership as well as rental. And what's really problematic about this is I think America by and large has had this idea that the people who are without a home are the ones who deserve

to be without a home. They're the people who are addicted somehow, They're the people who don't work and are basically waiting for the government to take care of them. But undeserving folks, right, I take exception with that. I think housing is a human right and everybody should be housed, and we ought to have policy directed toward making sure that we've got folks who are housed. But people do make convenient places in their mind where they think it's

okay for people to be without a home. And now what we're seeing is that people who are getting up every day and going to work a job, people with children, married couples who together pooling their resources, still are not able to afford to live in and in many of these cities. And what I'd love for us to explore and and and delving further into this one is what are our listeners experiencing. I'd love to hear wherever you

are in the country, o' good enough. I was surprised Alabama, Lower Alabama UH is experiencing its issues around housing affordability. Who would have ever thought, right, And no offense to anybody, but just knowing, you know, having relatives there and visiting that just wasn't That wouldn't have been my first guest. But wherever you are around the country. If you've got experiences that you want to share, make a video express what the conditions seem to be like, what you think

are contributories to the issue. We'd love to hear from you here at Native Lampid and then try to get to some of the reasons why. I will tell you with the with the rise of all of these equity uh firms that are basically pulling a non less money, to include a lot of that anonymous money coming from people's pension funds that are being invested on Wall Street, much of the housing market right now has been taken over by by these by these very discreete almost anonymous

funding sources that are buying it up. And they have no relationship to the cities, no relationship to the community, no care for anything other than getting their money. And if that means expelling you, putting you and your kids out because you're late two days with the rent, they'll

do it. So I think, y'all, I know you both are in cities that probably experienced this u DC tiffany that again some of the highest incomes in the region, but also one of the most extreme divides between those who have and those who have not even in my own city, y'all. I will testify that we have our own issues, Florida being one of the top three places where you cannot afford to live, whether it's rental or

buying a home. And I'll tell you, for our our community, the biggest transfers of wealth for us has largely been between the passing of our real estate, our homes that we've owned and poured into. When I was on tribe, my uncle called me, who was in real estate himself, and said, son, I know this legal bill is going to be a lot, but the last thing you can consider it, in fact, you cannot consider it at all. It's taking out another mortgage on your home or putting

your house up in any way, shape or form. That is for you, that is for your family, that is for your kids, And the fact that people don't have that to look forward to increasingly in our country is very problematic, but especially for our community.

and that's how you wealth build. Unfortunately, I bought this house at the height of the house crisis in two thousand and seven, and ten years later I found myself underwater in my mortgage. I was living far out, and so I used to live far out. I was in like way out Silver Spring, not downtown Silver Spring, but way out Silver Spring. But I remember when you had your house out that like townhouse. I remember head to

get thirtieth birthday party there. And but my point is none of us were living in the city, you know, the the hot area, and I just hated being out there. My whole life was in the city, and I had this incredibly tortuous commute. I was spending three hours each day, an hour and a half in traffic going back and forth. And one day I blew up my entire life and I just came home and said, I don't live here anymore.

And I called my realtor and explained to her, and she said, well, someone's feelings is going to get hurt in this.

this American dream. So I'm not an expert here. I really hoped of viewers take you up on that, Andrew, and send in your stories, because our friend Latasha Angela went through similar things looking for a house in Atlanta. People here in New York are offering, you know, two hundred thousand over the asking price just to be able to afford a place. I didn't even know what was going on in Seattle. So this seems to be something that's happened that's affect impacting all regions of the country.

So I'll have more questions for you guys about it than I do answers. But I wanted to get a little testimony just so y'all can be encouraged. Don't be embarrassed by your problems, because I'm telling y'all, I did a short sale on my home and walked away from it in service to my peace, and I haven't regretted since at all.

that house. And what is so crazy is, you know, people talk often about financial literacy being something that we really need, but one of the things we learned on the tour is that even when you're financially literate and you do have all the tools, if you still don't have the resources, your literacy means nothing because you don't have the capability or the capacity to do the things that you need to do. I, however, was both financially ignorant and didn't have all the capacity because I was

working on the hill. I had a lot of tools that a lot of folks didn't have, Like you know, the Congressional Federal credit Union.

in the house. I got a loan modification because on the hill you get exposed to these things because banks wanted to release you know, members and their staff and like, even though it was supposed to be further constituents. I was like, let me tell you something real quick, I actually need one of these too, And so I got my loan modified, and I felt myself really resenting my realtor and the person who structured my bank loan, because there were a lot of things they did that weren't helpful.

The realtor and the lender were married, and so they did what was necessary, yeah, to help each other, but not necessarily to help me. So again this is where literacy meets lack of resource. I'm trusting who's right there because I'm like, well, I just know I need to hurry up and close on this house. Saying all that to say, I wish that somebody would have told me that the only way that there's more than one way to reach the American dream. And some of that is

by eliminating debt, not creating new debt. Some of that might be investing in different things in your furro one k and putting more money in there. Like what I've learned over the last couple of years. You know, my furro one k has almost tripled its value having the right broker, the right financial advisor. So there are all these things that I've learned from trial and error. All I would ask, just like Tiff just did, is please learn from the words of my testimony, so you do

not dare repeat these things at home. And if you find yourself I'm in a situation where desperation has come in, or where your hard hit, or where you don't know how you're gonna make ends meet, please don't be afraid to speak up, because you will be astonished by the number of people who are in the exact same situation and trying to figure out how to pay rent or how to try to figure out how to pay the mortgage and that h o a fee, trying to figure out what we'll suffer trying to pay tax that on

top of that, you got to lean on your house. I had that too, right, So there are all of these things that come up and we don't know how to get out of it because we haven't learned the different tools to use to apply them in the process. That's it, rent is too damn high and then fix it.

She's the biggest forget bone thugs in harmony. We got Elizabeth Booker Houston thugs in harmony, and she is making it happen every single day on social telling us what it is, debunking misinformation, and she does it with the smile, with brilliant and with zest. Y'all can't even stand this. Elizabeth, thank you for joining us.

But I will say the whole right now, the whole idea and concept of being in law school in America to learn a constitution that we are understanding is pretty much meaningless going forward.

of different ways to be a lawyer. I don't practice. I did a hot minute in court and I did well, but I was crying all the time. So I was like, this is not for me. So I came to DC as a regulatory council in the FDA as a fellow under that man in the White House back in twenty seventeen, and I teach a lot of administrative law and Chevron was like the big case for forty years. Yeah, and

it got overturned last summer. So I didn't know what to do with my whole first two lessons for the semester because I'm like, I don't know what I have for y'all. So it's just been really very much trying to keep up with what's going on and flying by the seat of my pants. A lot of times.

meaning that the court's got to listen to them. And it made good sense because the whole reason these agencies exist is these are the experts, the scientists, the doctors, all the people that Congress is definitely not and so that's the whole reason these agencies exist because you know, Congress can't pass or the least they shouldn't be passing laws and regulations about things they don't understand. Well, the Supreme Court overturned that, and it was a big slash

to agency authority. And that was just step one of everything, because now we see that this administration is completely completely dismantling all of the federal agencies, but the layoffs, the mass terminations, all of that. So they're trying to get these experts out of So when you talk about environmental activists being very concerned, this was a big blow, say to the EPA, for example, because it didn't give them the dame.

violate that. And they purposely put this Elon Musk supercomputer monstrosity in the middle of the poorest, blackest neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, and they are violating how we would interpret the Clean Air Act under the Biden Harris administration. But as you said, we're going back to Reagan era interpretations, and so it's a little bit squishy as to whether they will succeed in court and fighting against this big, huge machine that is polluting the air, in the water in the area.

There's a black mayor who has sided with Elon Musk on this supercomputer on XAI, despite the fact that it is very clear that there the emissions being let out from this this entity are causing great harm to the surrounding communities. How is he justifying that and how should the community hold him accountable and responsible for that? And what's the point if we got black elected divisions, if they're not gonna do right by black people, don't even get me.

not be signing with Elon Musk. I think he's trying to justify it because of the whole economic advantages to the city, which, mind you, this supercomputer only takes about thirty people working in that facility to make it go. They are not creating jobs. Because people want to make comparisons to FedEx, because yes, we have FedEx and Memphis. Yes, FedEx has pollution, you know, at similar levels. FedEx also employs most of the city. FedEx is also providing services.

It's not perfect. We want to address the environmental impact issues of Vetex. But just because there's this one company there which is employing a lot of people in the city and they have some environmental issues to work on, doesn't mean we should just give away our city to other big factories. So he's basically trying to say, oh, if they build XAI here, then they're going to build a whole bunch of other industries here Memphis, which, by the way, we don't want that. I grew up in

South Memphis. That's where I was originally from when I was born, and I have a ton of health issues to this day because of growing up in that part of the city. I actually got to meet Mayor Brandon Scott at essence best Mayor of Baltimore, and I looked at him and I said, can you can you go talk?

But housing topic we address a little bit earlier in the show is probably one of the greatest undersung, under voiced issues confronting Americans. The majority, I've got to say,

the majority of us. If you're not in a rural place that may be experiencing some depopulation issues, maybe you're in you know, just a regular city town in anywhere America where even there, if you're an aging person you're not able to find independent living that is at your price point, and you certainly aren't able to get into assistant living facilities without the help of your Medicare and probably other supplemental insurance to be able to afford that right.

If you are young person who believes that the American dream is one day being able to own a home, if you are like the three of us hosts before the age of thirty, you know that dream is extinguished

for many people. I'm curious, just based off your policy experience, obviously your care and love for the city that you're from, but for cities, for localities, how did we get to frankly, World War two, post World War two levels of housing unaffordability, and of course the World War two crisis driven by the fact that we had soldiers returning who you know, had unpresident in numbers who just didn't have housing. How do we go from that to here today? No real

explainable reason. How it is that housing is so unaccessible for people.

And how that worked is the doctors, the nurses, everybody would be treating these children coming in with issues after issue after issue, but we would find that they're not going to get healthier. They're taking the medicine as they should, they're going to the doctors they should, but there's a legal need and underlying legal need that the doctors cannot handle. And so that's when we would come in and provide

promono legal services. And oftentimes that was me taking slum lords to court so they could get out of these leases and get into some safe, you know, actual good housing, or to force the slumblards to clean up the vice because it was just keeping these kids sick, and we just we treat housing as another product rather than understanding that it is the place that's supposed to be where children and families and individuals are safe, where they could

be healthy, or they could be sheltered from the weather, where they can make sure they have somewhere to go lay their heads at night and not worry about, you know, the elements outside or elements coming inside. And that shift in thinking about property, I mean, we see it all the time. There's Netflix shows about real estate moguls, you know, and about how many millions of dollars they can get in all their commissions for selling houses. That's how we've

looked at this. We're looking at it as if this is a want and not a need for every single individual. And that shift in thinking, this idea that not everybody deserves a home, but a home is something you're supposed to, I don't know, basically kill yourself trying to get that, I think has been the biggest attack. I'm making sure that people have affordable housing. And y'all were all talking

about buying your first home. And I remember I was not under thirty, but I was thirty one when I bought my first home, and my husband was a stay at home dad at the time, so even though I was married, I bought the home completely in my name, so the mortgage was just in my name, even as a married woman. And that was such a big deal because my dad didn't buy his first house until he was almost in his fifties, and so he was really proud that I was able to do that, but there

were so many barriers to get there. I was going through a first time home buyer's program, and it became apparent to me after the fact that they were being very discriminatory against me when I was buying the song, because days before closing, they told me, oh, we can't move forward unless you have an entire year's mortgage payments and arrears after the down payment, after the closing, cause you need to have twelve months of your mortgage payment.

And I happened to be a little savior at the time, and I was very fortunate to be able to save the money, and I said, okay, no problem, and the way the finance person on the phone went oh oh oh. I was like, yeah, I can send you bank sayments. Sure, I have another account with that money in there, and it was like they were shocked. So there's the discriminatory

aspect to it too. So when we talked about the housing situation, we're talking about redlining, we're talking about discriminatory practices. I remember looking at the application for my financing and they marked the races black and it said, how did you find this information? And it says social media? Because I had never seen these people in person. I had only talked on the phone and gone over email. I thought that was crazy because this was still in that

kind of COVID times. I had a little baby, like, you know, so I wasn't out there meeting up with people in person or anything. It was just on the phone and over email. And they treated me very funny, especially being a black woman who is married to and I'm married to a white man, but a black woman who was buying the house completely in her name. It was like it bothered them for some reason.

so to speak. But these are also the same people who took families who lived in homes for thirty forty years, who never missed a mortgage payment whatsoever, who went to those same black families presenting a better option for them repackaging their loans and turn their situation completely upside down.

A lot of the untold story I feel about the housing crisis is the one that we've been fed, is that there were a lot of people who were unqualified getting access to houses that they shouldn't have ever had and could never have afforded. Not true. Overwhelmingly, the crisis in the housing industry was bought on by greedy banks, with greedy incentivized negatively or positively for them, but negatively

for the rest of us. Incentivized to package these things repackage was what were otherwise stable loans and to now unstable loans that looked good for a couple of years, and then the bottom falls out and put a whole generation of folks into a tail spin and eliminated untold wealth in this country overnight. But it wasn't individuals who were uneducated or didn't know enough about what they were doing. Y'all knew what we knew what we needed to know at the time to accomplish the goal that yet set

for ourselves. We didn't expect, however, on the other side, to meet an untrusting partner who was only interested and their incentivized bottom line, the bonuses that they could get by basically duping us into situations that were untenable. And they all knew it, yet they were complicit. In fact, they created it and were complicit with the whole ruse. And now we're sitting in a situation where people can't afford rents where they live. There's zero protection in most places.

A lot of people hear about protections for folks in rental units in New York City, but New York City is a complete and total exception, and even their rules are not perfect. And most communities there's no protection for folks who are renting housing, which is the condition that a lot of our people find themselves in. And so I'm wondering, given your years, Angela, even your years in DC, what does it take for the kind of regulation that's

necessary in this country to come forth. Because this is a bipartisan issue, it's a non part of an issue. Republicans and Democrats are suffering the saying, how do we get the lawmakers? What? What is what has got them gripped so much so that they can't unleash themselves to be our advocates on housing.

doesn't make any kind of sense. And we're starting to see some shifts. So I'm a Montgomery County, Maryland resident. Now I've lived here fram a state year, and I've noticed that there have been some shifts to try to do things like cap increases in rent. I know Tacoma Park, Maryland, is particularly good about this, but Tacoma Park is still an expensive place to live. We're still not seeing the

equity that we need. I would say that being in Maryland compared to Tennessee over the last few years, I see a higher level of equity than I've seen back home. But as you pointed out, Andrew, it's still not to the level that we need it to be. It's still not where we need it to be. There are still homeless people sleeping by the Metro. There's no reason in this country why anybody should be homeless. It makes no sense to me why anybody is unhoused anywhere in this country.

We have too much money, we have empty homes, we have empty apartments. There's no reason except again to treat this as a commodity and try to use it as a form of conspicuous consumption. And a lot of it comes down to that conspicuous consumption. I got to look like I have something, And not only do I have to look like I have something, but I have to make sure that you don't have something so I can feel good about myself. And that's what we've been doing.

And I've also been on a ti rate about multigenerational housing. I purchased a multiti generational home in December. My husband and I we're very happy to do this. It has multiple little living situations going on. And my aunt, who is seventy, she is retired. She is living in the guest house of the home, and it has a walk out basement apartment, so when the time comes to my parents can live in the home. And right now my best friend is there. It was my child's godmother, and

she's helping out with things like childcare. White supremacy has done such a number on taking this concept of multigenerational living and intergenerational living and treating it as a failure and that you have to follow this rugged individualism and have a nuclear family and one home for your family, and if you don't have that, you are a failure, rather than understanding that you bring your family together and you pull resources to be safe, live together and help

each other out. And again, I know that's really a policy point, but I feel like we need a shift in that cultural thinking of understanding that this kind of living does not actually work, especially someone who has birthed and is now raising a child. We should not be alone postpartum raising these.

passion that is leading us. I remember I think it was gerald Dee Mariba who wasn't seeing in and was recently overprogramming a degree almost like have you heard of her? And I was like, oh my god, I love her because you could dress people down quickly but still very clear.

You know, you can understand you, but your mouth is going quick, and you could break it all down in ways that I think you know a lot of people respect and for all the people that was mad enough to cut you, was doing it all for them, you guys, I will tell y'all know I'm a snitch. So I saw Elizabeth's daddy and Jackson. I said, how do you feel when she cuts? Because my dad went off on me a vodcast. He's like, I don't like it, but

it's okay. So Elizabeth, I would do want to come to you on you know, why do you do it? And when you're talking to young people about where their space is and how to find their lane if they are to do content creation, what do you what do you advise them?

What feels right in my spirit. That is what drives everything that I do. That's what drove me going to law school. That's what drove me getting my master's and being a scientist. At one point I had started my law career, so I don't want to go back to being a scientist because it felt right in the moment, and that's what I did. And I know that was such a shift, but it was the thing to do. And when it came to content creation, what happened is

there was a global pandemic. I was home with a baby, I was on a maternity leave, and I had just so happened to be the first JDMPH grad from the University of Memphis, and I was trained at the CDC's Public Health Law program in epidemics, pandemics, quarantine, isolation law, all this stuff. And I told myself, this doesn't feel super relevant, and so I had shifted into privacy law. And then a whole pandemic happened, and I realized, oh, I'm sitting on a whole bunch of knowledge that not

a lot of people have at this intersection. Because I started having people who were my mentors, who had been ten twenty thirty years in the law calling me and saying, we know that you are one grad from Memphis who understands this. Can you break down this information for us and how this works? And so I realized this might be useful on a wider scale. And so it started

off getting on TikTok, just kind of cracking jokes. I lost my brother back in twenty seventeen to gun violence, and so I've made I do a lot of dark humor jokes. I made this little trend we were raiding our siblings. I raided it all, all four of my siblings. When it got to my brother, I gave before out of ten because I said he up and died. And you know, that had people laughing because they were like, not you rating him low because he died. I said, hey, it is what it is, and you know, kind of

built up a little bit of a following there. But I realized, oh, I can actually give people some information too, So I started talking about emergency use authorizations on vaccines, how the vaccine approval process works, all of this stuff, and doing it in a way that was, you know, entertaining for people. And so I think people started to appreciate it, and so I just kept doing it. And as long as people find what I do useful, I'll

keep doing it. And when it's not useful anymore, I'll go do something else.

put you in a bad situation. But what are the things that we should be most concerned about given what's happening.

trying to dismantle vaccine approvals within the FDA. Because the FDA handles approvals, it's through our biologics, the Center for Biologics, that's SBIRD and FDA, and pay close attention to that because I feel like it's not getting the coverage it should. And we've already seen what happened with COVID having a resurgence of diseases that we can prevent preventable communicable illnesses come back up, especially when the school year is going to start back up next month. Yes, we got to

be careful. We have to make sure and I know in our community especially there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy. People have misconceptions about the syphilist childs at Tuskegee. But vaccines are safe, they are effective. We need to make sure our babies have their MMR vaccines. We need to get our teaters and make sure that we are up on our MMR vaccines, that our levels are good, to make sure we don't need a booster. That would be my number one thing that I would say to really

really watch out for. That is the thing that scares me the most.

levels you need in your body to prevent infection. And if those levels are not where they need to be, they'll let you know if you need to get another shot. And again I always tell people I'm very open about it. I have an autistic son. He has five years old. He's beautiful, he's amazing, he's fantastic. Vaccines do not cause autism. It is genetic. It is also could be hereditary. They

do not cause autism. And I'm gonna tell you right now, I'd rather have my living, beautiful, happy, healthy baby boy than a child who has died from a preventable illness. I will tell you that every day.

did too. But it is that time to get to calls to action, so let's fire them off.

to start relooking and re examining your budget. How are you spending your money? How much are you spending on food, on clothes, on gas, on carb notes. Check to see where you can trim the fat, and keep asking yourself what do I need? And if it's not something that's needed, think about how you can have a treat less. Often I need to have a lot less street so I can fit my clothes. By the way, but we'll talk about them treats next time.

So I just want to give you all a hits up. And then my last CTA is just my own complaint, but I keep saying it and I don't think enough people have heard it. Nobody wants to hear your goddamn conversations. Please use your ear but at air in public spaces because when you when you don't do it, I'm gonna just start joining in the conversation.

when I'm out in these streets. I'll be trying to talk sports to these people, and I know I don't know what I'm talking about, but I just think she's one of the coolest people.