Bill Gates Says ‘No Room for Bad Luck’ If You’re Poor Spending 70% Of Income On Rent—Even If He Has ‘No Personal Experience’ With That Crisis

Bill Gates has spent decades attacking some of the world’s hardest problems—malaria, hunger, education. But in his 2017 review of “Evicted” by sociologist Matthew Desmond, the billionaire pivoted to a crisis he admits he’s never personally faced: the brutal instability of American poverty. 

“I have no personal experience with the kind of crisis faced by Sharon,” Gates wrote, referencing a single mother who was evicted after missing just one rent payment while recovering in the hospital. Still, he called housing instability a tipping point—one of the most unforgiving forces locking people into cycles they can’t escape.

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Published on his blog GatesNotes, the essay wasn’t just a glowing endorsement of Desmond’s Pulitzer-winning book—it was a wake-up call. Desmond spent 18 months in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, documenting the lives of renters and landlords without judgment, just clarity. The result: a clear-eyed portrait of how easily housing can become a trap.

For many of the families Desmond followed, rent swallowed 50% to 70% of their income. One emergency, one busted pipe, one missed shift—and they were out. Gates didn’t soften the takeaway: “There’s no room for bad luck,” he wrote.

That line became a refrain. Through stories like Arleen’s—a mother evicted after paying for a friend’s funeral, forced to move so often her son cycled through five schools in a single year—”Evicted” showed that poverty isn’t just a lack of money. It’s what happens when instability compounds, when one setback triggers ten more, and when housing is too fragile to recover from any of them.

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Gates, whose net worth sits around $103 billion, wasn’t pretending to relate. But he wasn’t ignoring it either. He used his platform to amplify what Desmond revealed: a system that fails even when it’s working as designed. 

In theory, housing vouchers and assistance programs should provide relief. In practice, only one in four families who qualify for help actually receive it. Waitlists stretch for years—sometimes decades. And in cities like Milwaukee, even in the poorest zip codes, rents aren’t cheap. 

Gates flagged that as a red flag: when the average rent in a high-poverty neighborhood is only $50 less than the citywide median, something is structurally broken.

And while “Evicted” didn’t offer easy fixes, Gates supported Desmond’s follow-up efforts—funding deeper research into eviction trends and the hidden forces that keep prices high even in struggling communities.

Eight years later, the contrast Gates acknowledged has only grown starker. “I have three houses,” he told The Times of London earlier this year. “My house in Seattle, I admit, is gigantic. My sisters have downsized. I can’t. I like the houses I have. My kids like to come back—that is a luxury.”

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He wasn’t being flippant. That luxury—choice, stability, space—is precisely what so many lack. Gates isn’t choosing between square footage and convenience. He’s choosing between three fully-owned, multi-million-dollar estates. Millions of Americans, meanwhile, are just trying to hold on to whatever space they have—until the rent goes up, or the job disappears, or bad luck strikes.

Despite having “no personal experience” with housing crises, Gates landed on a message that hasn’t aged a day: when 70% of your income goes to rent, there’s no margin for error. The American Dream isn’t just delayed—it’s quietly dismantled, one eviction at a time.

The crisis he described hasn’t eased—if anything, it’s intensified. Rents surged during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Wages didn’t keep up. Millions of families now spend half or more of their income just to stay housed, with no cushion, no fallback, no room for even the smallest emergency.

Gates didn’t need to live it to recognize what happens when housing turns from shelter into a trap. 

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