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

by Brian Goldstone

“I grew up in this city,” she told me. “I graduated from high school in this city. Through my job, I’ve been taking care of men and women in this city. And now my kids and I are homeless? How does that even happen?”

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.

But since 1985, rent prices nationwide have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.

If you’re disabled and receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which is capped at $943 a month, it’s even worse: the national average rent now amounts to 142 percent of this form of fixed income.

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.

These spaces, hollowed out by what the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has referred to as “organized abandonment,” did not simply coexist alongside newly or soon-to-be gentrified segments of the city. They were actively generated by them.

She had been evicted, without her knowledge, from a home that had been destroyed and deemed uninhabitable. In the long run, she realized, the eviction could prove more devastating than the fire itself. The stain on her rental history, this “Scarlet E,” could haunt her for years to come.

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. Skyrocketing rents were not translating into better conditions—on the contrary, exorbitant rent hikes were occurring at places that, in many cases, were barely livable. Rats and overflowing sewage, leaking ceilings, black mold, exposed electrical wiring: these were endemic in complexes occupied by the city’s poorest families. Their only recourse was to contact code enforcement. But nothing prevented landlords from evicting tenants for reporting hazardous conditions; here, too, Georgia was one of the few states that did not prohibit “retaliatory evictions.”

in recent years, approximately 20 percent of child removals in Georgia were due to “inadequate housing.”

Natalia would later pinpoint the moment she realized that their days in D.C. were numbered. She was riding the bus not far from their apartment on Livingston Road, an area still relatively untouched by the redevelopment craze, when she observed two white women jogging on the sidewalk. Her fellow passengers saw them as well. “We were all staring at the women,” she recalled. “You would have thought we’d seen a ghost. And then this older guy was like, ‘Well, I guess we need to start looking for another place to live.’ ”

These investors targeted older residents potentially unaware of what their homes were worth, bombarding them with unsolicited text messages, letters, and phone calls (a practice known as “dialing for dollars”) and trying to convince them to sell—often for a fraction of the house’s actual worth. The properties were then flipped, or refurbished and rented out, or left unoccupied until they could be sold again for maximum profit.

But by and large it was the newer, wealthier residents who benefited from these improvements. Many longtime residents were no longer around, casualties of gentrification in the sense defined by the LA Tenants Union: the “displacement and replacement of the poor for profit.”

Gentrification is purposeful and produced. Before the gentrifiers arrive, a neighborhood first has to become gentrifiable. The conditions for transformation must be created.

In his book Capital City, Samuel Stein, a housing analyst and city planner, shows that gentrification is the third stage in a cycle of strategic investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment in a particular area.

Why does a specific neighborhood gentrify? Because investors have identified a “rent gap,” as geographer Neil Smith terms it. This gap represents the difference between the current value of land and the higher returns it could yield through some intervention, such as renovating a property, demolishing and constructing new buildings, or evicting old tenants and attracting different ones. The wider the rent gap, the stronger the incentive for investment.

the primary drivers of the rent gap are shifts in urban policy and market demand. 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.

There is an inherent dignity in work, the architects of welfare reform had piously declared. Without a job, single mothers are incapable not only of escaping poverty but of realizing the blessing of self-sufficiency. Never mind that most of the jobs available to these women paid poverty wages, came with no health insurance, and were at constant risk of being eliminated by companies’ “restructuring strategies.” Many women didn’t have access to the childcare that would allow them to work such jobs.

Experts often talk as if there are discrete 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, an 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 by-product of homelessness rather than causing it. Michelle’s experience demonstrated how rapidly one variant 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. Pink had to remind herself that only recently the woman walking toward her had been in school and renting her own apartment. 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.

The idealism that had once animated her work in social services had, after she’d sat through countless webinars and conference plenaries and unveilings of strategic plans, been eroded by a creeping suspicion: that both the local and national response to homelessness was being hobbled by a kind of willful myopia. Instead of an honest assessment of why scores of people were continuing to become unhoused—poverty wages, out-of-control rents, greed, racism, gentrification—there was bloodless technocratic talk of “leveraging resources” and “program deliverables.” Instead of tenants’ rights workshops and political advocacy, there were mandatory parenting classes.

Financial support was important. But Carla had grown convinced that what her clients really needed was not assistance per se. It was power. “Most people I work with, they don’t just feel hopeless. They feel powerless. Because they’re constantly subjected to forces beyond their control—even beyond their understanding.”

A conservative estimate of the actual number of people deprived of housing in the United States—those living in vehicles or hotel rooms, or staying temporarily with others, along with people in shelters or on the street—would be well over four million.

This amounts to a shortage of 7.3 million low-rent apartments—a colossal deficit, and the single greatest reason why so many people are continuing to become homeless.

Last year, the Justice Department accused the country’s largest property managers of colluding to artificially increase rents by way of a price-setting algorithm. The scheme allegedly encompassed 70 percent of multifamily apartment buildings nationwide and sixteen million units.

Wall Street firms like Blackstone and Starwood Capital are not only profiting off people’s desperation to remain housed. They are also, increasingly, taking over the markets and industries designed to extract revenue from those who have already lost their homes. Rooming houses and extended-stays, cosigning companies and subprime lending, storage facilities and credit repair: a whole host of enterprises have sprung up to capitalize on the nation’s housing woes. Homelessness has become big business.

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,

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 nonprofits or municipal governments, or, as with limited-equity cooperatives or land trusts, residents can own a stake in their 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.