By “working homeless,” I mean the growing number of people in the U.S. who are working 50 hours, 60 hours a week but still can’t secure stable housing. These are people who go to sleep at night in their cars, or in extended-stay hotel rooms, or even on the street and head out to their jobs the next morning—often gig work like Uber or DoorDash, or low-wage jobs in the service sector or care economy.

There’s something scandalous, seemingly oxymoronic about the term. But in a country where roughly seven million workers are living below the poverty line and left to fend for themselves in a private, profit-maximizing rental market, it’s not surprising that more and more families are being deprived of a roof over their heads. And now, with the federal eviction moratorium set to expire in a few weeks, the ranks of this population are expected to swell to a truly catastrophic scale.

The reporting for this project has felt very similar to the fieldwork I did as a cultural anthropologist—in fact, it has often seemed more ethnographic than journalistic per se. I’ve now been reporting the book for almost two years, with the bulk of that time spent “embedded” at an extended-stay hotel where three of the families I’m writing about are living. I think my academic training has helped me to appreciate the significance of long, immersive engagement with a social world. You begin to perceive the depth and texture, the ebbs and flows, of people’s lives. Last year, for instance, one of the families received assistance from a local agency and were able to move into their own apartment. They were elated. Then, two months ago, came an eviction notice. What I thought was a happy ending turned out to be yet another moment in a grinding cycle of insecurity.

I believe very strongly that finding a solution requires an accurate appraisal of the magnitude and severity of what we’re facing, and a proper diagnosis of what brought us here. If the problem is a lack of “affordable housing units,” then the solution is simple: build more of them. But if the problem is a fundamentally unjust, dehumanizing, Hunger Games-like rental market—where increased rent can be tantamount to eviction, where a low credit score can keep you and your kids trapped in a shelter or hotel room, where a family can be forced out of their building because their landlord decided it’s more lucrative to sell it—then a different set of solutions will be necessary.

Is housing a basic right, no less vital than education or food or medicine? Or is it a commodity to be hoarded and exploited for maximum profit? It matters who we listen to. Our housing experts are the tens of millions of tenants whose fates are bound up with how these questions are answered.