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

by Brian Goldstone

Today there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Unemployment is at a record low; corporate profits have surged; the signs of growth are everywhere. Yet the delivery drivers, daycare workers, supermarket cashiers, and home health aides who help sustain our cities are being relentlessly priced out of them—and often out of housing altogether. Unlike earlier periods of widespread immiseration, such as the recession of 2008, what we’re seeing today is an emergency born less of poverty than prosperity. Families are not “falling” into homelessness. They’re being pushed.

Georgia, among the most landlord-friendly states in the country, was one of only three that did not require property owners to guarantee the habitability of apartments they rented out.

Urban planners—increasingly concerned with growth, and so beholden to the priorities of developers and investors—play a critical role not only in creating rent gaps where none previously existed but in helping landlords and property owners exploit them. In this way, gentrification becomes a political process as much as a social and economic one: an outcome of zoning changes and tax abatements, infrastructure upgrades and public-private partnerships.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Ours doesn’t have to be a society where people clocking sixty hours a week aren’t paid enough to meet their basic needs; or where parents have to sell their plasma or food stamps or go without electricity in order to keep their children housed; or where your ability to afford an apartment is contingent on winning a voucher “lottery” and spending years on a waitlist, only to then lose the voucher when no landlord will accept it. In the richest country on earth, nobody—whether they work or have a disability or struggle with addiction or mental health challenges—should be deprived of stable shelter. Mass homelessness arose recently, within our lifetimes. It’s worth reminding ourselves of this fact, because if it hasn’t always been like this, then a different kind of future is possible.