There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by Brian Goldstone (Penguin Random House, 448 pp., $30)
A few years ago, I learned that an employee at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, where I teach, was apparently living in a vacant office on campus. This person held a full-time job but could not, it seemed, afford a home. The employee’s sad situation, which lasted for at least a year, illustrates a broader crisis.
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In There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, journalist Brian Goldstone proves that the term “working homeless” is not an inherent contradiction. Far too many employed Americans lack stable housing. Often, these workers stay intermittently with friends or relatives. Sometimes, they sleep in their cars or at extended-stay hotels, living one misfortune away from a shelter, a tent encampment, or a cardboard bed beneath an overpass.
Goldstone’s much-lauded book chronicles the travails of five such African American families in Atlanta between 2019 and 2022. While readers will likely sympathize with the protagonists, the book lacks analytical balance. Its historical context is thin, and its policy prescriptions—only briefly sketched in an epilogue—are familiar left-wing shibboleths.
Atlanta has changed dramatically in recent years. What some celebrate as the city’s renaissance has made it less affordable and displaced some residents. I’ve experienced this myself, after having moved to Atlanta in 2010. Between then and 2023, rents climbed by 76 percent, outpacing my income gains.
Goldstone rightly laments the city’s structural problems. Atlanta suffers from severe sprawl and one of the nation’s worst mass-transit systems. Car ownership is nearly essential. Meantime, Georgia has some of the country’s least tenant-friendly policies, hurting poor renters who wish to avoid, for example, disingenuous tacked-on fees.
That’s just the start. The Department of Justice filed an antitrust complaint against a major Atlanta-based property manager in 2025 for allegedly using illegal price-setting algorithms. The city’s crowded rental market forces some renters to accept barely habitable units. Tenants reporting hazardous conditions risk retaliatory evictions that can be difficult to contest. Sometimes, the dilapidated property winds up being condemned.
Though the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) offers Section 8 vouchers to low-income families, demand far exceeds supply. Recipients are chosen through a computerized lottery. The vouchers come with strict parameters and frequently expire before they can be used, since landlords don’t have to accept them. Those that do honor the vouchers typically own properties in already-distressed neighborhoods.
Goldstone’s sharply etched portrayals illustrate how hard it can be for poor families to confront these obstacles. Attentive readers will notice, however, that the families he chronicles are undone by a brutal combination of bad luck and bad choices. Goldstone emphasizes the first but ignores the second.
Only one of the five families Goldstone follows involves a married couple. The other four are headed by single black women with 12 children between them. None of those kids’ fathers seems to provide consistent support. The narrative shows that one of the surest ways for a poor woman to become much poorer is to have multiple children out of wedlock—but Goldstone makes the point only accidentally.
Nearly all the book’s protagonists could have been more discerning and self-protective. Celeste abruptly loses her Westover Drive home when a vengeful ex sets it ablaze. She gets kicked out of her next apartment after her godson accidentally discharges a pistol and its bullet goes through the floor, killing a 14-year-old pregnant girl.
Another woman, Britt, is shocked when her landlord refuses to renew her lease. His objection? She’d let a recently incarcerated felon move in with her family, violating her rental agreement.
Michelle abruptly quits a stable overnight job at the Salvation Army without having another position lined up. She then takes up with a volatile, unemployed pothead named Nick—whom her children and neighbors plainly despise—in her family’s cramped quarters. Turns out, everyone was right about Nick except Michelle. He beats her up and threatens to kill her—no idle threat considering that he is now in prison for murdering a different girlfriend.
These and other passages remind one of a bad horror movie, where the dangers are obvious to everyone except the characters themselves.
One way of narrating all this—Goldstone’s approach—suggests that the volatility in poor black communities arises understandably, and almost inevitably, due to stressors attributed to systemic racism. Another framing—less comforting—places greater weight on the shortcomings of the book’s protagonists.
Goldstone holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke, which serves him well here, but the book could use a firmer grounding in history. “Mass homelessness arose recently, within our lifetimes,” he claims. While it is true that the causes and nature of homelessness differ today, the problem was widespread and openly discussed as far back as the 1800s. Hobos, tramps, and “women adrift” numbered in the hundreds of thousands at a time when the national population was much smaller.
And while Goldstone doesn’t mention it, the debate over who among the poor is “deserving” or “undeserving” is hardly new. It’s one of the most persistent throughlines in American history, and its lessons are sobering. One of the things I’ve learned through volunteering to help the homeless in Atlanta is that good-faith reformers repeatedly confront painful limits—not of compassion, but of what can be realistically achieved amid the complexities of human behavior.
Goldstone casually assumes that various well-intentioned policies are sure to lead to positive results. He supports, for instance, “a public option for housing”—that is, taking some housing off the private market, “beyond the reach of speculators and profiteers.” What could go wrong? Quite a lot, in fact. Housing does not cease to become scarce when markets are sidelined; it merely gets rationed differently. Goldstone seems unaware of the legacy of U.S. public housing in the 1960s and 1970s—how it concentrated poverty, encouraged dependency, eroded community and family stability, worsened urban decline, and provoked backlash. I do not understand how someone can write about today’s housing crisis without knowing this history.
It should not be hard to sympathize morally with the poor, and offer support, without sentimentalizing them or denying their agency. A powerful but unintended lesson of There Is No Place for Us is that bourgeois values matter—their absence can deepen misfortune.
Top Photo by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images