There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
59 pages • 1-hour read
Brian GoldstoneThere Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
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Themes
The Persistence of Housing Insecurity Despite Employment
In the American imagination, a full-time job was once the basic safeguard against being unhoused. Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us shows how that belief collapsed in modern Atlanta, where steady labor no longer secures shelter. Goldstone traces this break through stagnant low-wage earnings, a rental market with soaring prices, and weak tenant protections. The book follows workers whose long hours and steady commitment to their families never translate into stable housing, creating what Goldstone calls an emergency “born less of poverty than prosperity” (xvii).
Kara Thompson’s experience makes this rupture vivid. A single mother of four, Kara worked double shifts as a cleaner at Grady Memorial Hospital and trained herself to ignore physical strain so that she could keep providing for her children. A car accident led to a broken water heater at home, and when her landlord refused to fix it, the family lost the apartment. Kara slept in her car to keep her job and then turned to DoorDash, finding that expenses cut her pay to below the minimum wage. Her constant labor in the hospital and gig economy never protected her from the instability that pushed her family from their apartment into their vehicle.
Maurice and Natalia Taylor’s story reveals how even dual incomes can falter in a gentrifying market. After they left their affordable condo in Sandy Springs, they entered a suburban rental landscape reshaped by redevelopment. Rents rose rapidly, and thousands of affordable units vanished. The Taylors faced high, nonrefundable application fees and rejections tied to their credit scores. They eventually moved into a luxury apartment that cost $500 more per month, and their savings quickly disappeared. Their reliable tenancy and steady jobs carried little weight in a market where the “housing wage” for a modest apartment far exceeded their earnings. Their move from stable housing to an extended-stay hotel drained their savings, exemplifying how wages no longer keep up with the cost of shelter.
Throughout these accounts, There Is No Place for Us shows how working families confront a systemic crisis rather than a personal shortfall. The labor that Kara, Maurice, and Natalia poured into their jobs could not counter a housing market that shut out low-wage workers. Their stories reveal a broken promise of achieving stability through work and the resulting cycle of housing insecurity, even for families who remain employed.
How Corporations Profit From Precarity
There Is No Place for Us portrays housing instability as a source of revenue for companies that capitalize on scarcity. Goldstone outlines a system in which corporate landlords, extended-stay hotels, and automated financial tools draw profit from families that have few options. These businesses do more than ignore the unhoused population: They keep it unhoused through steep fees, limited rights, and automated decisions that turn instability into income. Families who search for shelter encounter a chain of traps designed to drain income and lock them into precarity.
Extended-stay hotels sit at the center of such extraction. Efficiency Lodge and Extended Stay America charge high weekly rates to families who cannot enter the formal rental market. Celeste Walker saw how this works when weekly payments at Efficiency Lodge consumed her paycheck and made saving for a security deposit impossible. This “hotel trap” relies on rates far above the cost of a standard apartment while offering none of the legal protections of tenancy, in addition to far less space and fewer amenities. Maurice and Natalia experienced the same pattern when they spent more than $17,000 in eight months at an extended-stay hotel. Goldstone describes this as a business that depends on a “captive customer base” (242) that has no better alternatives.
Corporate landlords add another layer of impersonal extraction. As the Taylors applied for apartments, they encountered nonrefundable applications and “administrative” fees (96) totaling hundreds of dollars per complex, and landlords kept the money whether or not the application was accepted. When the Taylors faced eviction from The Whitney, an algorithm triggered the filing instead of a person. Large firms like Covenant Capital Group used this method to rapidly maximize profits by filing immediately after rent was late. Automation stripped away context, turning eviction into a routine revenue strategy.
The most aggressive tactic was at Efficiency Lodge, where armed guards carried out illegal “self-help” evictions en masse without court orders. In addition, management enforced an “innkeepers’ lien,” keeping residents’ belongings until overdue bills were paid. These tactics allowed the hotel to remove tenants quickly, replace them, and avoid revenue loss. Goldstone shows how such companies build a profitable industry out of practices that exploit families’ lack of power, leaving them without any stable path to housing.
How Planned Gentrification Drives Displacement
There Is No Place for Us highlights how public-private redevelopment shapes gentrification as a deliberate strategy. Goldstone illustrates this point by describing how projects ranging from suburban “city center” plans to the Atlanta BeltLine relied on the “rent gap,” a difference between current property values and future profit. Redevelopment replaced low-rent housing with upscale projects, and long-term Black residents lost their homes under the language of renewal.
Maurice and Natalia Taylor’s displacement from their Sandy Springs condo shows how this works at the suburban level. As City Springs and Gateway rose, Sandy Springs marketed the area as a new “modern city center” (95). This push resulted in the demolition of four older apartment complexes and removed roughly 3,000 residents with lower incomes. Goldstone calls this pattern “displace-and-replace suburban redevelopment” (95), a process that swaps poorer tenants for wealthier groups. For the Taylors, the impact was immediate: Rents grew by 39%, and 1,700 affordable apartments disappeared. Their search for a new place left them paying steep rents and eventually living in an extended-stay hotel.
Atlanta’s BeltLine drove the same pattern at a larger scale and became “arguably the greatest rent-gap generator in the city’s history” (117). The project’s parks and trails raised property values and attracted investors. Gladstone Apartments, where Britt Wilkinson found rare affordable housing, sat near the future Southside Trail and thus became a target for speculation. The complex was sold to Empire Communities for $33.25 million after an earlier $3.7 million purchase price, and this sale led to the demolition of 300 affordable units. Goldstone shows how public infrastructure creates openings for developers that depend on removing existing communities.
A policy gap in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program accelerated the loss of Gladstone. The property owner used the program’s “qualified contract” provision (likely included to make privatizing low-income housing more attractive) to abandon affordability obligations halfway through the 30-year requirement, which cleared the path for a luxury project. Empire Zephyr, the new development, included only a few units labeled “affordable,” and those rents exceeded what former residents could pay. The details of the Gladstone property’s history show how law, finance, and development converge to move tenants with low-income vouchers out. Through these intertwined stories, Goldstone presents displacement as a deliberate feature of redevelopment rather than a side effect.
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