Stephanie Land. Poverty, work, and homelessness

In an in-depth interview for TVN24+(Warner Bros. Group) we spoke with bestselling author Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive Stephanie Land, about reality that remains largely invisible: people who work, follow the rules, and still have nowhere to live. Set in the USA, the discussion reaches far beyond one country, revealing a universal problem — a world in which employment no longer guarantees housing, stability, or dignity.

Key points from our interview:

• It is not a story of individual failure, but of systemic collapse
  Rising housing costs, low wages, and shrinking social support create conditions where families move between cars, temporary shelters, and borrowed floors, all while remaining employed. The American context becomes a mirror for a broader, global experience shared by working people across different societies.

• Working, yet unhoused
  The most striking insight is how homelessness increasingly affects people with jobs — a contradiction that challenges long-held assumptions about work as a path to security.

Stephanie Land, Maid:

“If we can somehow start to remove shame from struggle, if we can truly see people and care for them as our fellow human beings”

• When assistance excludes the needy
  Social support systems appear designed to filter people out rather than help them in, requiring proof of extreme poverty before any aid is granted.

• A system built on imbalance
  With wages lagging far behind housing costs, the gap between effort and survival widens - not because of personal choices, but because the system itself no longer works.

• A shared, global condition
  Although rooted in the U.S., the mechanisms described — precarious work, unaffordable housing, conditional aid — resonate across borders, making this a story about contemporary inequality rather than one nation’s failure.

Authors: Jane Knap, Joanna Rubin - Sobolewska