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

Even fully employed Americans are being pushed into homelessness, according to this harrowing debut report. Journalist Goldstone follows four single moms and a married couple living in metropolitan Atlanta—all of them steadily employed as restaurant workers, cleaners, health aides, call center staffers, and mechanics—who had to find new places to live because of rent increases, layoffs, a sudden large expense, or other one-off events. They face a labyrinth of obstacles: income and credit-score requirements that they don’t meet; high up-front application fees; fake realty agents trying to scam them out of their deposits; and maddening bureaucratic regulations on housing assistance. (One renter had to wait weeks for the city to review an apartment’s environmental impact before she could use her subsidized housing voucher on a deposit—by which time the apartment was no longer available.) The biggest roadblock is that, in a gentrifying Atlanta, housing is simply no longer affordable for working-class families. The result is many downward spirals through ever-worsening housing options, including the already overcrowded apartments of relatives, squalid yet exorbitantly expensive motels, a Salvation Army shelter, a car, and even the chairs in an all-night laundromat. Goldstone weaves a richly detailed narrative of his subjects’ increasingly desperate struggles, and he offers a searing indictment of a greedy corporate real estate industry, which he consistently pegs as the culprit behind these woes. It’s a gripping, high-stakes account of America’s housing emergency. (Mar.)