Lunch and Learn: "There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America" by Brian Goldstone

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

This fall, grab your favorite lunch at noon and tune in to virtual conversations with the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System on topics from repairing the effects of racial injustice to fighting for equitable access to recovering from exile and loss. Let’s learn together!

Lunch and Learn returns with special guest Brian Goldstone in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System discussing his new book, "There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America."

Registration not required. Click on the YouTube video linked below to stream the program live or watch the recording later.

About the Book:

By telling 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 a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something appalling and seemingly-oxymoronic 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. Today, there isn't a single county in America where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Brian reveals the human cost of this crisis by ushering us into the lives of:

Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in Atlanta after being priced out of Washington, D.C., lured by the promise of upward mobility in the nation’s Black Mecca. But when their landlord decides to sell, their middle-class aspirations crumble as they’re thrust into Atlanta’s cutthroat rental market. Before long, Natalia is stunned to find herself checking the box for “homeless” on an assistance application

Kara, a single mother of four, fantasizes about starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Nights are spent in a cramped motel room or her Toyota Avalon, where she delivers food for DoorDash with her kids in tow—teaching them to pee in soda bottles to avoid late deliveries. Determined to secure housing through a program for homeless families, she faces rejection after rejection, and when she finally secures an apartment, bureaucratic delays confront her with an impossible choice: move into an unaffordable rental or start over.

Britt’s roots in Atlanta stretch back five generations, and she hopes a long-awaited Section 8 voucher will give her family a foothold in the rapidly gentrifying, increasingly unequal city of her birth. But when she finally finds a unit near the BeltLine, the low-income complex is sold to a luxury developer, displacing Britt and more than a hundred other families. Once again, Britt and her two young children confront an uncertain future.

Michelle, a mother of three, is pursuing her dream of becoming a social worker while juggling college coursework and the daily fight to keep her family housed. After her fiancé squanders their rent money, she and her children lose their apartment and eventually end up in a filthy, freezing storage room, selling plasma and food stamps to scrape by. When a promising daycare job offers a way out, her own lack of affordable childcare for her youngest leaves her with no choice but to turn it down, pushing Michelle further into the relentless grind of survival.

Celeste is a person of a thousand talents, savvy and unflappable, but a cancer diagnosis and a predatory housing system prove overwhelming even for her. Forced into a run-down extended-stay hotel, she transforms her room into a makeshift restaurant, selling meals to neighbors while undergoing chemo and working grueling shifts at a warehouse. Yet, despite her resourcefulness, systemic barriers to assistance—like being deemed “not homeless enough” to qualify for housing aid—leave her trapped in instability, where hope of escape feels agonizingly out of reach.

Shockingly, all of these people are part of 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. There Is No Place for Us brings them out of the shadow realm and puts them front and center, where they—and this societal failure—should be. To do so, Brian spent more than three years reporting the book, dividing his time between a squalid extended-stay hotel—a de facto homeless shelter where two of the families were living—and the cars, congregate shelters, and relatives’ apartments that the other families were cycling in and out of. He followed the parents as they worked gig jobs, and met with caseworkers, teachers, and child welfare investigators; he went with them to court, to plasma donation centers, to homeless service agencies. The duration of the reporting allows us to see that homelessness is less a decisive turning point or intractable “condition” than a continuum of insecurity. We feel the anguish of their circumstances all the more because we see what came prior to it.  
We’ve long been told that work is a solution to poverty and homelessness (“Why don’t they just get a job?”). There Is No Place for Us offers a forceful rejoinder to that idea.

About the author: 

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 Ph.D. 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.