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295and they are also shut out of public housing, which now has waiting lists that stretch on for years and even decades. Struggling families looking for a safe, affordable place to live in America usually have but one choice: to rent from private landlords and fork over at least half their income to rent and utilities. If millions of poor renters accept this state of affairs, it%u2019s not because they can%u2019t afford better alternatives; it%u2019s because they often aren%u2019t offered any.%u2022 %u2022 %u2022You can read injunctions against usury [lending money at unreasonably high interest rates] in the Vedic texts of ancient India, in the sutras of Buddhism and in the Torah. Aristotle and Aquinas both rebuked it. Dante sent moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell. None of these efforts did much to stem the practice, but they do reveal that the unprincipled act of trapping the poor in a cycle of debt has existed at least as long as the written word. It might be the oldest form of exploitation after slavery. Many writers have depicted America%u2019s poor as unseen, shadowed and forgotten people: as %u201cother%u201d or %u201cinvisible.%u201d But markets have never failed to notice the poor, and this has been particularly true of the market for money itself. . . .For most of American history, regulators prohibited lending institutions from charging exorbitant interest on loans. Because of these limits, banks kept interest rates between 6 and 12 percent and didn%u2019t do much business with the poor, who in a pinch took their valuables to the pawnbroker or the loan shark. But the deregulation of the banking sector in the 1980s ushered the money changers back into the temple by removing strict usury limits. Interest rates soon reached 300 percent, then 500 percent, then 700 percent. Suddenly, some people were very interested in starting businesses that lent to the poor. In recent years, 17 states have brought back strong usury limits, capping interest rates and effectively prohibiting payday lending. But the trade thrives in most places. The annual percentage rate for a two-week $300 loan can reach 460 percent in California, 516 percent in Wisconsin and 664 percent in Texas.Roughly a third of all payday loans are now issued online, and almost half of borrowers who have taken out online loans have had lenders overdraw their bank accounts. The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375. Keeping people indebted is, of course, the ideal outcome for the payday lender. It%u2019s how they turn a $15 profit into a $150 one. Payday lenders do not charge high fees because lending to the poor is risky%u2014even after multiple extensions, most borrowers pay up. Lenders extort because they can.Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees. That%u2019s more than $55 million in fees collected predominantly from low-income Americans each day%u2014not even counting the annual revenue collected by pawnshops and title loan services and rent-toown schemes. When James Baldwin remarked in 1961 how %u201cextremely expensive it is to be poor,%u201d he couldn%u2019t have imagined these receipts. . . .%u2022 %u2022 %u2022Poverty isn%u2019t simply the condition of not having enough money. It%u2019s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst. . . .Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves. The Johnson administration started the War on Poverty and the Great Society in 1964. These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, 205 Matthew DesmondCopyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.