Working While Homeless: In America, It’s All Too Common

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

Britt, a mother of two whose roots in Atlanta go back five generations, stared at the signboard near the road where she used to live. The previous year, her affordable housing complex, Gladstone Apartments, had been razed to make way for a new development called Empire Zephyr, whose digital rendering showed a mix of condos and townhouses “starting from the low $400s” and promised “lush greenery, budding culture, energy and soul.” The construction site both impressed her and made her utterly despondent: “Wow, this will be really nice when it’s done. But me and my kids? There’s no place for us here.”

The moment is wrenching. Before Britt finally secured a unit in Gladstone, she had been struggling to find a home. Her story is one of several that the journalist Brian Goldstone tells in “There Is No Place for Us,” his powerful new book about “the working homeless” in the rapidly gentrifying city of Atlanta, where someone with a full-time job can still get priced out of a place to live. “The city’s renaissance has exacted a heavy toll on its low-income residents,” he writes, explaining that between 2010 and 2023 the median rent shot up by a staggering 76 percent.

The people in this book work a lot, and earn very little. Sleeping in cars, crashing with friends or paying for a decrepit room in an extended-stay hotel, they are “trapped in a sort of shadow realm.” Politicians have been incentivized to define homelessness narrowly, including only people living in shelters or on the street. A true measure of homelessness in America would be six times the official figure, Goldstone writes, pushing the number up to more than four million. “There Is No Place for Us” offers an immersive narrative of how five Atlanta families found themselves in the direst of straits yet statistically invisible: “They literally did not count.”