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

By Brian Goldstone

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - 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

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593237145
• ISBN13: 9780593237144
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

One of the best books of the past ten years.

Goldstone manages to brings you into the lives of five families that represent what people are forced to endure everyday. The amount of research, interviews, and background investigations that went into this is leave nothing to be imagined on the cruelty that houseless people have pushed onto them by careless politicians, developers, landlords, and the business that have sprang up to drain the poorest of us the little money they have left. Don't stop with this book- let the anger fill you and use that to find a way to change policy and advocate for these that need it- I'm definitely not the same person now.