What happened
And this isn’t simply a story about people without jobs.
In DeKalb County, Georgia, researchers found more than 4,600 people living in extended-stay hotels, including more than 1,600 children. Most of the households surveyed had someone working.
At the same time, eviction filings are piling up across major U.S. cities. Over the past year, the Atlanta area recorded roughly 142,000 filings, New York City nearly 117,000, Houston about 79,000 and Dallas about 48,000.
And the pressure isn’t limited to the United States. In Madrid, 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was evicted from the apartment she had lived in for roughly 70 years. She was carried out on a stretcher after a long fight over the apartment. A deal was eventually reached that could have allowed her to return home, but she died before she ever made it back.
So what happens when you can make the monthly payment but still can’t qualify for an apartment? And what happens when someone who already has housing suddenly loses it?
In this Monterra documentary, we look at the growing gap between having an income and actually being able to secure stable housing — from extended-stay hotels and cars to converted sheds, storage units and adults remaining in their childhood homes.
We also go back more than a century to Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives, and look ahead at 3D-printed homes, automation and how technology could change both the cost of building a home and the jobs people depend on to pay for one.
The question underneath all of this is pretty simple:
When traditional housing stops working, where do people go?
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