Imagine waking up one day and, on your usual commute to work, finding yourself involved in a minor traffic accident. Nobody is seriously injured, thank God. But you spend the rest of the morning on the phone with a friendly State Farm representative named Natalia sorting out your insurance claim. Then you head over to the local Enterprise, where a helpful employee by the name of Maurice gets your rental car ready. Would it ever occur to you that the two individuals assisting you in dealing with the aftermath of your accident are doing so amidst their own struggles with homelessness? Or does that term conjure up images of the disheveled residents of Skid Row, lost in the clutches of serious mental illness and substance abuse?
If, like me, your mind immediately leaps to the latter, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone arrives as a desperately needed wake up call. Goldstone, an anthropologist by training and a resident of Atlanta, Georgia, immerses readers in the lives of five families from his hometown who, despite their participation in the labor force, find themselves unable to maintain stable housing. The aforementioned Natalia and Maurice Taylor, married parents of three, are the heads of one of these families. After the owner of a small condo they had been renting for several years decides to put her property on the market to take advantage of rapidly escalating home prices, the Taylors (the protagonists’ names have been changed to protect their identities, but not the details of their stories) find themselves at the mercy of a similarly frothy rental market. As the city rebounded from the effects of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, Atlanta rents rose much more sharply than wages. Between 2010 and 2023, with Atlanta becoming increasingly gentrified, a total of 60,000 apartments renting for $1,250 or less were lost. The only apartment the Taylors are able to find is an enormous financial stretch to begin with. When Natalia is placed on short-term disability leave as a result of severe postpartum depression and the family’s income drops, the monthly rent becomes unmanageable. Shortly before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the family finds itself entering the nightmarish world of squalid extended-stay hotels, where for amounts that often end up exceeding what they had paid for previous housing, tenants rent rooms by the week in buildings plagued by drug use, prostitution, and other criminal activity.
For the Taylors, the inciting incidents in their descent into homelessness are the sale of their existing residence and a temporary dip in income. Several of the other families profiled likewise lose their footing in the face of modest setbacks (not unlike your imaginary traffic accident) that those not forced to live so close to the bone would have been better able to overcome. But the reversals pushing the families towards homelessness are also sometimes more harrowing. In one particularly devastating scene, a mother lies on the floor of a mildew-stained bathroom in an extended-stay hotel, desperate to prevent her chemotherapy-induced retching from waking her children.
What the families have in common are the lengths they all go to in an attempt to pull themselves out of their predicaments. Hour-long public transit commutes in the dead of night to hold on to low-wage jobs. Driving for DoorDash and other gig economy work to supplement meager incomes. Service as essential workers during a pandemic while the laptop class is safely ensconced in their homes. Online courses completed on smartphones in pursuit of better opportunities. When people are trying this hard and still end up sleeping with their children on the floor of a storage room, something has gone seriously wrong with our society. Some readers will identify in Goldstone’s account evidence of cultural failings. Four of the five families followed are headed by single mothers whose children’s fathers are largely absent from the picture. Others will point to economic factors. Goldstone notes that almost half of American workers between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four hold low-wage jobs that pay a median figure of $10.22 per hour.
In our rootless age, many may see an obvious solution to the predicament that Goldstone describes—people should simply move from high-cost cities like Atlanta to places where rents are cheaper. Set aside for the moment whether this would even work. (Goldstone points out that “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”). Set aside too the self-interested question of who then will perform all the hidden, but indispensable work that makes a city like Atlanta function. Who will care for the children of the city’s professional class? Who will clean the rooms of the hospitals where they go for treatment? Who will prepare the meals at the restaurants they frequent? (Each of these being a job held by a member of the families profiled here). Even ignoring all of this, is encouraging a fifth-generation resident of Atlanta to find someplace else to raise her family really the best we can do in the face of this problem?
A better solution, Goldstone argues, requires us to heed a maxim from James Baldwin: “Not everything that can be faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” As Goldstone demonstrates, the problem with our blinkered view of who is actually experiencing homelessness in this country is that it causes us to dramatically underestimate the magnitude of the issue, thereby reducing the sense of urgency to address it. The formal definition of homelessness used by government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development typically includes only those actually living on the streets or in designated shelters. It does not encompass those trapped in the extended-stay nightmare or temporarily staying with family and friends despite the instability inherent in these arrangements. Goldstone cites research suggesting that when this more expansive view of homelessness is taken, the number of Americans suffering from it increases at least six-fold. The nature of the problem also changes. While both the more stereotypical Skid Row resident suffering from serious mental illness and the working families presented here are alike in their possession of human dignity and their right to shelter, the types of support likely to be necessary to get them housed would seem to be quite different.
But there is another, more personal need to see at play here. One of the most profoundly moving elements of Goldstone’s narrative are the repeated examples of other members of the low-wage workforce intuitively sensing the distress of the profiled families during ordinary interactions and then offering a helping hand despite their own strained circumstances. Perhaps as a result of enduring their own struggles, these men and women seem capable of detecting the turmoil lurking just below the surface in others. To take one example, after picking up on something in the body language of a mother of three named Kara, a Walmart cashier meets her outside and hands her $50 in cash, saying “I just feel that I’m supposed to give this to you.” Later that afternoon, Kara is finally offered a spot in an affordable apartment complex after weeks of searching, contingent on her coming up with the application fee that day. The amount? $50. God has no hands or feet on Earth but ours. The human suffering chronicled by Goldstone cries out for policy solutions, but also for those of us who have been blessed with more privileged lives to be better attuned to the anguish of those we encounter in everyday life.
Recently, I came in for some gentle ribbing at the hands of my son’s basketball coach, who claimed that I never show up to practice without a book in my hand. Guilty as charged. I try to squeeze in reading time whenever and wherever I can, and as a result I usually manage to get through quite a number of good books every year. But only a very few of them are essential, offering up something without which our understanding of life is limited in some crucial way. There Is No Place for Us is essential. Those who have had the joy and the heartbreak of reading it will view the world around them with new eyes.
