There Is No Place for Us
Working and Homeless in America (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
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4.7 • 41 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Through the “revelatory and gut-wrenching” (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across America.
“An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE BERNSTEIN AWARD • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Elle, New America, BookPage, Shelf Awareness
The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.
Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.
By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Hard work is supposed to provide stability, but for millions of Americans, it no longer guarantees a home, as journalist Brian Goldstone tells us in his eye-opening and deeply compassionate book, There Is No Place for Us. Focusing on five Atlanta families, Goldstone reveals how skyrocketing rents, predatory housing practices, and bureaucratic red tape push employed parents and their children into homelessness. Goldstone’s immersive reporting follows families as they cycle through shelters, motels, and even their cars, all the while holding down jobs and caring for children. His writing is both novelistic and urgent, capturing the humanity of his subjects while holding institutions accountable for a crisis driven by worsening inequality. A searing indictment of America’s housing emergency, Goldstone’s book forces readers to confront the stark reality that homelessness isn’t just a symptom of poverty. It’s a byproduct of a booming economy that has made housing a luxury instead of a right.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even fully employed Americans are being pushed into homelessness, according to this harrowing debut report. Journalist Goldstone follows four single moms and a married couple living in metropolitan Atlanta—all of them steadily employed as restaurant workers, cleaners, health aides, call center staffers, and mechanics—who had to find new places to live because of rent increases, layoffs, a sudden large expense, or other one-off events. They face a labyrinth of obstacles: income and credit-score requirements that they don't meet; high up-front application fees; fake realty agents trying to scam them out of their deposits; and maddening bureaucratic regulations on housing assistance. (One renter had to wait weeks for the city to review an apartment's environmental impact before she could use her subsidized housing voucher on a deposit—by which time the apartment was no longer available.) The biggest roadblock is that, in a gentrifying Atlanta, housing is simply no longer affordable for working-class families. The result is many downward spirals through ever-worsening housing options, including the already overcrowded apartments of relatives, squalid yet exorbitantly expensive motels, a Salvation Army shelter, a car, and even the chairs in an all-night laundromat. Goldstone weaves a richly detailed narrative of his subjects' increasingly desperate struggles, and he offers a searing indictment of a greedy corporate real estate industry, which he consistently pegs as the culprit behind these woes. It's a gripping, high-stakes account of America's housing emergency.
Customer Reviews
Saddening and Maddening
Excellent exposition of the real homeless crisis in America. So sad to read the real life stories of struggling workers who end up homeless. And so maddening to realize that there is no fix especially in the current trumpian environment. The book is a great read but the flipping between different stories can make it feel disjointed.