There Is No Place for Us

Through the unforgettable 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 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....

Autorentext

Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a PhD in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family.

Klappentext

"Through the ... stories of five Atlanta families, this ... work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend--the dramatic rise of the 'working homeless' in cities across America"--

Zusammenfassung
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.

Leseprobe
1

Britt scrutinized her face in the bathroom mirror, hoping she looked less tired than she felt. Sleep had been hard to come by since she began working the closing shift at Low Country, a “new Southern cuisine” restaurant at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Some nights, after a grinding hour-plus commute from the airport back to her great-grandmother’s apartment in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood, she managed to crawl into bed beside her two-year-old son, Kyrie, and four-year-old daughter, Desiree, without waking them. Last night she was not so lucky: Kyrie stirred and Britt was up with him until well past midnight. No sooner had they finally drifted off than Britt’s phone alarm sounded, and it was all she could do to get the kids dressed and fed by six o’clock, when their daycare van arrived. Now, seven hours later, she massaged cocoa butter moisturizer onto her cheeks and forehead. Good enough, she thought with a sigh.

“Britt!” her great-grandmother bellowed over a television commercial. “Don’t forget to tidy up my living room before you leave!” Britt examined herself one last time. She hadn’t been able to wash her line-cook uniform between the previous night’s shift and the one she would be starting shortly, but the stains weren’t too noticeable.

For five months, Britt and her kids had been living out of several oversized tote bags in a corner of the apartment’s compact living room, next to the pullout sofa bed they shared. An ironclad rule at Granny’s apartment was that you pick up after yourself, and as Britt rushed to fold their clothes and blankets, she tried to arrange everything as neatly as possible. She had never asked Granny for a closet or dresser drawer in which to keep these items, in part because it seemed like there wasn’t any room to spare—the older woman had a propensity to squirrel away whatever toy or child’s sweater or pajama set she thought could be handed down to the family’s newest members—but mostly because she needed to believe that their stay at her apartment was only temporary. For her part, Granny made it clear in her own loving but not particularly subtle way that she was in no need of roommates. Britt described it to a friend as a “don’t get too comfortable” situation.

After reassembling the sofa bed and arranging its cushions, Britt hurried into the kitchen to finish preparing the kids’ dinner for later: chicken tenders, rice, green peas, and Pillsbury Crescent Rolls. She glanced at Granny, perched in her rocking chair a few feet away from the TV. Britt often marveled at the disconnect between this kindly arthritic woman, who passed the hours glued to Judge Mathis or Tyler Perry’s Madea movies while clutching her large-print Bible, and the stories she’d grown up hearing about her. Britt’s favorite photo of Granny from her younger years showed a scowling, self-professed hustler outside Butler’s Shoes in downtown Atlanta, sporti…