There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
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Brian Goldstone on There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A nurse’s waiting room, a reporter’s blind spotThe book began not with Goldstone’s own reporting but with his wife Elaine Brown Goldstone’s clinical practice at Mercy Care community health center in Atlanta. She was watching patients finish shifts as warehouse workers, Uber drivers, and home health aides and then not go home. When she brought this to him in 2018, it collided with an assumption he had never thought to question.
How could these two words, working and homeless, go together?
To find out whether anyone had mapped this overlap systematically, Goldstone went to the academic literature. What he found there was as telling as what was missing.
I typed ‘working homeless’ into an academic database and found almost nothing. That silence told me something. These people’s lives weren’t being taken seriously, even in research.
The sociologist Peter Rossi had declared in a 1989 foundational text that people experiencing homelessness were essentially cut off from work. The silence in the database confirmed that his framing had gone largely unchallenged for decades.
The subject had deeper roots for Goldstone than a single clinical observation. Long before he became a journalist and anthropologist, he had a formative encounter with homelessness in the same city where the book is set, one that planted the question he would spend years trying to answer.
It actually started in high school. I was a terrible student and got into a lot of trouble. After one of my many infractions, my parents made me volunteer at a homeless outreach center in Atlanta. That was my first real encounter with people who were unhoused — and their stories were so complex. They had aspirations, passions, flaws, and regrets. They weren’t these caricatures that society tries to make them into.
How he wrote it
Six years, five families, one rewritten languageGoldstone spent nearly six years reporting and writing. His training as a cultural anthropologist shaped what he counted as sufficient time in the field: not interviews alone, but sustained daily presence at eviction court, plasma donation centers, homeless service agencies, and for extended stretches at Efficiency Lodge, a budget extended-stay motel on Candler Road in Atlanta where two of the five families lived at different points. Sustaining that presence required a specific commitment he made to each family before the reporting began.
Trust was indispensable. I mean, trust was everything here. I told the families going into this that at the end of this process, that I would sit down with them and we would go over every part of what was included in their stories, not only to make sure it was actual, but to make sure that they were consented fully to what was depicted. To the five families’ credit, they didn’t ask for one thing to be taken out.
The book opens with the families in ordinary moments: Christmas dinners, small domestic routines, the texture of a relatively stable week. Only then does the narrative follow what happens to them. In the Barnes & Noble Poured Over interview, Goldstone names this sequencing as both a moral and a narrative commitment, one that pushed back against a pattern he saw throughout journalism on poverty.
We shouldn’t just try to capture people in their most anguished moments, as so much reporting and research on poverty tends to do, just this kind of misery porn. We should show people in the fullness of who they are. [paraphrased from audio]
Beyond structure, the process of writing forced Goldstone to audit his own vocabulary. A word he had used without thinking turned out to encode the argument he was trying to dismantle.
At so many points in the process of writing this book, I’ve had to discipline my own language. I used to catch myself saying, oh, such and such number of people this year fell into homelessness. No, and they were not falling. They were being pushed.
The shift from “fell” to “pushed” is not stylistic: it is the book’s central claim in miniature. Passive accident becomes the outcome of traceable decisions, by landlords, investors, and legislators, that the book then traces family by family.
The weight of that gap between what the families endured and what he could do for them on the page surfaced plainly once the reporting was done and writing required giving the stories a shape.
There were times I wished I were writing a novel, because then I could have given these stories a different conclusion. But this is reality.
On what’s at stake
A myth about work, and who profits from keeping itThe official federal point-in-time count placed the homeless population at roughly 770,000 at the most recent tally. Goldstone argues that figure, because it counts only people visible on a single night, misses almost everyone in cars, motels, and doubled-up apartments. The size of that gap matters because it determines who the public imagines when they think about homelessness.
The term ‘working homeless’ immediately explodes that myth. What it says is the line separating the housed from the unhoused has become devastatingly porous in this country.
One of the recurring discoveries across his six years of reporting was that the families’ instability was not an unfortunate side condition of a broken market: it was the product the market was selling. Blackstone and Starwood Capital, for instance, bought Extended Stay America for six billion dollars during the pandemic, when budget extended-stay facilities were running at 80 to 90 percent capacity with displaced workers while most hotel chains sat empty.
One of the most astonishing discoveries for me in reporting this book was realizing that, at every turn in these families’ journeys, there were entire business models designed to profit from their hardship. We talk a lot about the ‘housing crisis,’ but what we’re really living through is the financialization of housing: the transformation of homes into financial instruments and people’s instability into a source of profit.
Goldstone connects that business model to a longer political history. Beginning with the Reagan administration, he argues, officials worked to reframe homelessness as individual pathology rather than as a consequence of cuts to public housing and safety-net programs. A 1986 New York Times and CBS News poll asked random New Yorkers what caused homelessness; the most common answers were drugs, alcohol, or psychological problems. Nobody mentioned housing. That framing, Goldstone writes, did not describe reality: it shaped it.
We’ve allowed these investors, these corporations to buy up housing, to hoard this precious resource, this basic human necessity. We’ve just auctioned it off to the highest bidder. And we call it supply and demand economics. We call it capitalism. We don’t call it by its proper name, which is really price gouging. Price gouging during an emergency that has not been declared. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Unnecessary, undeclared, and still ongoingGoldstone is precise about the emotional response he wants the book to produce. Speaking at an Atlanta Regional Commission housing summit, he distinguished between the two feelings he hoped readers would leave with, and was explicit that one of them was not enough.
Reporting this book made it clear that homelessness isn’t an individual failing — it’s the predictable outcome of decades of policy that have made housing unaffordable, wages inadequate, and tenant protections, in many cities, nearly nonexistent. But if these conditions were created by policy choices, they can be undone by different choices.
The solutions he names are concrete: social housing models, where rents are tied to income rather than to demand and homes are permanently removed from the speculative market, on the examples of Finland and Vienna. The argument is that the same deliberate policy-making that created the crisis can, in principle, end it.