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.