- The stories journalists tell can stretch from the personal to the public.

Today's guest is no different, giving us narratives and an understanding of personal health crises, the challenge of housing, and the kinds of shelter offered by both families and physical structures.

She's Francesca Mari, this week, on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Francesca Mari, a journalist whose body of work spans the distance from a family member living with Alzheimer's disease to the state of housing today in the United States.

She joins us from upstate New York.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- You know, I mentioned the body of work that you have produced as a journalist is really expansive, from homelessness and homeless house-sitters to con men and the abuse of power.

How do you find the stories that you're going to write about?

- Yeah, so I'm really driven to understand how things work and I have the privilege of sort of following my curiosity.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

Have you always been sort of a...

When did you start writing and what drew you to writing in the first place?

- I think it was this opportunity to always be learning more.

So I'm from San Francisco originally, and one of the first subjects I really seized on was housing because I left the Bay Area for college and then didn't return until I was in my thirties, and I returned in 2016.

And the place to which I returned was so different.

I became obsessed with understanding how one of the most progressive places on Earth had one of the most backwards conservative housing policies.

And so housing has sort of been my beat and something that I returned to again and again and again to try to understand.

But along the way, I've, you know, picked up all sorts of other subjects that I'm interested in and used them as an opportunity to really dive deeply into the subject matter and interview experts.

- So we're going to dive into as many of your stories as we have time for here.

But I wanna start with the Trip of a Lifetime, which was recently published in the New York Times Magazine, where you're a contributing writer and it's just, it's an incredible piece of journalism filled with facts, emotion, it just, very, very moving.

It opens with you on the East Coast and your 72-year-old father on the West Coast, and he is to fly to the East Coast, and then you're both to fly overseas to Switzerland and Italy.

But it's a very tense opening scene.

What's going on in that opening scene?

- Yeah, so I had very limited time to travel, in part because I have an almost three-year-old and I teach at Brown.

And so it was with a lot of trepidation that I made the decision to have him fly to me in Providence.

And I booked him a flight that I thought gave him plenty of time in the morning to get ready and come to me, and I booked him a cab.

And the night before, I asked him to set an alarm and he sort of erupted, "I don't need an alarm."

And I realized, you know, my dad has mild to moderate Alzheimer's and I'm always sort of tracking where he is, but I realized in that moment that he had probably forgotten how to set an alarm.

So I set mine, and the next day just proceeded to sort of call him throughout the morning to make sure he was on track and on target to get into the cab, to go to the airport to come to me.

- He eventually makes it to the East Coast, and you both eventually make it overseas.

Why was it important for you and for him to visit Switzerland and then Italy?

- Yeah, so the past few years, I'll be honest, have been really challenging with my dad, with sort of discovering his Alzheimer's and sorting through kind of all the financial and kind of logistical disasters that ensue when you have memory issues.

And my grandmother also had Alzheimer's for quite some time, and I really wanted to give my dad joy and to sort of supplant the terrible memories of the last few years with something more positive, both for him and honestly for myself.

And I had come across something called reminiscence therapy.

You know, there are no cures for Alzheimer.

There are no medications that are all that promising.

And reminiscence therapy is the practice of revisiting one's strongest memories from the age of 10 to, say, 30.

And it's a way of engaging with the person.

It's a way of touching on their identity and really connecting.

And so my dad has taken very few trips out of the country, but when he was 14, he went to Lugano where his father was from, and Naples where his mother was from, with his parents.

And that trip remains a source of some of his strongest memories.

And so I wondered, what if I could literalize reminiscence therapy?

What if I could, instead of just talking about these memories, actually take him back to that place?

And it turns out that that sort of has some echoes with something called Life Review, which, Robert Butler, sort of this gerontologist and psychologist who really looked at aging, said was very helpful to those trying to reconcile their lives.

And so could I, and a big part of Life Review often is returning to one's original home.

And so I thought, what if we could retake this trip?

- And what kind of, what kind of experience did you have?

You write about the impact of revisiting some of those places with your dad, but for the benefit of our audience, how did he respond in the course of that trip?

- Well, when I first told him we were gonna take the trip, his response was, "Oh God!

(hosts laughing) So I was a little worried that this was mostly for myself.

And, you know, I was a little anxious that, that maybe I had misjudged his capacity.

And, you know, I think some people who are caring for those with Alzheimer's would say that I was totally reckless and selfish in concocting this trip.

And I was really worried initially, I mean, in part, because he was so reluctant to go in the first place.

But we were super fortunate and it was magical.

And I could see him sort of becoming younger over the course of the week.

And, you know, I can't say that this is replicable, that this could happen for anyone.

But what I observed reflects some of the work of Ellen Langer, one of the first psychologists to get tenure at Harvard, who really studied the mind-body connection.

And this idea of, you know, what if I expected a fair amount of my dad with no real kind of burdens, like no real stakes?

What would happen if I thought, you know, maybe this trip is possible?

And I'm so lucky that he rose to the occasion.

I mean, that's not really the right words, but that by engaging day to day and experiencing things together, he seemed to come more into himself and seemed to sort of acquire new abilities as time went on.

- There's a very poignant scene with the two of you in a car with a Beatles song on the radio.

You write, "Music opens old cupboards in the brain."

What happened in that scene and what impact did that music have on your father and his memories?

- Yeah, so I had first witnessed this in San Diego, in a daycare for people with memory disorders called Town Square.

And Town Square recreated a town that looks like it's from the 1950s.

The idea being that those with memory issues right now, their strongest memories were happening in the 1950s, 1960s.

And there they played music around the clock and it was really powerful for people.

Some people who had lost language could still sing, and it was a point of conversation for people.

So when we were driving from Lugano to Modena, I put on the Beatles and it put my dad immediately in a romantic state of mind.

And he began sort of riffing on all the women that he had dated.

(hosts laughing) And he was sort of nostalgic and, you know, and then, of course, he got to my mother who died when I was 10, so died about, oh dear, you know, almost 30 years ago now.

- Wow.

So you just mentioned that your mother died of cancer when you were 10.

And you write about how memory is passed down through families, but your mother was gone and your father has Alzheimer's.

How does that work?

When that memory, the family memory is lost, what do the people who are still alive have?

- Yeah, so I realized during this trip that, to thrive, memories have to be kind of pollinated between people.

People are kept alive through communal remembering.

And I realized that in losing my dad in this kind of slow, painful way, I was also losing the memory of my mother or the capacity to remember her.

And, you know, that wasn't a, that wasn't something always exercised, I think for a long time, it was really painful for my dad and I to remember her.

And now, sort of that opportunity is growing more distant.

- You closed the story with a passage that, you know, literally brought us to tears.

It's about your father losing his wife, your mother, and I'm just gonna read it.

'"I bet it was a shock,' I said.

'You didn't bargain to become a single parent.'

'No, but look at the end result,' my dad said, his voice cracked, his face frailer than it once was.

It's amazing.'"

So powerful.

Did you have that ending in mind when you began writing this?

When did that in the writing process, that incredible ending, which, you know, just lives on in my memory, how did that come to be?

- Well, I knew in the moment, you know, we were both brought to tears.

And so I knew it was a powerful moment.

Something that really epitomized what's so amazing about my dad.

And also what's so painful.

He's someone who has always tried to move forward in the face of so much grief and so much challenge.

And the thing about the disease is that it forces you to move backwards to retain your identity.

Like you have to revisit your core memories.

You can't be moving forward in the present.

And so I think I knew fairly early on that, that that was the end.

I think I had a sort of, I kind of stepped on it at first.

I had another sentence after that, that said, "What a gift it is to be unconditionally loved."

'Cause that's scene is a little bit about, you know, the, my being hard on my dad as a teenager, and yet him always loving me and always moving forward.

But I realized I didn't need to say that for the reader.

The reader could feel it, that his comments and his exchange said it all.

- You know, Francesca, this is such a beautiful and yet intensely personal accounting.

As a journalist, are there specific challenges and things you have to be mindful of if you're gonna, if you're really gonna sort of open your own life and your own, your own heart really, and your own family to sort of a public telling.

Like what are the specific challenges you have to navigate in telling a story like this?

- Yeah, I'm terrified.

I mean, they might come up to haunt me.

But I think I felt that there are so many people who are caregivers are going through something like this.

And so I really just wanted to be as honest as possible about everything, the good and the bad.

My shortcomings, my dad's shortcomings, his amazingness.

I mean, I hope that my love for him comes through.

But, you know, there are, I was honest about some of his challenges and I think that might make people uncomfortable.

I did, there was a fact checking process in which I read every single line of the story to my dad and, you know, asked if it was true, asked for his thoughts.

And so we did do that.

But yeah, I think the story is richer for it being more complicated.

I hope it's richer for it being more complicated.

- Well, it's an incredible story, as I said before.

We promised to get into some of your other stories.

And so let's get to a few more.

The Great Wall Street Housing Grab was also published in the New York Times Magazine.

Give us an overview of what that was about, please.

- Yeah, so I was really driven by this question of, you know, the whole world was shaken by the subprime mortgage crisis, by housing speculation.

And yet, 10 years later, how was it that housing had become more expensive than ever?

How did it rebound?

How did it become more inaccessible than before?

And what was this new phenomenon I was seeing in the suburbs of single family rental home empires, and how did those arise?

And so I really looked at what happened to all those foreclosed homes and saw that they were purchased en masse by private equity firms who saw an enormous opportunity to buy housing at rock bottom.

This was facilitated and sort of approved of by the government that thought that, you know, big companies would stop the collapse of values, but there wasn't much thought given to what would happen in the future.

And so private equity companies like Blackstone realized that they could get tenants to pay the rent, essentially service their mortgage, their mortgages, while waiting for the houses to recover in value.

And previously it had been difficult to own a collection of single family homes because the management was difficult, but technology sort of solved that problem.

And so these companies became extremely profitable off of the backs of many people who had actually lost housing in this crisis.

And so I was interested in that phenomenon and also what those companies did with those profits.

So they were trying to maximize their bottom line.

They went public, they were accountable to stockholders, you know, they then use their profits to fight rent regulations, and then they sold out, they, you know, cashed out because private equity wants to maximize its returns over a 10 year period.

And so I was interested in the winners and losers of the subprime mortgage crisis.

- Yeah, stories like this always fascinate me because I wonder, so, I don't know if innovation is the right word to describe private equity moving into the space, but this was something that, in large numbers, they had not done at this scale before, but then the conditions were right and they move in.

And they've got the resources to make that kind of market swing.

But it's a kind of issue that seems to cry out for some sort of public policy that says, maybe we are not best served by having large segments of our housing stock owned by private equity.

Am I being too progressive in this sense?

- Yeah, absolutely, and I think one of the things that I found most unnerving was that during this period in 2013, Blackstone developed a new financial instrument to access more liquidity.

So it created a new securitization.

Basically it sold its mortgage debt on the secondary market to other private investors.

You know, this is not a public exchange for any Joe or Jane or whatever.

And yet who regulates those markets?

It's just the financial institutional players.

There's really no federal oversight over that.

And so they're able to sell their debt to investors on a secondary market to get more liquidity with which to purchase more foreclosed homes at rock bottom prices.

- Wow.

- How is that allowed?

How is that okay?

- And it certainly can't be good policy.

- No.

- No.

- There is no policy essentially.

- Right.

- So another housing story, and this was in the New Yorker, it was Using the Homeless to Guard Empty Houses.

Again, can you give us an overview of that?

Another very, very powerful piece of journalism.

- Yeah, I mean, that piece fell into my lap.

While reporting the story on the Wall Street housing grab, I was in conversation with a lawyer who represented homeowners who had been wrongfully foreclosed on, and he lived in South Pasadena on this block that seemed to epitomize to me the financial forces operating on housing because one of the homes was owned by Invitation Homes, the single family rental home empire that Blackstone founded.

Another had been in foreclosure for a couple of years.

And whenever I was in LA, I would visit that lawyer and visit that block and just see what was going on.

And suddenly I saw that a home that had been vacant for two years had African print sheets on the window.

And so I kind of went up to the window and looked in and I saw that there were peanuts on the counter.

And as I was walking away, a Black man in his seventies said, "Can I help you?"

And I turned around and that's how I met Augustus Evans, who, at one time had been the biggest bank robber in LA history.

And because of that criminal record, he had found it very difficult to get a job after he came out.

And he had been house-sitting for almost 10 years at that point.

And I was interested in the way that these investors in housing instrumentalize the people who were cut out of the housing market to sort of guard their properties from others like themselves so that companies could turn a profit and gentrified these homes.

And so I got to talking to Augustus Evans, and he's a poet and someone who is a beautiful storyteller.

And that story really just wrote itself.

But the question then was, in what ways is this homeless house-sitter, and "homeless" is his preferred term.

In what ways is he representative of forces operating on housing?

And so that became sort of the question of the story.

- Yeah.

What did he conclude?

What did you conclude?

- I concluded that he was representative of the disproportionate number of Black people experiencing homelessness in LA.

You know, despite representing a small part of the population, they represent over 40%, I believe, of the homeless population.

And how is that the case?

And it's because of the legacy of housing discrimination and redlining and predatory lending to people of color and disproportionate foreclosure on people of color.

And so all these factors contributed to the mass disenfranchisement and dislocation of Black Angelinos.

And nearly all of the homeless house-sitters were Black.

And so it was actually interviewing, finding, you know, the homeless house-sitters work under the table.

The owner of the company that they work for, Weekend Warriors, didn't acknowledge that she hired these people, and she tried to keep them separate from one another, but every so often they bunk up, or I was able to track which company owned the homes by looking at the address of the LLCs under which they own the homes, and tracking that to a company in southern California.

And then was able to see what their other listings were.

And so I went to those other listings and encountered other homeless house-sitters- - Oh, wow.

- and they were all Black.

And so after meeting, you know, a dozen of them, I realized that this was the story.

- Yeah, I guess the question I wanna ask is, on some level, it almost feels like it's a creative solution to homelessness, but it also feels exploitative.

Is that the right tension?

- Yeah, I'm interested in that tension too, because I don't think it's right or wrong.

I think it's nuanced.

And some house-sitters, like Augustus, was incredibly grateful for the opportunity to live for free.

Other house-sitters, there's another one, Mansa Moosa-El, who's in the piece, shows a different side of this story.

You know, the ways in which he's exploited or put in conditions where he's forced to house at this house when it's being gassed and debugged for termites and how people kind of bust in on him at, you know, at 6:00 in the morning and kind of other things.

And so it's complicated.

I don't think it's right or wrong.

And in fact, Wedgewood, the company that was flipping these homes, was proud to tell me that they had come up with this solution for security.

But of course, the person they contracted with to implement it denied that she had any employees.

So it's complicated.

- It's fascinating, it's complicated, but it's remarkable reporting, and Francesca Mari, we thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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