July 28, 2025 • 29 mins
Affordable housing is hard to find. We talk about it at every level of income. But what is the affordable housing crisis like for working people at the low income end of the spectrum, for whom even an average monthly rent is out of reach? Our guest is Brian Goldstone, author of THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US: Working and Homeless in America. Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose long form reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and others. He has a doctorate in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to get connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Thanks for listening to the show. Affordable housing is hard
to find. We talk about it at every level of income,
But what is the affordable housing crisis like for people
working at the low income end of the spectrum, for
whom even a mortgage is out of reach, Working people
with entry level wages that may only afford them a
room at a weekly motel, a rooming house, a shelter
(00:35):
whose home, for as long as they can keep it,
could be doubled up in a relative, spare room with
their children, sleeping in cars, or worse. Our guest is
Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us,
Working and Homeless in America. Brian Goldstone, thank you for
being on the show.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
It's wonderful to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose long form reporting and
essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine,
The New Republic, the California Sunday Magazine, and others. So, Brian,
there Is No Place for Us follows five Atlanta families,
one married couple with children, and four single mothers. All
are working families who are not technically defined as homeless,
(01:14):
and yet in many ways are As you outline in
the book, there has long been a willful disregard to
count families like these people living in extended stay hotels,
on couches, in rooming houses. Can you talk about how
homelessness is defined and why would an undercount be by design?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, you know, I was absolutely stunned as I did
the reporting for this book over several years. I was
absolutely stunned to find that there's this entire world of
homelessness out of sight that we're not seeing. It's shocking
to realize that as bad as the official numbers are,
And it's important to note that over the last two
(01:58):
years in America, the US has seen the highest level
of homelessness on record. So two years ago it was
the highest number on record, and then last year it
broke that record. So even as far as the official
numbers go, it is a really catastrophic situation that we
are facing as a country. But what is disturbing to
(02:20):
see is that that as bad as those official numbers are,
the reality is exponentially worse. And you know, in many ways,
what we see on the streets, the encampments, the people
in makeshift dwellings under freeway overpasses, that is really just
the tip of the iceberg. The tents are just the
tip of the iceberg. And in some ways my book
(02:42):
is trying to document the rest of the iceberg, this
immense rest of the iceberg that lies, as it were,
under the water surface. And you know that is to
put a number on it. By coupling together different data sources.
I show in the book that that if you include
all of the people who are excluded from the official count,
(03:03):
we're looking at a population that is roughly six times
greater than the official number, So about four million Americans
right now who have been deprived of housing. Most of
those people they don't fit the stereotypes and sort of
the myths that we have about homelessness. These are people
who are working and working and working some more and
(03:25):
it just is not enough to afford a place to live.
And those are overwhelmingly households with children. And we are
neglecting this population and this growing phenomenon.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
I believe at our peril.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I do not think it is an understatement to say
this narrow definition has left families in this sort of
awful kind of limbo. So lest would be an example
from your book, Celeste is a woman who has both
ovarian and breast cancer and yet cannot get services because
she's not the right kind of homeless.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
That's right, So to speak to that definition for a moment. So,
the federal government, through HUD has a definition of homelessness
that limits it to those who are on the streets
or in a homeless shelter everyone else. So all of
(04:21):
the families who I follow in this book, who are
who are languishing in their vehicles or in the overcrowded
apartments of others, in living situations that are temporary and
often extremely precarious and also put at risk the housing
of the people they're staying with because they can be
(04:42):
evicted if they have others staying with them. So they're
living in those situations. They are living in these extremely
profitable and exploitative extended state hotels and motels, which I
think of as kind of commercial for profit homeless shelters.
That's where the majority of families with children who are
(05:03):
homeless in the US are living, and that's how they
experience homelessness, and yet that federal definition through HUD, effectively
writes all of those people, all of those families, out
of the story we tell, and they literally don't count.
So every year, when the federal government conducts the homeless census,
refer to as the point in Time count, only those
(05:24):
people who are visible on the street or in shelters
are counted. So, yeah, Celeste is a person in the book.
She has a warehouse job, and without getting too far
into her story, what pushes her and her children into
homelessness is an unjust eviction. They are actually evicted from
a home that has burned down and it tanks their
(05:47):
credit score. When she refuses to pay rent on this
home that has burned down, her private equity landlord files
an eviction against her and Celeste actually doesn't find out
about this eviction until much later, and it tanks her
credit score and she's she, like many many people in
America today, are sort of forced out of the formal
housing market and pushed into this extended stay hotel. And
(06:10):
once she's diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, she and
her children are just desperate to get out of that situation.
And as you mentioned When she goes to Gateway Center,
the place in Atlanta which is sort of the hub
for homeless services, she's told that she doesn't meet the
definition and basically that she's not homeless in the right way.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Our guest is Brian Goldstone. He's author of There Is
No Place for Us, Working and Homeless in America. He
has a doctorate in anthropology from Duke University and was
a Melon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In twenty twenty one,
he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives
in Atlanta, which is where this book is centered. You
are listening to get connected on one oh six point
(06:50):
seven light FM. I'mina del Rio. Atlanta is pretty interesting too,
because one of the things that has done to exacerbate
the affordable housing issue in Atlanta is demolishing public housing.
They were the first in the nation to offer public
housing and the first to do away with it all together.
The story of public housing in America beginning at this
(07:12):
great height and then falling into disrepair is fascinating to me.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Absolutely, And in that sense, Atlanta is a really interesting
sort of case study in housing policy in America. You
could almost tell the story of housing policy just through
just through Atlanta, because you know, in the nineteen thirties,
Atlanta was the first city in the country to build
public housing, was sort of this laboratory for public housing,
(07:39):
which went on to spread to other cities. And then
in the nineties and two thousands, Atlanta became the first
city in the country to begin demolishing all of its
public housing in favor of expecting the housing needs of
low income Americans to be sort of left to the
private market to take care of, then incentivizing that private
(08:00):
market to fill the gap and to provide housing. So
in many ways, yes, Atlanta really is a unique place.
But the reason the book is based in Atlanta isn't
just because of how unique it is. It's also because
of how representative it is. Atlanta, like many cities across
the country, over the last decade or so, has undergone
(08:21):
a much celebrated urban renaissance, a kind of transformation of
its city center. Property values are skyrocketing, the signs of
growth in Atlanta are everywhere, and working class and poor
families in the city are systematically being pushed out, not
just of the neighborhoods where they grew up in but
(08:43):
increasingly out of housing altogether. And so the ways that
this sort of unbridled growth in this much celebrated success
story in the city, which again has been just replicated
in cities across the country, the way that that's fueling
this insecurity is I think really striking. And I argue
(09:06):
in the book that this crisis of housing, insecurity and homelessness,
the sort of staggering rise of the working homeless, is
not a crisis of poverty per se. It's really a
crisis of prosperity. It's the product not of a failing economy,
but of a booming economy. And I think that's something
that we, as residents of these cities that are in
(09:28):
the midst of this transformation and this newfound wealth, really
need to grapple with.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
I'd like to go back to the families for a moment.
Most of the research and reporting on this book was
done with the families between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one.
How did you find these families and how willing were
they to talk with you about, in some cases, very
devastating stories.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
So my way into this project was actually through a
magazine article that I reported and wrote for the New
Republic beck in I believe late twenty eighteen early twenty nineteen,
and I followed one family in Atlanta in that story
for about seven months. And when that story was finished,
I realized that I had only scratched the surface of
(10:13):
what there was to investigate and sort of piece together
about why this catastrophe was unfolding, not just in Atlanta
but across the country. In the course of reporting that story,
I spent time at food pantries and at homeless service providers.
And one thing I will say about this subject matter
is that unlike journalists who kind of struggle, they have
(10:35):
the topic, they have the sort of expos they want
to write, but then they kind of struggle to find
a protagonist or an individual to sort of carry that story,
in my case, there was no shortage of people who
fit the description of those who were working full time jobs,
often more than one job, and are still deprived of
(10:57):
a place to live. So it was really less a
matter of me sort of choosing those who I would
follow then who would allow me into their lives in
a way would that would give readers a visceral sense
of what it looks and feels like for parents, for
their children when this basic human necessity is always out
(11:19):
of reach. And I basically, you know, I told the
folks that I met, I said, I'm I'm really looking
to kind of immerse myself in your day to day
lives and just follow you for a long time.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
And that's a tall order.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
That's a very difficult thing to ask of anyone, and
especially someone who is struggling in this way just to
meet their most basic material needs. And so there were
several people and families and individuals who I followed for
weeks or even months, and it just became clear that
they had too much that they were dealing with. They
(11:51):
just had no space in their life for a journalist
to be asking them these questions and to be accompanying them.
So yeah, those who I ended up sort of including
the book and following for the amount of time I
did over several years. These were families who were just
willing to have me along. And that is almost miraculous
(12:16):
degree of generosity that I'm still just trying to wrap
my mind around.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
The depth of reporting is very impressive. It is a
very compelling book altogether. I did go through because I'm
nosy and look at some reader reviews, and there was
one reader's review that says they were disappointed that of
all the families you included, they all appeared to be
black families. And I assume that was not an error.
I wish you could talk about that.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Yeah, you know, when I began this project, I did
have an aspiration to kind of check all of these
different demographic boxes to give We know that homelessness in
America does cut across ethnic and racial categories, but in
Atlanta specifically. You know, as I was going to those
(13:04):
food pantries, as I was going to these homeless shelters
and spending time with folks, I noticed that almost every
single person was black. And there's a statistic behind that.
You know, even though Atlanta is no longer a majority
black city. It once was, but it no longer is
because of that kind of gentrification and revitalization that I
(13:26):
was talking about earlier. Even though it's no longer a
majority black city, ninety three percent of families experiencing homelessness
in Atlanta are black. So this is an issue that
is deeply racialized and it didn't spring up overnight. That
statistic has a history. It goes back to the end
(13:47):
of slavery, where millions of men, women, and children were
emancipated into a society where they were deprived of property
rights and ownership rights, and we're sort of forced into
a labor economy of low wages, rent and debt, and
sort of continuing through generations of redlining and restrictive covenants
(14:09):
that prevented black families from becoming homeowners or living in
certain neighborhoods. So this has a history and it is
deeply racialized. It just wouldn't have been honest to present
this as a color blind issue. Now, in some cities
in the country, that racial dimension takes a different form.
I was recently in Minneapolis, and there a disproportionate number
(14:33):
of Indigenous and Native American residents are experiencing homelessness. In
northern California, where I've also reported, there's a disproportionate number
of Latino families and individuals experiencing homelessness. But there is
a racialized dimension. And you know the cliche that any
of us can can become homeless. There's some truth to that,
(14:55):
but I also want to say that it's much more
likely to happen to some than others.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Very particular historical.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Reasons gentrification is not specifically redlining. But since you're on
that thread, I want to talk about Gladstone for a moment.
Gladstone was a complex of one hundred and sixty four
affordable apartments in a community where residents were mostly classified
as low income, and around late twenty twenty all the
residents were evicted and the complex was raised to build
(15:22):
upscale condos. It is not unique, but it is emblematic.
I think of how disregarded these families are, and how
sort of excluded or uninvited they are in the process
of modernizing Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, you know, these families who were evicted en mass
from their homes during the pandemic because the owner of
this property deemed it more important to make millions of
dollars in profit by selling this property to a luxury
developer than it was to keep these people housed. I
(15:59):
think they ills very starkly the fact that peorn working
class people are basically becoming the casualties of their city's success.
You know, the people living in these apartments, They are
not on the fringes of society. These are the very
(16:19):
people whose whose work, whose labor is powering the growth
that Atlanta is experiencing through their jobs, through you know,
taking care of our children, taking care of our elders,
and caregiving positions, packing boxes for Amazon, driving for Uber
and Lyft, and during the pandemic, you know, delivering food
for door dash and uber eats when people can go
(16:42):
to restaurants. And they were performing these services. They were
working these jobs and then they were just pushed out
of their homes.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
With no recourse. This was perfectly legal.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
And you know, even though many of them had lived
in this neighborhood for years or even decades, they weren't
as part of the community because they were tenants, because
they were renters. The community was imagined to be comprised
of homeowners and the homeowner association in this neighborhood, they
didn't raise their voices against this eviction of their neighbors,
(17:16):
precisely because these renters weren't even considered neighbors to begin with.
And I think it just exposes some of the fault
lines that exist in this new urban space, and it
really raises the question of what is the human cost
of this renaissance that cities like Atlanta are experiencing. The
(17:40):
title of the book, there is no place for us.
It actually comes from one of the parents who was
living in one of these apartments at Gladstone, and her
name is Britt, and she and her children they became
homeless after they lost their home at Gladstone. Britt returns
to this neighborhood months later, and she looks around and
(18:00):
she loves the new Atlanta. She believes in the new Atlanta.
She loves how fun and sexy it's becoming. But she
looks around and she says, you know, this is really beautiful.
But for me and my kids, there's no place for
us here. And I think in that sense, there is
no place for us. It's not just an Atlanta title.
It's a New York title. It's a Chicago title, Nashville, Charlotte, Phoenix, Austin,
(18:25):
all across the country. There is no place for us
is a refrain that I think we're hearing from those
again whose work and whose labor is actually powering that
very success.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Our guest is Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No
Place for Us, Working in Homeless in America. You're listening
to get connected on one O six point seven light FM.
I'm Mina del Rio. Childcare is a recurring challenge for everyone.
Childcare is a recurring challenge for these families. Michelle is
a mother of three, and she's put in terrible positions,
(18:59):
losing a opportunity and refusing to stay in a shelter
because of her children. Michelle's story is perhaps the most
devastating in the book. I think her story begins in
an apartment with her fiance and her three children, where
she's studying to be a social worker, but unfortunately, her
life goes radically downhill. None of these people are perfect,
but in her defense, perhaps it's because the upheaval is
(19:21):
so huge. It feels as if she and Britt and
people like them they're living through PTSD.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
When the book opens, Michelle is wearing a Santa hat
and making dinner for her family on Christmas Eve. The
chapter opens. The first chapter with Michelle opens with her
and her fiance and her three children building a gingerbread house.
And it was really important to begin in that way
(19:48):
because I think it accentuates both the anguish of what follows,
but also just how utterly preventable and avoidable their you know,
descent into homelessness was. And it was truly, I mean,
there are no words for what it was like to
(20:10):
watch in real time as all of these systems sort
of came together to militate against the stability of families
like Michelle's. As you mentioned, childcare becomes a really crucial
part of Michelle's story, or it's the lack of childcare
(20:31):
becomes a very crucial part of her story. And you
know what it shows is that while and I want
to be really clear here that the reason homelessness is
at the highest level on record, the reason we are
seeing this staggering rise of the working homeless has one cause,
and that is a lack of access to housing among
(20:53):
poor and working class people. A lack of access to
housing they can afford. That is the reason. But along
with that, there are all these kind of uniquely American
maladies that have come together to make it even more
likely that some people will be pushed into homelessness and childcare.
A lack of subsidized affordable childcare, along with affordable healthcare,
(21:17):
universal healthcare, along with a lack of basic labor protections
like sickly. If all of these things come together to
both make more likely and exacerbate these families predicaments, and
if Michelle had had had access to subsidized childcare, she
would have been able to go back to work, and
she would have been able to eventually remain stably housed.
(21:42):
But that doesn't happen, and you know, by the time
the book closes, Michelle could be mistaken for just a
chronically unhoused person. Michelle is sleeping at times in the
Marta station, the train station, and she could easily be
mistaken as she is in the throes of alcoholism now,
as she is in the throes of all of these
(22:04):
other manifestations of despair and acute anxiety and depression. She
could be mistaken for someone who's been in that condition
for years. But she hasn't been, and it was so
utterly avoidable.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
The average family in rental arrears in New York City,
this is a twenty twenty three number, is about four
thousand dollars, but if they are evicted, it will cost
seventy thousand to keep them in shelter. I assume those
numbers shift a bit from city to city. But the
choice seems obvious to offer adequate public rental assistance. There's
a choice to, as you say, to not provide for
(22:44):
these people time and time again, in the book, when
the people reached out to brand name agencies for emergency
housing or city services, the service provider either didn't exist
or didn't have space, or the families didn't qualify, or
if the housing did exist, it was terrifying. Again, the
choice seems obvious to offer adequate public rental assistance. Why
(23:07):
do we not do that?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Yeah, choice is exactly the right word. Homelessness is a
policy choice. It's often framed as an individual choice. That
is not correct. Homelessness is a choice, but it is
a policy choice. It is a choice that we collectively
have made as a society. And you know, we as
a country are sort of at a crossroads right now,
(23:31):
as homelessness continues to spiral, both in its invisible, hidden
forms and in its very public and conspicuous forms, we
have we have a decision to make. We can either
double down on criminalization and banishment and just this kind
of out of sight, out of mind policy that just
(23:53):
pushes it out of view, pushes or even worse, pushes
people into into jails and penalizes them and makes it
even less likely that they will ever come out of homelessness.
Or we can choose to address this crisis at its source,
which is again fundamentally a lack of access to housing
(24:17):
that people can afford. And what a case manager in
the book Carla Wells refers to as the homeless industrial complex,
which she sees as sort of all of the sort
of agencies and government bureaucracies and nonprofits and charities that
have really been tasked not so much with ending homelessness,
but with managing it, with making sure that it sort
(24:39):
of stays under control, and she, as a case manager,
is incredibly frustrated and burned out by that model. I
think that we have the ability, we have the opportunity
to truly end this added source, to truly cut off
this relentless churm of people into homelessness, which in many cities,
(25:03):
you know, for every one person who gets out of
homelessness into housing in Los Angeles and San Francisco, another
three people four people become unhoused. That is the reason
why even throwing billions of dollars at shelters and wrap
around services does not see this emergency abate. And what
(25:25):
will do that, I believe, is a paradigm shift around
how we treat housing in this country.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
You know, we have treated housing as.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
A commodity, as a as a vehicle for wealth accumulation.
And we've basically said that, you know, if you are
lucky enough to own property, if you're lucky enough to
be a landlord, you should be able to profit as
much as you want from just this basic human need
for a place to live. And I remember during the
pandemic there were two brothers in Tennessee who were going
(25:55):
around buying hand sanitizer, stockpiling it, hoarding it, and selling
it on Amazon and eBay for eighty dollars ninety dollars
a pop. And I remember thinking, that is what we've
done to housing in this country. We've allowed it to
be hoarded. We've allowed this precious resource to just be
auctioned off to the highest bidder. But we don't call
that price gouging. We don't call that praying on the
(26:18):
desperation of those in the midst of an emergency. We
just call it supply and demand economics. And I think
until we have a paradigm shift around housing and who
it's for and what we allow the market to do
with that, and basically treat housing is just an essential
public good like education, and say that everyone should have access,
(26:44):
we will just continue to manage this crisis instead of
end it.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
To wrap up, Brian, have you kept up with these families?
What can you say about how they're doing now? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
I remain in very very close contact with them. I
either text or talked to almost all of them on
a weekly basis for confidentiality reasons. We sort of had
an agreement that what wasn't included in the book, which
we went over very closely together to ensure that there
was nothing there that would either compromise their privacy or
(27:19):
just kind of be gratuitous.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
Everything.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
This is incredibly sensitive, incredibly harrowing and painful material, and
I read the book to each of them, the material
that they appear, and to ensure that I got it
right and to ensure that I was respecting their dignity.
So we did agree that what wasn't in the book
(27:43):
I wouldn't necessarily discuss publicly, but I will say that
all of them, in different ways, have continued to struggle,
you know, after the events in the book took place,
even with me trying to marshal financial support for them,
trying to you know, doing fundraisers, and it exposes the
(28:04):
limits of this kind of individual attempt to provide help.
This is a systemic issue that will only be solved
through systemic means. And some of the families are finally,
you know, a little bit more stable, but they are
still renters. They are still trapped in a renter class
(28:26):
and a housing system that prioritizes profit over all else
and as long as that remains the case, their situations
will be precarious.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Our guest is Brian Goldstone, the author of There Is
No Place for Us Working and Homeless in America. Brian Goldstone,
thank you for being on to Get Connected, beautiful book.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one IO six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
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Thanks for listening.
Welcome to get connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Thanks for listening to the show. Affordable housing is hard
to find. We talk about it at every level of income,
But what is the affordable housing crisis like for people
working at the low income end of the spectrum, for
whom even a mortgage is out of reach, Working people
with entry level wages that may only afford them a
room at a weekly motel, a rooming house, a shelter
(00:35):
whose home, for as long as they can keep it,
could be doubled up in a relative, spare room with
their children, sleeping in cars, or worse. Our guest is
Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us,
Working and Homeless in America. Brian Goldstone, thank you for
being on the show.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
It's wonderful to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose long form reporting and
essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine,
The New Republic, the California Sunday Magazine, and others. So, Brian,
there Is No Place for Us follows five Atlanta families,
one married couple with children, and four single mothers. All
are working families who are not technically defined as homeless,
(01:14):
and yet in many ways are As you outline in
the book, there has long been a willful disregard to
count families like these people living in extended stay hotels,
on couches, in rooming houses. Can you talk about how
homelessness is defined and why would an undercount be by design?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, you know, I was absolutely stunned as I did
the reporting for this book over several years. I was
absolutely stunned to find that there's this entire world of
homelessness out of sight that we're not seeing. It's shocking
to realize that as bad as the official numbers are,
And it's important to note that over the last two
(01:58):
years in America, the US has seen the highest level
of homelessness on record. So two years ago it was
the highest number on record, and then last year it
broke that record. So even as far as the official
numbers go, it is a really catastrophic situation that we
are facing as a country. But what is disturbing to
(02:20):
see is that that as bad as those official numbers are,
the reality is exponentially worse. And you know, in many ways,
what we see on the streets, the encampments, the people
in makeshift dwellings under freeway overpasses, that is really just
the tip of the iceberg. The tents are just the
tip of the iceberg. And in some ways my book
(02:42):
is trying to document the rest of the iceberg, this
immense rest of the iceberg that lies, as it were,
under the water surface. And you know that is to
put a number on it. By coupling together different data sources.
I show in the book that that if you include
all of the people who are excluded from the official count,
(03:03):
we're looking at a population that is roughly six times
greater than the official number, So about four million Americans
right now who have been deprived of housing. Most of
those people they don't fit the stereotypes and sort of
the myths that we have about homelessness. These are people
who are working and working and working some more and
(03:25):
it just is not enough to afford a place to live.
And those are overwhelmingly households with children. And we are
neglecting this population and this growing phenomenon.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
I believe at our peril.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I do not think it is an understatement to say
this narrow definition has left families in this sort of
awful kind of limbo. So lest would be an example
from your book, Celeste is a woman who has both
ovarian and breast cancer and yet cannot get services because
she's not the right kind of homeless.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
That's right, So to speak to that definition for a moment. So,
the federal government, through HUD has a definition of homelessness
that limits it to those who are on the streets
or in a homeless shelter everyone else. So all of
(04:21):
the families who I follow in this book, who are
who are languishing in their vehicles or in the overcrowded
apartments of others, in living situations that are temporary and
often extremely precarious and also put at risk the housing
of the people they're staying with because they can be
(04:42):
evicted if they have others staying with them. So they're
living in those situations. They are living in these extremely
profitable and exploitative extended state hotels and motels, which I
think of as kind of commercial for profit homeless shelters.
That's where the majority of families with children who are
(05:03):
homeless in the US are living, and that's how they
experience homelessness, and yet that federal definition through HUD, effectively
writes all of those people, all of those families, out
of the story we tell, and they literally don't count.
So every year, when the federal government conducts the homeless census,
refer to as the point in Time count, only those
(05:24):
people who are visible on the street or in shelters
are counted. So, yeah, Celeste is a person in the book.
She has a warehouse job, and without getting too far
into her story, what pushes her and her children into
homelessness is an unjust eviction. They are actually evicted from
a home that has burned down and it tanks their
(05:47):
credit score. When she refuses to pay rent on this
home that has burned down, her private equity landlord files
an eviction against her and Celeste actually doesn't find out
about this eviction until much later, and it tanks her
credit score and she's she, like many many people in
America today, are sort of forced out of the formal
housing market and pushed into this extended stay hotel. And
(06:10):
once she's diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, she and
her children are just desperate to get out of that situation.
And as you mentioned When she goes to Gateway Center,
the place in Atlanta which is sort of the hub
for homeless services, she's told that she doesn't meet the
definition and basically that she's not homeless in the right way.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Our guest is Brian Goldstone. He's author of There Is
No Place for Us, Working and Homeless in America. He
has a doctorate in anthropology from Duke University and was
a Melon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In twenty twenty one,
he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives
in Atlanta, which is where this book is centered. You
are listening to get connected on one oh six point
(06:50):
seven light FM. I'mina del Rio. Atlanta is pretty interesting too,
because one of the things that has done to exacerbate
the affordable housing issue in Atlanta is demolishing public housing.
They were the first in the nation to offer public
housing and the first to do away with it all together.
The story of public housing in America beginning at this
(07:12):
great height and then falling into disrepair is fascinating to me.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Absolutely, And in that sense, Atlanta is a really interesting
sort of case study in housing policy in America. You
could almost tell the story of housing policy just through
just through Atlanta, because you know, in the nineteen thirties,
Atlanta was the first city in the country to build
public housing, was sort of this laboratory for public housing,
(07:39):
which went on to spread to other cities. And then
in the nineties and two thousands, Atlanta became the first
city in the country to begin demolishing all of its
public housing in favor of expecting the housing needs of
low income Americans to be sort of left to the
private market to take care of, then incentivizing that private
(08:00):
market to fill the gap and to provide housing. So
in many ways, yes, Atlanta really is a unique place.
But the reason the book is based in Atlanta isn't
just because of how unique it is. It's also because
of how representative it is. Atlanta, like many cities across
the country, over the last decade or so, has undergone
(08:21):
a much celebrated urban renaissance, a kind of transformation of
its city center. Property values are skyrocketing, the signs of
growth in Atlanta are everywhere, and working class and poor
families in the city are systematically being pushed out, not
just of the neighborhoods where they grew up in but
(08:43):
increasingly out of housing altogether. And so the ways that
this sort of unbridled growth in this much celebrated success
story in the city, which again has been just replicated
in cities across the country, the way that that's fueling
this insecurity is I think really striking. And I argue
(09:06):
in the book that this crisis of housing, insecurity and homelessness,
the sort of staggering rise of the working homeless, is
not a crisis of poverty per se. It's really a
crisis of prosperity. It's the product not of a failing economy,
but of a booming economy. And I think that's something
that we, as residents of these cities that are in
(09:28):
the midst of this transformation and this newfound wealth, really
need to grapple with.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
I'd like to go back to the families for a moment.
Most of the research and reporting on this book was
done with the families between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one.
How did you find these families and how willing were
they to talk with you about, in some cases, very
devastating stories.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
So my way into this project was actually through a
magazine article that I reported and wrote for the New
Republic beck in I believe late twenty eighteen early twenty nineteen,
and I followed one family in Atlanta in that story
for about seven months. And when that story was finished,
I realized that I had only scratched the surface of
(10:13):
what there was to investigate and sort of piece together
about why this catastrophe was unfolding, not just in Atlanta
but across the country. In the course of reporting that story,
I spent time at food pantries and at homeless service providers.
And one thing I will say about this subject matter
is that unlike journalists who kind of struggle, they have
(10:35):
the topic, they have the sort of expos they want
to write, but then they kind of struggle to find
a protagonist or an individual to sort of carry that story,
in my case, there was no shortage of people who
fit the description of those who were working full time jobs,
often more than one job, and are still deprived of
(10:57):
a place to live. So it was really less a
matter of me sort of choosing those who I would
follow then who would allow me into their lives in
a way would that would give readers a visceral sense
of what it looks and feels like for parents, for
their children when this basic human necessity is always out
(11:19):
of reach. And I basically, you know, I told the
folks that I met, I said, I'm I'm really looking
to kind of immerse myself in your day to day
lives and just follow you for a long time.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
And that's a tall order.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
That's a very difficult thing to ask of anyone, and
especially someone who is struggling in this way just to
meet their most basic material needs. And so there were
several people and families and individuals who I followed for
weeks or even months, and it just became clear that
they had too much that they were dealing with. They
(11:51):
just had no space in their life for a journalist
to be asking them these questions and to be accompanying them.
So yeah, those who I ended up sort of including
the book and following for the amount of time I
did over several years. These were families who were just
willing to have me along. And that is almost miraculous
(12:16):
degree of generosity that I'm still just trying to wrap
my mind around.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
The depth of reporting is very impressive. It is a
very compelling book altogether. I did go through because I'm
nosy and look at some reader reviews, and there was
one reader's review that says they were disappointed that of
all the families you included, they all appeared to be
black families. And I assume that was not an error.
I wish you could talk about that.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Yeah, you know, when I began this project, I did
have an aspiration to kind of check all of these
different demographic boxes to give We know that homelessness in
America does cut across ethnic and racial categories, but in
Atlanta specifically. You know, as I was going to those
(13:04):
food pantries, as I was going to these homeless shelters
and spending time with folks, I noticed that almost every
single person was black. And there's a statistic behind that.
You know, even though Atlanta is no longer a majority
black city. It once was, but it no longer is
because of that kind of gentrification and revitalization that I
(13:26):
was talking about earlier. Even though it's no longer a
majority black city, ninety three percent of families experiencing homelessness
in Atlanta are black. So this is an issue that
is deeply racialized and it didn't spring up overnight. That
statistic has a history. It goes back to the end
(13:47):
of slavery, where millions of men, women, and children were
emancipated into a society where they were deprived of property
rights and ownership rights, and we're sort of forced into
a labor economy of low wages, rent and debt, and
sort of continuing through generations of redlining and restrictive covenants
(14:09):
that prevented black families from becoming homeowners or living in
certain neighborhoods. So this has a history and it is
deeply racialized. It just wouldn't have been honest to present
this as a color blind issue. Now, in some cities
in the country, that racial dimension takes a different form.
I was recently in Minneapolis, and there a disproportionate number
(14:33):
of Indigenous and Native American residents are experiencing homelessness. In
northern California, where I've also reported, there's a disproportionate number
of Latino families and individuals experiencing homelessness. But there is
a racialized dimension. And you know the cliche that any
of us can can become homeless. There's some truth to that,
(14:55):
but I also want to say that it's much more
likely to happen to some than others.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Very particular historical.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Reasons gentrification is not specifically redlining. But since you're on
that thread, I want to talk about Gladstone for a moment.
Gladstone was a complex of one hundred and sixty four
affordable apartments in a community where residents were mostly classified
as low income, and around late twenty twenty all the
residents were evicted and the complex was raised to build
(15:22):
upscale condos. It is not unique, but it is emblematic.
I think of how disregarded these families are, and how
sort of excluded or uninvited they are in the process
of modernizing Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, you know, these families who were evicted en mass
from their homes during the pandemic because the owner of
this property deemed it more important to make millions of
dollars in profit by selling this property to a luxury
developer than it was to keep these people housed. I
(15:59):
think they ills very starkly the fact that peorn working
class people are basically becoming the casualties of their city's success.
You know, the people living in these apartments, They are
not on the fringes of society. These are the very
(16:19):
people whose whose work, whose labor is powering the growth
that Atlanta is experiencing through their jobs, through you know,
taking care of our children, taking care of our elders,
and caregiving positions, packing boxes for Amazon, driving for Uber
and Lyft, and during the pandemic, you know, delivering food
for door dash and uber eats when people can go
(16:42):
to restaurants. And they were performing these services. They were
working these jobs and then they were just pushed out
of their homes.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
With no recourse. This was perfectly legal.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
And you know, even though many of them had lived
in this neighborhood for years or even decades, they weren't
as part of the community because they were tenants, because
they were renters. The community was imagined to be comprised
of homeowners and the homeowner association in this neighborhood, they
didn't raise their voices against this eviction of their neighbors,
(17:16):
precisely because these renters weren't even considered neighbors to begin with.
And I think it just exposes some of the fault
lines that exist in this new urban space, and it
really raises the question of what is the human cost
of this renaissance that cities like Atlanta are experiencing. The
(17:40):
title of the book, there is no place for us.
It actually comes from one of the parents who was
living in one of these apartments at Gladstone, and her
name is Britt, and she and her children they became
homeless after they lost their home at Gladstone. Britt returns
to this neighborhood months later, and she looks around and
(18:00):
she loves the new Atlanta. She believes in the new Atlanta.
She loves how fun and sexy it's becoming. But she
looks around and she says, you know, this is really beautiful.
But for me and my kids, there's no place for
us here. And I think in that sense, there is
no place for us. It's not just an Atlanta title.
It's a New York title. It's a Chicago title, Nashville, Charlotte, Phoenix, Austin,
(18:25):
all across the country. There is no place for us
is a refrain that I think we're hearing from those
again whose work and whose labor is actually powering that
very success.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Our guest is Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No
Place for Us, Working in Homeless in America. You're listening
to get connected on one O six point seven light FM.
I'm Mina del Rio. Childcare is a recurring challenge for everyone.
Childcare is a recurring challenge for these families. Michelle is
a mother of three, and she's put in terrible positions,
(18:59):
losing a opportunity and refusing to stay in a shelter
because of her children. Michelle's story is perhaps the most
devastating in the book. I think her story begins in
an apartment with her fiance and her three children, where
she's studying to be a social worker, but unfortunately, her
life goes radically downhill. None of these people are perfect,
but in her defense, perhaps it's because the upheaval is
(19:21):
so huge. It feels as if she and Britt and
people like them they're living through PTSD.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
When the book opens, Michelle is wearing a Santa hat
and making dinner for her family on Christmas Eve. The
chapter opens. The first chapter with Michelle opens with her
and her fiance and her three children building a gingerbread house.
And it was really important to begin in that way
(19:48):
because I think it accentuates both the anguish of what follows,
but also just how utterly preventable and avoidable their you know,
descent into homelessness was. And it was truly, I mean,
there are no words for what it was like to
(20:10):
watch in real time as all of these systems sort
of came together to militate against the stability of families
like Michelle's. As you mentioned, childcare becomes a really crucial
part of Michelle's story, or it's the lack of childcare
(20:31):
becomes a very crucial part of her story. And you
know what it shows is that while and I want
to be really clear here that the reason homelessness is
at the highest level on record, the reason we are
seeing this staggering rise of the working homeless has one cause,
and that is a lack of access to housing among
(20:53):
poor and working class people. A lack of access to
housing they can afford. That is the reason. But along
with that, there are all these kind of uniquely American
maladies that have come together to make it even more
likely that some people will be pushed into homelessness and childcare.
A lack of subsidized affordable childcare, along with affordable healthcare,
(21:17):
universal healthcare, along with a lack of basic labor protections
like sickly. If all of these things come together to
both make more likely and exacerbate these families predicaments, and
if Michelle had had had access to subsidized childcare, she
would have been able to go back to work, and
she would have been able to eventually remain stably housed.
(21:42):
But that doesn't happen, and you know, by the time
the book closes, Michelle could be mistaken for just a
chronically unhoused person. Michelle is sleeping at times in the
Marta station, the train station, and she could easily be
mistaken as she is in the throes of alcoholism now,
as she is in the throes of all of these
(22:04):
other manifestations of despair and acute anxiety and depression. She
could be mistaken for someone who's been in that condition
for years. But she hasn't been, and it was so
utterly avoidable.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
The average family in rental arrears in New York City,
this is a twenty twenty three number, is about four
thousand dollars, but if they are evicted, it will cost
seventy thousand to keep them in shelter. I assume those
numbers shift a bit from city to city. But the
choice seems obvious to offer adequate public rental assistance. There's
a choice to, as you say, to not provide for
(22:44):
these people time and time again, in the book, when
the people reached out to brand name agencies for emergency
housing or city services, the service provider either didn't exist
or didn't have space, or the families didn't qualify, or
if the housing did exist, it was terrifying. Again, the
choice seems obvious to offer adequate public rental assistance. Why
(23:07):
do we not do that?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Yeah, choice is exactly the right word. Homelessness is a
policy choice. It's often framed as an individual choice. That
is not correct. Homelessness is a choice, but it is
a policy choice. It is a choice that we collectively
have made as a society. And you know, we as
a country are sort of at a crossroads right now,
(23:31):
as homelessness continues to spiral, both in its invisible, hidden
forms and in its very public and conspicuous forms, we
have we have a decision to make. We can either
double down on criminalization and banishment and just this kind
of out of sight, out of mind policy that just
(23:53):
pushes it out of view, pushes or even worse, pushes
people into into jails and penalizes them and makes it
even less likely that they will ever come out of homelessness.
Or we can choose to address this crisis at its source,
which is again fundamentally a lack of access to housing
(24:17):
that people can afford. And what a case manager in
the book Carla Wells refers to as the homeless industrial complex,
which she sees as sort of all of the sort
of agencies and government bureaucracies and nonprofits and charities that
have really been tasked not so much with ending homelessness,
but with managing it, with making sure that it sort
(24:39):
of stays under control, and she, as a case manager,
is incredibly frustrated and burned out by that model. I
think that we have the ability, we have the opportunity
to truly end this added source, to truly cut off
this relentless churm of people into homelessness, which in many cities,
(25:03):
you know, for every one person who gets out of
homelessness into housing in Los Angeles and San Francisco, another
three people four people become unhoused. That is the reason
why even throwing billions of dollars at shelters and wrap
around services does not see this emergency abate. And what
(25:25):
will do that, I believe, is a paradigm shift around
how we treat housing in this country.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
You know, we have treated housing as.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
A commodity, as a as a vehicle for wealth accumulation.
And we've basically said that, you know, if you are
lucky enough to own property, if you're lucky enough to
be a landlord, you should be able to profit as
much as you want from just this basic human need
for a place to live. And I remember during the
pandemic there were two brothers in Tennessee who were going
(25:55):
around buying hand sanitizer, stockpiling it, hoarding it, and selling
it on Amazon and eBay for eighty dollars ninety dollars
a pop. And I remember thinking, that is what we've
done to housing in this country. We've allowed it to
be hoarded. We've allowed this precious resource to just be
auctioned off to the highest bidder. But we don't call
that price gouging. We don't call that praying on the
(26:18):
desperation of those in the midst of an emergency. We
just call it supply and demand economics. And I think
until we have a paradigm shift around housing and who
it's for and what we allow the market to do
with that, and basically treat housing is just an essential
public good like education, and say that everyone should have access,
(26:44):
we will just continue to manage this crisis instead of
end it.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
To wrap up, Brian, have you kept up with these families?
What can you say about how they're doing now? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
I remain in very very close contact with them. I
either text or talked to almost all of them on
a weekly basis for confidentiality reasons. We sort of had
an agreement that what wasn't included in the book, which
we went over very closely together to ensure that there
was nothing there that would either compromise their privacy or
(27:19):
just kind of be gratuitous.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
Everything.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
This is incredibly sensitive, incredibly harrowing and painful material, and
I read the book to each of them, the material
that they appear, and to ensure that I got it
right and to ensure that I was respecting their dignity.
So we did agree that what wasn't in the book
(27:43):
I wouldn't necessarily discuss publicly, but I will say that
all of them, in different ways, have continued to struggle,
you know, after the events in the book took place,
even with me trying to marshal financial support for them,
trying to you know, doing fundraisers, and it exposes the
(28:04):
limits of this kind of individual attempt to provide help.
This is a systemic issue that will only be solved
through systemic means. And some of the families are finally,
you know, a little bit more stable, but they are
still renters. They are still trapped in a renter class
(28:26):
and a housing system that prioritizes profit over all else
and as long as that remains the case, their situations
will be precarious.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Our guest is Brian Goldstone, the author of There Is
No Place for Us Working and Homeless in America. Brian Goldstone,
thank you for being on to Get Connected, beautiful book.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one IO six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one O six seven lightfm dot com.
Thanks for listening.
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