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

by Brian Goldstone, Dion Graham (Narrator)

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)

FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL A BEST BOOK OF THE 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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, History, Social Justice, Audiobook, Economics

Audible Audio

First published March 25, 2025

About the author

Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He received his PhD in anthropology from Duke University. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University's Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from New America, Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He lives with his family in Atlanta, GA.

Reviews

[Traci Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

People need to read this book. It gets at a super specific and rising trend in homelessness in the USA that we are not talking about enough at all. It is super engaging and reads like a novel because of the narrative structure. I would say sometimes things get confusing as he follows 5 families and I was forgetting who was who a bit here and there. I also think it was a touch too long and repetitive, but overall I was hooked.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful and well-written book about the working homeless. Brian Goldstone follows five Atlanta families closely as they struggle to find a roof over their heads for themselves and their families. Devastating and important, we see as they bounce back and forth between exploitative extended-stay motels, shelters, loved ones’ couches, and their cars and the street. The focus on the families feels intimate and they’re all portrayed with great humanity and specificity; the circumstances they face are both sad and enraging. Goldstone’s writing is clear and compelling, and I felt invested in all these families’ lives. The integration of snippets history and policy was smooth and done in a way that didn’t distract from the families’ lives and perspectives.

A necessary book and I appreciate Goldstone’s message about methods at the end even if I felt he could’ve briefly discussed his positionality more (perhaps that comes from my research training). I liked how Goldstone described tangible actions and interventions we can advocate for at the end of the book (e.g., rent control, supporting tenant organizing to help prevent evictions, social housing, etc.)

[Emily Jurlina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though it's only April, I already know this is one of the best books I will read this year.

At turns heartbreaking and infuriating, Goldstone does critical work to help us see the plight of America's "hidden homeless." From the Kafka-esque ordeal of getting (and using!) any sort of government assistance to the predatory nature of extended stay hotels, you truly grow to understand why people are literally trapped in a cycle of homelessness. Truly our country is broken.

Instead of reading about JD Vance whining about people who he views as beneath him having cellphones in "Hillbilly Elegy", please read this instead to get a complete understanding of what it means to struggle in America.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a close up and personal look at the shortage of low income housing and the related increase of the homeless population. In this book the author reports on the experiences of five different families in the Atlanta, Georgia region who were struggling to find ways to keep housing in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles while also providing food and paying for other obligations.

While the experiences being reported on in this book occurred in Atlanta, they are representative of similar situations across the United States. Ironically, the metro regions with the most robust economies (i.e. with plenty of jobs) are the areas where the shortage of low income housing is the most acute. This is because property owners in these areas can make more money building new high income housing and commercial developments. Often this new construction takes place on land where low income housing used to be located.

The rise in homelessness is obvious to most people living in urban areas, but the homeless crisis is worse than reported in official statistics because for many years politicians have been motivated to keep the numbers as low as possible. Consequently, what is defined as homelessness has become ever more narrow. Thus, only those living on the street or staying at homeless shelters are counted, and those living in cars, hotel rooms, or doubling up with other people are invisible from the official statistics. Careful analysis and polling has revealed that when they're all counted the true housing crisis is six times larger than the official figure.

The shortage of low income housing has caught the attention of institutional investors who have started flocking to the financing of extended stay hotels. These new hotels are occupied by many families that would otherwise be homeless, not because their rental rates are low but rather because they are the only housing option available. Their rental rates are generally double what would be considered a fair rate for low income housing. Consequently many people pay up to seventy percent of the their income for rent and are forced to visit charitable food distribution sites to keep their families fed.

There are two terms for the homeless housing crisis I encountered in the book that caught by attention. One was "homeless industrial complex" which is referring to the government agencies, non-profits, businesses, and philanthropic groups that make up Atlanta's continuum of care while also trying to persuade itself that is is tackling the crisis. The other term was "housing hunger games" which was referring to competition between low income people trying to get housing in a market where there isn't enough to go around.

Audio length of this book is 13 hrs and 19 mins, but it seemed longer because of the dire circumstances and frustrating disappointments described for the individuals begin followed. Indeed the impossible dilemmas faced by the people in this book were so stressful and their descriptions so real that they caused me to experience feelings of anxiety. There's no pleasure in learning about unhappy stories that are true and probably typical and continuing for millions of people in similar circumstances (probably not far from where I live). I listening to this book during the 2025 shutdown of the Federal government which caused a disruption to SNAP benefits as well of other multiple economic issues. Thus it all seemed too real.

For people who are considering reading this book but are put off by my description of it being a stress producing experience, I suggest the option of reading only the Epilog where the author gets into policy issues and less mention is made of crises experienced by individuals in need. The Epilog does make scattered references to the individuals followed by the book's narrative, so maybe your curiosity will be inspired to go ahead and read all of the book.

The following is an partial excerpt from this book's Epilog in which the author suggests some corrective measures that could be taken to relieve the housing crisis.

If we are serious about ending this country's epidemic of homelessness and housing insecurity. then we must confront it head on, and commit to a guiding principle, everybody in America should and can have a home. It won't happen overnight, but it's the foundation on which our solutions must be built. “The housing market is a catastrophic failure, and the conditions tenants are experiencing today cannot continue," Tara Raghavir founding director of KC Tenants and the Tenant Union Federation told me, “Something’s gotta give.”

One immediate way to relieve this misery is to keep people in the homes they already have.
Every minute in the United States, there are on average, seven evictions filed, a total of roughly 3.6 million eviction filings in a typical year, according to Princeton University's eviction lab.
Ensuring that poor tenants have access to free legal representation, just as there's a right to counsel in criminal cases, would help to drastically reduce this number.

Other tools include direct. cash assistance for vulnerable renters and laws mandating basic habitability standards, closing the qualified contract loophole for LIHTC properties. Or, better, extending affordability requirements beyond 30 years would have kept Britt in her apartment. Enacting just cause eviction laws designed to shield tenants from arbitrary or retaliatory evictions, and crucially limit the reasons a landlord can refuse to renew a lease would have kept Maurice and Natalia in theirs.

Then there's rent control. among the most potent weapons against housing instability. Homeowners already enjoy de facto rent control in the form of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Why shouldn't renter households be similarly secure in knowing what they'll be paying from one year to the next? Real estate lobbyists and the politicians they fund vigorously oppose nearly all of these measures which is why tenant organizing. and tenant unions are so important. Large-scale transformation typically begins not at the top in the halls of power, but with concerted pressure from below, and often the groundwork is laid by those who stand to lose the most.

In 2022, a year and a half after Efficiency Lodge hired guards to forcibly remove families at gunpoint, a group of residents sued the hotel for illegally evicting them. Represented by the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and supported in an amicus brief by Housing Justice League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, the residents sought to prove what Natalie McLaughlin had argued to the police lieutenant immediately following the lockouts, that after years at the hotel they should have been covered by landlord-tenant law, and that management had circumvented this law by pushing them out without due process. At trial the judge sided with the residents when attorney and former Governor Roy Barnes, the brother of Efficiency's owner, appealed the verdict. The Georgia Court of Appeals upheld it. This ruling set a precedent. for other extended stays in Georgia granting their residents the status of tenants instead of guests. What they won was the right to a court-ordered eviction, rather than a summary lockout. “Not the dramatic victory they'd hoped for, but the seeds of more profound change,” as one HJL member pointed out were planted.

Preventing families from becoming homeless is an urgent task, getting them into housing they don't yet have is just as critical. A range of practical interventions would ease their burden, banning extortionate application fees, capping security deposits, outlawing biased tenant screening practices, prohibiting discrimination against voucher holders, and enforcing those rules. These are but a few ideas. Expanding HUD's definition of homeless is another. But the biggest challenge by far is the housing itself. There's not enough of it. Certainly not the kind that's affordable for millions of low-income renters.

Restrictive land use policies have contributed to this mess. With an estimated 75% of land in the nation's major cities zoned exclusively for single-family homes, it’s no surprise that the supply of housing has failed to keep pace with demand. Yet simply deregulating private development is insufficient because the market on its own will never be incentivized to build and maintain truly affordable housing for those in need of it. Recognizing this fact, there is a growing consensus that, as in other times of national emergency, all levels of government, Federal, state, local, must intervene directly.

These interventions can take many forms, but the most promising is a model known as social housing. Commonly described as a public option for housing, this model takes housing permanently off the private market beyond the reach of speculators and profiteers. It can be owned and operated by non-profits or municipal governments. Or as with limited equity cooperatives or land trusts, residents can own a stake in their own homes at subsidized rates.

In recent years, Finland has made international headlines for virtually ending homelessness.
Their secret? Building tens of thousands of social housing units on government-owned land ensuring that even the most economically marginalized have access to safe affordable homes. But it's in Vienna, where a whopping two-thirds of city residents live in high-quality publicly owned apartments and spend about 22%. of their post-tax income on rent and utilities, that social housing has particularly thrived. “If people don't have to struggle all day to survive,” a Vienna resident who has lived in the city's social housing for several decades told journalist Francesca Mari, “you can use your energy for much more important things.”

Imagine if America's public housing, those bright, cheerful buildings that first arose in downtown Atlanta a century ago, and then spread to the rest of the nation hadn't been set up to fail. Imagine if public housing hadn't been drastically underfunded and fallen into decrepititude, if it hadn't been treated as an option of last resort concentrating poverty and becoming stigmatized as a result. What if today, public housing were appealing enough that people across income levels would want to live there? Not only because of the quality of the apartments but because rents would never exceed a quarter of their earnings.

That's social housing and combined with other complementary policies, such as raising the federal minimum wage and significantly expanding labor protections, it could be our best hope of ensuring finally that every family in this country has a roof over their heads.

Our cities are on a perilous path with extreme and mounting wealth on one side, loss and deprivation on the other, and a credo of hard work will be rewarded somehow persisting despite it all.

But this new American homelessness is a choice, one we have collectively made, as a society, and it comes at a cost—Grace consoling her baby brother as they passed the night in a Walmart parking lot, Kyrie and Desiree moving from one living room floor to another never knowing where they'll be staying next, DJ and his siblings sleeping in a filthy freezing storage room. Such suffering is so unnecessary, so utterly preventable. We have the solutions. We have the resources. What we need now is the will to act.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Homelessness is at least 6x higher than reported. Reading this story gives just a glimpse into the world that’s all around us, but that we’re systematically trying to hide in order to tell the grand American dream story.

[Michael Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an immensely powerful and essential book, infuriating and heartbreaking, written with an insight and empathy that deserves every major literary award. Most importantly, this book reveals failing systems, systemic inequalities, and a general lack of public awareness. If there’s any justice in the world, this will open the eyes of those most in power to change how we treat low-income workers.

What a book.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so important. It is the Evicted of the 2020s, and I hope it gets that level of attention because it is certainly deserved. It focuses in on a massive issue that we all need to be talking more about: the skyrocking housing costs that are squeezing many lower-income people in the U.S. out of housing altogether… in some cases, because wages aren’t keeping up with costs, even those with full-time jobs.

The book’s primary focus is storytelling, following 5 families in Atlanta—all with children, mostly headed by single mothers, although in one case even a family with two working parents gets caught up in this nightmare. Their journeys through losing and gaining and losing housing again illustrate all different facets of the problem, all with top-notch storytelling that will get the reader invested. Some of the many topics addressed:

• Lack of affordable housing, especially in places that are gentrifying; lots of new construction is happening but generally higher-end, while owners of lower-rent properties have an incentive to sell out.

• Landlords unwilling to work with the Section 8 voucher program, so that even people who are supposed to get their rent subsidized can’t find anyone to accept the subsidy (mostly because the government expects rents to be reasonable and inspects the properties). I thought this was an isolated problem but it turns out almost 2/3 of the vouchers issued in Atlanta during this time period went unused because no one would accept them.

• Apartment complexes that got tax breaks in exchange for being affordable finding loopholes to end affordability early and sell out.

• Conditions in affordable housing are also a serious problem (this is apparently especially true in Georgia, one of three states that doesn’t even require rented homes to be habitable, but really it’s a problem everywhere that demand for affordable housing exceeds supply).

• Landlords often charge exorbitant fees—for applications, for instance—which can be a major expense for people who get denied repeatedly due to poor credit, past evictions, etc.

• Credit scores aren’t fairly calculated either; making timely rent and utility payments for years does nothing to improve your score, while an eviction will tank it.

• Extended-stay hotels often wind up as the place of last resort for those who have lost their housing (many stay for years, often with none of the protections of a tenant). They tend to be seedy and even dangerous, in poor repair, and meanwhile charge so much for a single room (which often houses an entire family) that people already priced out of housing can’t save enough to move elsewhere.

• Couch-surfing can work for people with a strong support system, but puts a serious strain on relationships and is highly unstable.

• As a last resort, many people wind up living out of their cars. But try getting a full night’s sleep in a car, especially with kids and inhospitable temperatures outdoors.

• Transition programs for the homeless can help, if bureaucratic requirements don’t render them impracticable, but short-term rental assistance only goes so far. Programs aimed at helping the homeless tend to be based in dated and inaccurate, but politically convenient, notions that homelessness is primarily caused by individual mental health problems rather than economic forces.

• Rooming houses are another potential option, but the one shown here is financially exploitative and in terrible condition (apparently, this is not uncommon).

• Through it all, most programs aimed at the homeless really just mean people on the streets, excluding most of those without housing.

• Being homeless itself takes a toll, and going through it can cause addiction or mental health problems—not to mention the toll that growing up this way takes on kids.

This isn’t a policy text, though—the book is very much grounded in the individual stories of the families, each a bit different from the others, offering big-picture information when it is helpful for context while letting readers see how it all plays out in the lives of actual people. While Goldstone exclusively follows families in Atlanta, where he lives, it all rings very true to my area as well (our laws aren’t as asinine as Georgia’s on tenant protection, but this seems to make less difference than you might think).

My biggest reservation about the book is that Goldstone’s writing himself out of it, when he was spending a lot of time with these families, is a bit misleading. There is perhaps no perfect way to do this in journalistic nonfiction (highly present authors tend to be distracting and annoying), but his involvement in their lives and presence at key moments must have had an influence. It also would’ve been nice to know what happened to these people once his reporting was over and he felt free to help them.

Overall, though, this is a great book to read for awareness of a pressing issue and for empathy with the people facing it. One of the women profiled, in particular, can be difficult in ways anyone working with the public will have encountered—she can be paranoid and belligerent—but Goldstone writes about her with a great deal of empathy and curiosity about what she’s going through, so you get a full picture of her life and why she sometimes acts this way. That said, the affordable housing problem is so big that several families in the book fall into it while doing nothing wrong. As long as rents are beyond what people can afford while working relatively low-wage jobs—in restaurants, call centers, day cares, customer service, warehouses, etc.—this will continue.

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book closely follows five families as they deal with precarious housing situations in Atlanta. It sheds light on the day-to-day struggles of people dealing with “hidden homelessness,” bouncing between extended-stay motels, shelters, and loved ones’ couches. It really shows how difficult it is to get ahead as a working class person, and how life events like medical debt, a landlord selling their home, or a breakup can change someone’s situation from “scraping by” to “out on the streets” in an instant.

What struck me the most was the sheer levels of bureaucracy and logistical hurdles these people have to deal with in order to get any assistance. Many social service agencies don’t “count” people as homeless if they’re couch-surfing or staying in a motel, so they have to put their family in the possibly dangerous situation of sleeping on the streets in order to access aid. Some family shelters don’t let teenage boys stay, so mothers face the agonizing choice of whether to split up their families so they can have a roof over their heads. And then there’s the nightmare of trying to find low-cost, safe childcare that can accommodate a shift work schedule.

Some of the people in this book struggle with mental-health issues and addiction, but these struggles are the result of their homelessness, not the cause of it. The immense amount of stress they’re under pushes formerly stable people to the edge.

This book definitely opened my eyes, and I think it’s vital reading for anyone who wants to be more aware and empathetic.

[Eloise H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goldstone examines the plight of the working homeless, those working full-time, who still can’t afford to rent. He examines the dire results of gentrification, creating a scarcity in affordable housing, as well as the lack of government aid and the ineffective bureaucratic mess they must navigate to try to get some kind of relief. He follows 5 families and their plights and their degradation and feeling of total powerlessness, yet having hope that things will get better. He’s an excellent non-fiction writer. It was heart breaking, enlightening and riveting. The diminished federal funding for the working poor makes me question and feel outraged that we’re spending billions and billions of dollars on far reaching wars. Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for giving me the opportunity to read this advanced copy.

[Katy O. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly powerful and an essential addition to the body of work on this topic, especially in regard to the impacts of the predatory extended stay motel industry. This book requires a dedicated and patient reader, as it is easy to get confused when switching between the five families and their extended networks of family and associates. It is well worth the effort, though.

Source: public library hardcover

[Lilah Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book…this is an amazing eye opening and heartfelt account of the economic gap we face with the cost of living ! I think he did an amazing job of breaking down each families personal story and explaining.We are all one crisis away from life falling apart. Amazing job

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the policy failures that created the housing crisis in America, but it's not like any such book you've ever read. Instead of the bulk of the book describing the history, the relevant policies, the weakening of the social safety net, and the threat of gentrification to poor communities - with a few names sprinkled in as examples - the vast majority of the pages focus on the *people* who have been harmed, using their stories as a lens through which to illustrate the failures. And the book is much more effective and much more readable because of it.

The book tells the story of five families in Atlanta and how they were pushed into homelessness. These are people like all of us, with pasts, hopes, challenges overcome, interests, talents, aspirations. They are devoted parents. The vast majority work - in fact, they work way more hours per week than I do, take on second jobs, spend hours commuting by unreliable public transit to get to and from these jobs. Yet through a host of factors, including the scarcity of affordable housing, network poverty (i.e., when you're poor and struggling and your family and friends can offer little help because they're in the same boat), the laughable inadequacy of the federal and state minimum wage, meager assistance from government and nonprofits, and shockingly lopsided laws governing renters, they all lose stable housing and, with it, a chance at a stable life.

Everyone needs to have their eyes opened to not only the suffering that is caused, including/especially among children, by preventing people from reasonably priced, reliable, safe housing - but to the way government has actively tried to minimize the problem by severely undercounting the number of people without housing.

This book's unique structure and its empathetic, expansive, intimate view of these families' lives remind us that at the end of the day, the laws we make or don't make are not just words on paper. The inequities we accept or don't accept as given are not just abstracts. They affect people - real people - and the suffering these actions cause is no less real.

(Disclaimer: I'm a friend of the author's, but I would still unreservedly recommend this book even if I wasn't.)

[Samantha Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

the short: a riveting, frustrating, painful, incredible read following five families in Atlanta slipping in and out of homelessness. I need everyone to read this book immediately

the long: lots of people (incorrectly) think homelessness is a choice, or that it is directly related to addiction and mental illness. this book does an excellent job of showing that some homeless folks do make poor choices and some do deal with addiction and mental illness, and that none of those things should force them into homelessness. it also highlighted how limited social welfare programs, particularly in the south, fail to adequately address poverty and homelessness but, even more so, they entirely overlook huge swathes of the population in need.

these case studies also excelled at depicting the cyclical and generational nature of poverty and the many ways in which poverty impacts nearly every waking moment of someone’s day. this book was an excellent primer on not just the working homeless, but also poverty, gentrification, urban planning, and social welfare as a whole. it highlighted numerous policy failures and ways in which the rich exploit the poor without reading like a textbook or a policy proposal. the writing felt personal and extremely compelling. I would love to see Brian Goldstone use this methodology and writing style to discuss homelessness in other cities across the United States.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Be prepared to set aside everything you think you know about homelessness. This book is a must-read. I'll be thinking about it for a long time. Main takeaways for me:

First, "homelessness is an exponentially bigger and more pervasive phenomenon than we have been led to believe." Goldstone's reporting is evidence of that. These are powerful stories about real families working and still struggling to keep a roof over their heads in Atlanta. Maddeningly, he shows how many of these families are not considered "homeless" by definition and are, in many ways, even more invisible than those we do recognize as homeless. Politicians and lobbyists controlling the narrative don't want to acknowledge the depths of the problem.

Next, "...housing is an essential public good--something that benefits society as a whole and contributes to the overall flourishing of communities." This is one of the reasons I believe (and this book reinforces) that living in a safe, affordable home should be a guaranteed right for everybody.

Finally, one of the solutions he suggests we should be more open to as a society is funding public housing. Investment in the public sector helps reduce inequality. Think clean water, K-12 education, libraries, etc. Other countries have figured this out and citizens across all income spectrums take advantage of public housing. As one of the richest counties in the world, we can and should do the same.

And if you like this book, I also highly recommend Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Poverty, by America. He's doing really important work on the welfare state and solutions for ending poverty.

[Liz Hein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so mad I already posted my best books of 2025. This should be on there.

[Lauren D'Souza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A resounding five stars for an incredibly impactful, difficult, emotional, and important read, a book that I think everyone living in America needs to pick up. I've been dragging my feet on writing this review because I'm not sure how to sum up the heart-wrenching circumstances, evil systems, and messy conglomeration of policies that all came together to produce the uniquely American phenomenon of the working homeless.

Goldstone captures the stories of dozens of families who are right on the periphery of homelessness - doubled up with family or friends, living at extended-stay motels, in part-time family shelters, or otherwise on the brink of being on the streets. By many (highly politicized) definitions of homelessness, these families are technically not "unhoused" - and are therefore ineligible for many forms of assistance or shelter. But all of them are in precarious, unstable, unsafe, and desperate situations that make them turn to payday loans, predatory rent cosigning schemes, or scams that put them even further in the hole of payments upon payments upon payments just to keep some semblance of a roof over their heads.

It feels like so many families at this level of poverty are spinning plates of rent, car payments, utility bills, childcare, working 50-hour weeks, and more obligations. If even one of these plates drops, they're screwed - and in this book, the plate that often drops and plummets the family into crisis is rent payment. Let alone if this results in evictions, which it often does, and basically ruins that family's chance of being able to rent anywhere again. Let alone if this happens during Covid. It also felt like one of these plates dropping gets the family down, then life and the government and work and health and compounding payments just kick them over and over again. It often felt like there is truly no reprieve, and every setback pushes them even further from having a normal life again.

I could say so much more about this book, but you should just read it. If you read nothing else, read the prologue and the epilogue. As my housing expert friend Hannah said, it's one of the most eloquent and succinct descriptions of our current housing crisis that she's read.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Brian Goldstone's 'There Is No Place for Us' is a masterful and deeply moving exploration of the intricate relationships between work, poverty, and homelessness in America. Through his immersive and empathetic storytelling, Goldstone brings to life the daily struggles and remarkable resilience of individuals navigating the daunting complexities of poverty, housing insecurity, and the labor market. With nuance, compassion, and a keen analytical eye, he challenges readers to confront the systemic issues perpetuating homelessness and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about work, dignity, and social welfare.

What sets this book apart is Goldstone's ability to humanize the experiences of those often rendered invisible by societal neglect and stigma. By giving voice to the stories and struggles of individuals caught in the vortex of poverty and homelessness, he provides a searing indictment of the failures of current policies and societal attitudes. At the same time, he offers a beacon of hope by illuminating the urgent need for meaningful solutions that address the root causes of homelessness.

This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the human face of poverty and the complex web of factors that contribute to homelessness. It is a powerful call to action, one that challenges readers to engage with the issue on a deeper level and to demand more from our social and economic systems. 'There Is No Place for Us' is a testament to the power of compassionate storytelling and rigorous analysis to inspire change and to illuminate the path toward a more just and equitable society."

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great documentary on an important growing problem highlighting systemic failures in policy & practice. Unfortunately his fictionalized style didn’t work for me. Five families sampled from the black mecca of america have too many characters, varying factors of abuse and bad decisions, mostly focusing on abuse by the homeless industrial complex, mismanagement of municipal and federal resources making it a complex read. Sad and sobering stories all around. Gotta read more on the topic like the Nickel n Dimed, Evicted, etc.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

I love social justice books - this is a very interesting and informative look at the housing crisis in America and the rising homelessness that is its terrible result. I learned so much!. This is told through the stories of four families in Atlanta who find themselves, in spite of their best efforts and working multiple jobs, in this terrible situation.

This should be required reading. One of Obama’s favorite books of 2025, I also highly recommend!

[Morgan Gale · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've ever read

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and thought provoking, but could have been better.

This book follows five families in the Atlanta area that aren't what we would normally think of as homeless. They are in and out of apartments, extended stay hotels, relatives couches, etc and can't keep a stable home despite having steady jobs. The families' stories have a lot in common, which I think is the author's point...that this is more common than we think but this also makes it very difficult to keep the families straight. When the story just shifted between families every chapter it was bad enough, but Goldstone then starts shifting between families multiple times during each chapter and it was just so difficult to keep straight.

I wish that instead of this format, Goldstone had chosen to spotlight one family at a time, and pick families from all over the country. While I realize that focusing on the Atlanta area was probably both more shocking to him personally and convenient, because this is his own backyard, to the rest of the country, I think the point could have been made by only focusing on one or two of these families. It becomes too easy for the rest of us to dismiss this as just an Atlanta problem, or a Georgia problem or even a Southern problem. Spotlight some families in California, New York or DC where I know this is rampant as well. His brief comments that this isn't just an Atlanta problem were weak and spotlighting some other families would have really driven home that this is happening nationally.

A huge issue I personally see with housing that Goldstone touched on but failed to really follow up on in the Epilogue, is the standard of houses. Even when high density housing gets approved, it is often "luxury" units that go for a premium, not the basic, functional accommodations these families needed. Even where I live, an hour's drive to the city when there is no traffic (if that can ever happen) modest 2-3 bedroom 2000 sqft and below houses are being bought up by developers and replaced with mega mansions. Even middle class families making six figures can no longer afford a house this far from the city.

Personally, I disagree with Goldstone's vision of the government as the country's largest landlord, but he does expose many injustices in the housing system that will make your blood boil. Having seen the other side too, where overly generous tenant protections hurt small time landlords (like my friend who temporarily rented her place out while she had a two year gig out of town) I think a balance needs to be struck, but after reading this I am wholly convinced that in Atlanta at least, the deck is stacked far too heavily in favor of the landlords. He did also convince me that there is a gap nationally that a lot of hardworking families are falling into, and that we as a nation need to come up with a way to stop disincentivizing those who try.

Unfortunately, besides the injustices heaped on these families, it was also painful to read about them at times sabotaging their own futures. Like a horror movie where you scream "don't go in there!" at times you can see a train wreck coming for the families. I wish the author had followed up in the Epilogue with how it turned out for them (because he said in the intro that after he was done gathering data for the book he helped them out). It ended rather abruptly.

Overall, a tough book to read but an interesting and enlightening one. This is an important issue but unfortunately I think the book could be better. It is a good book, but it could have been great.

[Nat :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most sobering, urgent, and eye-opening nonfiction books I’ve read in a long time. There Is No Place for Us exposes the raw and often invisible truth about America’s homelessness crisis—and how deeply tied it is to systemic failures, corporate greed, and a refusal to treat housing as the human right that it is.

I went into this thinking I had a general understanding of the issue. I left realizing just how much I didn’t know—especially how massively underreported homelessness is in this country, and how many working people fall through the cracks every single day. People who do everything right—who work multiple jobs, care for their families, and still can’t afford a safe place to live.

“Recent research reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the United States, factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms or doubled up with other people, is at least six times larger than the official figure.”

One of the things that stuck with me most is how preventable this all feels. We could change this if we wanted to. We could treat housing like a public good, just as we do roads, schools, and libraries. But we don’t—because there's too much money in keeping it broken.

“There’s not enough [housing], certainly not the kind that’s affordable for millions of low-income renters... The market, on its own, will never be incentivized to build and maintain truly affordable housing for those in need of it.”

Reading this made me furious. And heartbroken. And awake in a way that feels hard to shake. There’s an entire working class living in motel rooms, on couches, in cars—doing everything they can just to survive. And the system continues to leave them behind.

“How have we allowed something as fundamental as shelter to be excluded from this list [of public goods]?”

If you care about social justice, if you care about equity, if you care about truth—read this book. It’s impeccably researched, powerfully written, and absolutely necessary. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

TLDR: A heartbreaking, infuriating, and essential read. There Is No Place for Us uncovers the systemic failures fueling homelessness in America—and reminds us that the root cause isn’t poverty, it’s policy.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Searing book on maybe the most pressing crisis in the country—the vast numbers of people living in de facto homelessness at extended stay motels, in their cars, by doubling up, and in the constant chaos of a world not made for them to even tread water. By focusing on 5 families in Atlanta, this book makes real the plight of the vast majority of the homeless who live with the daily threats of predatory corporations, unresponsive and unnecessarily complicated bureaucracies, and the failure of the richest country on earth to make a place to live a basic right. The tenacity of these families in the face of constant threats is awe-inspiring and debunks claims that the homeless are somehow at fault for their conditions. Best book of its kind since Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and an absolute must read.

[Madison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should be required reading for high schools across the country. It's straightforward in its condemnations and clear in its reasoning. Such a harrowing and valuable book for folks who are looking for the successor to Matthew Desmond's excellent Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The only thing I struggled with was the fact that it's easy to forget the specific circumstances of each individual family profiled throughout the book by the time you circle back to each perspective.

[Inez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goldstone offers a staggeringly harrowing overview of “in between” homelessness in the U.S. by following several families in their attempts to stay housed. This case study approach not only makes the book very easily accessible (as opposed to academic text filled with citations and statistics) but also illuminates the many different aspects of homelessness, humanizing it and the families to the reader (who, presumably, is housed). It also offers a glimpse into the constant tension between wanting grand scale change and contending with individual people’s needs (which I’ve touched on before). How do you advocate and organize on a national scale while assisting and supporting the individual people who need immediate help because of that system? In most ways, you can’t, and I hope books and accounts like this one push more of us over to being more comfortable helping the individual rather than signing a petition.

"Experts often talk as if there are discreet types of homeless Americans. It is widely assumed, for instance, that a family dealing with episodic homelessness has stumbled into their predicament for economic reasons—job loss, and eviction—whereas unsheltered or chronically homeless individuals are believed to be in that position because of mental health issues—a disability or substance use. Yet Pink had witnessed again and again how such things could become a bi-product of homelessness rather than causing it. Michelle’s experience demonstrated how rapidly one area of homelessness could morph into another. In other words, how porous all those ostensibly firm distinctions could be. The hidden homeless could very quickly find themselves on the street, today’s worker, given enough adversity, might lose their job and spiral into addiction or mental illness. Homelessness, seen in this light, was never a fixed state or a static condition. It was a point along a spectrum, in a motel today, on a couch tomorrow, possibly in a tent a year from now."

"But our approach to counting and defining homelessness is not just robbing people of support; it also distorts our understanding of the problem. Narrow the lens, and perhaps we can persuade ourselves that homelessness is a unique condition, afflicting a particular type of person. Widen the lens, adjust the focus, and homelessness begins to look very different."

[Tyffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the more difficult books I've read. I had to pull over listening in the car; I showed up upset to places; I had to talk to my therapist to calm down.

Unsparing in the account and daily grind of families experiencing poverty. I learned the different challenge of being poor in 2020 compared to my experience of being poor in the 80's/90's. There's no question in my mind that me and my mother would have been homeless in this climate. I saw my mom in most of the women detailed in "there is no place for us" and I heard a lot of the same words and feelings that I grew up with. I don't want that for anybody, and I hate that there's always kids involved.

I wasn't the biggest fan of switching between narratives so quickly, but maybe by doing that as a reader I felt immersed in the chaos of poverty? Maybe for someone who didn't experience being poor that's a good way to get them in the headspace? Anyone who does a social work kind of job is going to know these problems, this book isn't for them. This might be a book for people to build some empathy who don't have an experience of poverty? I would hope it would change the tune of some of the people I see on Nextdoor railing against the homeless.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important, heartbreaking set of stories!! In an urge to make this review shorter than my usual book report (I want to watch a talk with the author and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in an hour), let’s just get into it.

Flip sides of the coin
In There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone expounds on a point that many of us know deep down: our luxury is inextricably linked to other’s precarity. In the “Black mecca” of Atlanta, which has notably ranked dead-last in upward mobility, the urban growth machine has led to starkly inequal fortunes. While people like me (I don’t live in Atlanta, being illustrative here) can be educated and housed with relative ease, the people who are from Atlanta, who work “essential” jobs to keep the place running, are being priced out altogether. This sort of flip-side scenario makes me think of something my parents often said when we moved to the Charlotte region in 2009, that “a DC paycheck goes much further in North Carolina.” But what, my family should’ve been asking, happens to the people living in NC on an NC paycheck?!? Goldstone’s book attempts to answer the Atlanta version of this question:

“Increasingly in Atlanta, there were two kinds of poor Black neighborhoods: those where property values were rising and investors were buying up land, waiting for the inevitable transformation, and those like the area around Efficiency [Motel], where people ended up after being pushed out of the gentrifying neighborhoods. These spaces…did not simply coexist with [gentrifying] segments of the city, they were actively generated by them. Although they appeared worlds apart, these areas were intimately connected, like a balloon squeezed at one end. Candler Road was not a deviation from the booming new Atlanta, but another byproduct of it. One did not exist without the other.”

In other words, the glittering futures in one corner are creating the harrowing conditions in another. He shows that not only is Atlanta experiencing “redevelopment” with a host of harms, but as a nation, we are vastly underreporting those harms. When my friend and I were reading the Communist Manifesto in February, we came across a report about how our country’s record underemployment is often excluded from the record, so it doesn’t impact the “official” unemployment rate politicians use in their stump speeches. Goldstone reveals that a similar underreporting is happening with homelessness, where we only count people living on the street, and not the millions of people struggling through other forms of housing instability: extended-stay hotels, SRO arrangements, or even a family member’s couch. As There Is No Place for Us shows, this underreporting about both homelessness and underemployment is actually quite linked: our country has rejected the moral imperative to pay people enough so they can have a home, and rejected to house people in the cases where they can’t pay. Disastrously, in the stories within this book, having a job and being homeless are no longer mutually exclusive categories. In fact, having an inflexible, unpredictable, and taxing minimum-wage job leaves most of these interviewees just a step away from homelessness after the first emergency. We are all super close to the brink, but we are especially failing to pull the closest people back. As Goldstone writes in the case of one interviewee, Michelle:

“Michelle’s experience demonstrated how rapidly one variant of homelessness could morph into another…how porous all those ostensibly firm distinctions could be. The hidden homeless could very quickly find themselves on the street. Today’s worker, given enough adversity, might lose their job and spiral into addiction or mental illness…Homelessness, seen in this light, was never a fixed state or a static condition. It was a point along a spectrum. In a motel today, on a couch tomorrow. Possibly in a tent a year from now.”

Gab’s editorial corner
As a housing nonprofit employee who works on several affordability programs in Atlanta, I echo Goldstone’s criticisms of my industry. Unlike the social workers profiled in this book, my job is not client facing, and is more focused on the educational, financial, and political barriers to affordable housing development. From this vantage point, I’ve seen how much work goes into efforts that fail to address the scope of our housing problem—efforts that have failed Britt, Michelle, Maurice/Natalia, Celeste, and Michelle. It’s like watching drops in a bucket, if the drops took blood, sweat, tears, and countless technical assistance cohorts and policy whitepapers and financing “innovations” to materialize. We do so much work for so few homes, and at what cost? To what ends?

Just this week, I tried to help identify funding for a development right near the projects where Britt’s family used to live. I spent dozens of hours compiling, verifying, and summarizing information about this project; brainstorming and corresponding with potential funders for the project; planning, hosting, and facilitating a “shark tank” style call to drum up interest in the project; and now I am following up with more people because the sharks didn’t bite. This is all not including the time I spend tracking my own work on this program for *OUR* funders, people who must be sufficiently pleased with our outcomes for me to be compensated to do this job which helps other people do their job which tries to help people get into homes they can’t afford because of THEIR jobs underpaying them. And what is the result of all this, you ask? Hopefully, 9 homes in a new project will be affordable to people making 5 times the minimum wage (but at least, I hear my former boss saying, it’s still below 100% AMI!!! 🤡🤬)

The affordable housing sector is failing people on every turn—with the duration of affordability (qualified contracts mentioned in a book!!), with the level of affordability (rarely at/below 30% AMI, which is where the dire need is), and the plethora of carceral, punitive restrictions once people even get into this incredibly scarce “affordable” housing. As Goldstone notes, the voucher program is a mess where everyone wants them. I see this not just on the user side with housing choice vouchers, but also on the affordable developer side with project-based vouchers. The demand isn’t enough, and the waitlist is ever growing (unless it’s pruned through infeasible deadlines and landlord discrimination, like Britt experienced.) And now thanks to Trump, even the people who “win” the voucher lottery MIGHT NOT EVEN HAVE THESE IN THE DOOMSDAY BUDGET SCENARIOS. Even affordable housing “innovations” I was previously really excited about, like the conversion of extended stay motels into subsidized affordable housing, are now leaving me with gloom. Not only have I now seen how few lenders are willing to invest in these deals, but the “preservation” aspect is too often about preserving units, not people, with tenant-in-place rehabs being much rarer than I initially thought as a student. SIGH. 😭🤦🏾‍♀️

Experience as a reader
The passage of time is also an incredibly depressing element of this story—things now are even worse than what these interviewees lived through. The events in There Is No Place for Us are two mayors old, and Atlanta has continued to experience rapid gentrification, displacement, inequality, and political corruption in the time between. Kara literally couldn’t have made the abortion appointment she previously had in Georgia today, most of the rents people are quoted in this book would be twice that amount now, and the corporate landlords Goldstone references now own tens of thousands of single-family homes in Metro Atlanta. Every other month, their current mayor is making a pronouncement about new affordable housing funding that will purportedly “eradicate homelessness.” The most insulting example of this was a September 2024 news conference that was LITERALLY HELD ACROSS THE STREET from a park where on any given day, THERE ARE AT LEAST 50 PEOPLE ACTIVELY EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS. That city is a truly darksided place that doesn’t seem to be getting any better—but at least they’ll have a new police training center to prepare all the people who will be evicting tenants and assaulting protestors!!

Sadly, as all of the costs of housing have continued to go up, the wages staying the same. It’s a guilty, helpless feeling as a reader, knowing each of these stories only get worse. It’s even harder to see these people’s social networks fraying to their very limits, a logical but still heartbreaking conclusion of the ordeals they are going through each day. In some ways, the relational turmoil seemed to mirror the up and down nature of housing instability itself. Even when somebody got a break with an apartment, or temporarily reconciled with a family member, it became sadly clear that this was just a brief respite from the next challenge.

Final thoughts
I really tried and failed to not make this review super long! It may be warranted though, as There Is No Place for Us is an important book that forces those of us with the (temporary?) fortune of (relative?) housing stability to pay attention to what we’ve allowed to happen to millions of other people. It’s easy to avoid this reality when unhoused people are hidden in extended stay hotels. It’s more difficult to avert your eyes when people are on the side of the highway with their kids. But when you plug in your headphones and turn on this audiobook, it’s impossible to ignore the terrible state we’re condemning people to as a society. I have no real closing words, just that I’m glad I read this book, and I’m deeply sorry that the book (and life circumstances in it) exist.

Like I said, I’m going to Goldstone’s book talk in 5 minutes, and I hope to find out if there are any crowdfunds or direct ways to compensate/support the people covered in the story. I will update my review if so, but in the meantime, I did find the info for Pink, the woman in the book who coordinated a herculean number of direct assistance efforts for people facing homelessness. We can make direct contributions to her work through one of the CashApp accounts on this webpage, each of which are for her projects/organizations.

[Jeremy Inducil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking, and it urgently shattered a bias I didn’t even realize I had: that being homeless and having a job were mutually exclusive. It made me confront how easily I’d accepted the absurd reality that a full-time minimum wage job still can’t cover a 1br apartment in most American cities!

“There are lots of things we consider public goods and fund accordingly: K-12 education, Social Security, clean water, parks, libraries, roads and highways, and other infrastructure. How have we allowed something as fundamental as shelter to be excluded from this list?”

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Be prepared: this is a book about bleak lives. And the bleak lives of these people has been made so by political policies that put money into the hands of those profit from the bleak lives of these people.

Some of the perpetrators:
Apartments with conditions so dire that they face being condemned.
Hotels set up for people who have nowhere else to go where people pay twice as much as an apartment.
Expensive child care.
Car payments that have almost 30% interest rates.
Eviction for those who can't pay rent.
Termination of electricity for those who can't pay for the service.
Gig jobs.
Scams.

And, as the author clearly states in his epilogue: "It doesn't have to be this way."

Very, very sad.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book needs to be read by every lawmaker, whether at a local, state, or federal level. These stories of people who struggle with stable housing while employed broke my heart over and over again. Please read this book and vote for change in how we house and help house people in this country. We can and must do better.