There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

In There Is No Place for Us, Goldstone traces how Atlanta’s housing landscape reflects a national shift away from publicly owned housing toward market-driven models. Since the New Deal (President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mid-1930s program to aid recovery from the Great Depression), US federal policy has increasingly pivoted from directly providing affordable housing to subsidizing privatized provision, largely because the government was ill-suited to maintaining affordable housing:

[A]fter decades of federal disinvestment created slums out of public housing, policy has turned toward privatization of public housing, from subsidizing privately-owned units to razing-and-replacing public housing with mixed-income redevelopments (Nena Perry-Brown. “Why Privatization has Become the Public Housing Solution Du Jour.” Greater Greater Washington, 2020).

In 1986, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program began. For eligible renters, the program offers vouchers through the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8) for low-rent housing units. For developers and property owners, the program offers tax breaks as incentives to provide affordable housing through construction and rehabilitation, stipulating that they commit to providing it for 30 years.

However, a loophole in the LIHTC system allows property owners to exit this commitment early by approaching the Federal Housing Authority’s housing credit allocating agency to sell the property after 14 years. This results in a one-year process in which the agency seeks a buyer. The problem is that, due to continuous gentrification, the price that the qualified contract formula generates virtually always exceeds the property’s market value as affordable housing. As a result, low-income renters are priced out and must repeatedly seek affordable housing in a market where it is both increasingly in demand and increasingly rare. As the National Housing Trust notes, “An estimated 10,000 units of affordable housing are being lost annually as a result of the qualified contract (QC) provision” (“Protecting Long-Term Affordability by Closing the Qualified Contract Loophole.” National Housing Trust, 2023).

This policy arc is central to urban redevelopment strategy. Goldstone shows how the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) systematically demolished public housing complexes like East Lake Meadows and Techwood Homes, displacing families in a rental market where many landlords refuse low-income vouchers. This era of urban renewal coincided with massive public-private projects designed to attract new capital. The author frames the city’s BeltLine as the ultimate catalyst, calling it “arguably the greatest rent-gap generator in the city’s history, and a prime example of planned gentrification” (117). This revaluation of land created the ideal conditions for the Gladstone Apartments’ demise that Goldstone describes in the book. The LIHTC qualified contract loophole enabled the owner to sell the property to a developer just as BeltLine-spurred gentrification made the land hyper-valuable, leading to the mass displacement of residents like Britt. This trajectory illustrates a systemic process where policy and profit align to displace low-income communities.