The 1968 Civil Rights Act made housing discrimination illegal, but subtler forms prevailed. Crystal and Vanetta wanted to leave the ghetto, but landords like the one on Fifteenth Street turned them away. Other landlords and property management companies--like Affordable Rents--tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans. When Crystal and Vanetta heard back from Affordable Rentals, they learned their application had been rejected on account of their arrest and eviction history.

The worse the Hinkstons' house got, the more everyone seemed to become withdrawn and lethargic, which only deepened the problem. Natasha started spending more time at Malik's. Doreen stopped cooking, and the children ate cereal for dinner. Patrice slept more. The children's grades dropped, and Mikey's teacher called saying he might have to repeat, mainly because of so many missed homework assignments. Everyone had stopped cleaning up, and trash spread over the kitchen floor. Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.

It was once said that the poor are "constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance." Especially for poor African American families--who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance--living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged. [...] Growing up in a shack in the ghetto meant learning how to endure such an environment while also learning that some people never had to. People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it--they thought less of themselves.

What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted. And, who knows, maybe you could have actually become a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one Shortcake gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn't break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that day on your groom would introduce you as "my wife." But that's not what happened. What happened was that your hours were cut, and your electricity was about to be shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home, and you snatched someone's purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who's to say you won't do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.

If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing--and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate. Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, "not to destory individualism," in Franklin D. Roosevelt's words, "but to protect it." Child labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protects we now take for granted came about when we chose to place the well-being of people above money.

There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. "Every condition exists," Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crysallized in the slum."

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people's incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more--and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. Poverty is two-faced--a matter of income and expenses, input and output--and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.

[...] In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack--good jobs, a strong safety net, role models--we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor. [...]

Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of the many financial techniques--from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges--specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller retuns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair.

Those who profit from the current situation--and those indifferent to it--will say that the housing market should be left alone to regulate itself. They don't really mean that. Exploitation within the housing market relies on government support. It is the government that legitimizes and defends landlords' right to charge as much as they want; that subsidizes the construction of high-end apartments, bidding up rents and leaving the poor with even fewer options; that pays landlords when a family cannot, through onetime or ongoing housing assistane; that forcibly removes a family at landlords' request by dispatching armed law enforcement officers; and that records and publicizes evictions, as a service to landlords and debt collection agencies. [...]

[...] If given the same opportunity, would any of us price an apartment at half of what it could fetch or simply forgive and forget losing thousands of dollars when the rent checks didn't arrive? Emphasizing the importance of exploitation does not mean haranguing landlords as greedy or heartless. It means uncovering the ironies and inefficiencies that arise when policymakers try to help poor families without addressing the root causes of their poverty. It means trying to understand landlords' and tenants' acceptance of extreme inequality--and our own.

[...] The annual income of the landlord of perhaps the worst trailer park in the fourth-poorest city in America is 30 times that of his tenants working full-time for minimum wage and 55 times the annual income of his tenants receiving welfare or SSI. There are two freedoms at odds with each other: the freedom to profit from rents and the freedom to live in a safe and affordable home.

Whatever or way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering--by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.