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There is no place for us : working and homeless in America
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2025
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Publishers Weekly Review
Even fully employed Americans are being pushed into homelessness, according to this harrowing debut report. Journalist Goldstone follows four single moms and a married couple living in metropolitan Atlanta--all of them steadily employed as restaurant workers, cleaners, health aides, call center staffers, and mechanics--who had to find new places to live because of rent increases, layoffs, a sudden large expense, or other one-off events. They face a labyrinth of obstacles: income and credit-score requirements that they don't meet; high up-front application fees; fake realty agents trying to scam them out of their deposits; and maddening bureaucratic regulations on housing assistance. (One renter had to wait weeks for the city to review an apartment's environmental impact before she could use her subsidized housing voucher on a deposit--by which time the apartment was no longer available.) The biggest roadblock is that, in a gentrifying Atlanta, housing is simply no longer affordable for working-class families. The result is many downward spirals through ever-worsening housing options, including the already overcrowded apartments of relatives, squalid yet exorbitantly expensive motels, a Salvation Army shelter, a car, and even the chairs in an all-night laundromat. Goldstone weaves a richly detailed narrative of his subjects' increasingly desperate struggles, and he offers a searing indictment of a greedy corporate real estate industry, which he consistently pegs as the culprit behind these woes. It's a gripping, high-stakes account of America's housing emergency. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
Homelessness has long been a chronic problem in almost every large American city. However, the common assumption that the homeless are unemployed (and unemployable) is challenged in journalist Goldstone's heartbreaking book. He does a deep dive into the history and circumstances of several family units in the Atlanta area who have been plagued by homelessness, despite having jobs. These families have found themselves without a home, sometimes because of personal problems but more often through adverse developments beyond their control. Some of them face eviction by a landlord intent on development, some have subsistence jobs that make them unable to afford move-in costs. Occasionally they have enough for a short stay in a cheap motel, sometimes they resort to shelters, sometimes they live in their cars. Learning of the harsh obstacles of daily life for these people will both distress and outrage any reader with an ounce of empathy. At the very least, the reader is made aware of the complexity and severity of the problems of those living on the edges of society.
Kirkus Review
Down and out in Atlanta. Pete Hamill, one of the last great tabloid journalists, practiced what he preached. InNews Is a Verb, he argued that reporters ought to write about ordinary people--not celebrities--and live among them. Goldstone, a veteran journalist, does both and does them well in this labor of love. While there are trenchant observations about the U.S. in this book, Goldstone focuses on the homeless crisis in Atlanta, where he lives. The "Silicon Valley of the South," as it's often called, is the nation's third-fastest-growing metropolitan area. Goldstone seems to know every neighborhood and street and a great many of the down-and-out citizens he writes about who sleep on the streets, in shelters, and in hotels unfit for human habitation. Against the odds, these people hold down jobs--but, he writes, their "paychecks are not enough to keep a roof over their heads." A map of Atlanta--with roads, highways, hotels, and motels--appears at the front of the book, so no reader can get lost, and there are ample notes and an eye-opening epilogue. Goldstone explains that he did not pay any of his sources for information. In a profession that's increasingly lax when it comes to ethics, Goldstone is a model of ethical journalism. To protect the privacy of the people he writes about, he doesn't use real names. With a Ph.D. in anthropology, he trains an empathetic eye on families that are struggling in an increasingly gentrified city that prizes property above people. "Families are not 'falling' into homelessness," he writes. "They're being pushed." Make a place for this book alongside Jane Jacobs' classicDeath and Life of Great American Cities. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC' S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR * Through the "revelatory and gut-wrenching" (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend--the dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across America.

"An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Matthew Desmond's Evicted ." --The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, AND THE BERNSTEIN AWARD * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Elle, New America, BookPage, Shelf Awareness

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America's booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country's "Black Mecca" after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children--and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation's working homeless.

Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation's hidden homeless--omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.

By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness--and shows that it won't be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.
Table of Contents
Map of Metro Atlantaviii
The Familiesxi
Author's Notexiii
Introductionxv
Part 1Equilibrium1
Part 2Storm49
Part 3Possibility157
Part 4Rupture207
Part 5The New American Homeless271
Epilogue351
Acknowledgments367
Notes371
Index409
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