Who Gets Housing, and Who Is ‘Disposable’?

2021 New America Fellow Brian Goldstone's book, There Is No Place for Us, was reviewed in The Washington Post.

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone, shines a light on what the author calls the “shadow realm” of working people who are not considered officially homeless but lack a fixed place to sleep at night. As Goldstone writes, in the popular imagination homelessness is linked to “individual pathology”—primarily mental illness and substance use disorders, but also “laziness” or an unwillingness to hold down a job. Americans cling to the idea that if we work hard enough, not only will we avoid homelessness, but we will one day become homeowners. Indeed, the myth of the American Dream depends on a decoupling of homelessness and employment. But Goldstone exposes how working families like the Walkers and the Thompsons, “besieged by a combination of skyrocketing rents, low wages, and inadequate tenant protections…are becoming the new face of homelessness in the United States.”