The New Face of Homelessness: Brian Goldstone on THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US

Transcript of podcast interview on Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon

Episode Summary

In this episode of *Writer’s Voice*, we speak with anthropologist and journalist Brian Goldstone about his searing nonfiction book There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America.

Goldstone follows five families in Atlanta who work full-time jobs yet face chronic housing instability—often living in extended-stay motels, losing Section 8 housing, or being denied shelter entirely.

He explains how homelessness has become a widespread, invisible crisis in the U.S.—with nearly 4 million people unhoused, the majority of them working families. He also explores the failures of programs like Section 8, the profiteering of private equity in extended-stay motels, and how booming urban development displaces the very people who power those economies. By focusing on Black working families in Atlanta, Goldstone unpacks the racialized legacy of housing injustice and the growing commodification of shelter in America.

Through powerful storytelling and rigorous reporting, Goldstone shows how homelessness in the U.S. is no longer just a crisis of poverty—but a crisis of prosperity. This interview confronts systemic housing injustice and calls for a fundamental paradigm shift in how we understand the human right to a home.

Transcript

FR: Brian Goldstone, welcome to Writer's Voice.

BG: Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be with you.

I have to say this was just such a terrific book, and there was so much in it. To me, it brought home the impossible situations, the crushing stress and the family havoc that homelessness causes.

And you really zero in on what one should imagine might be the least likely people to become homeless. That's people who work full-time.

Exactly. And that's a population that I argue in the book has really been written out of the story we, as a nation, have told ourselves about homelessness.

And you say it's an exponentially bigger and more pervasive phenomenon than we have been led to believe.

Yeah.

What is the true scale of homelessness in America, and do we even know?

Well, one of the really scary realities that we confront when we begin to really kind of go beyond the surface accounts of homelessness is that as bad as the official numbers are, and just to be clear, over the last two years, the official homeless count, the point-in-time census, which is conducted every year by the federal government, this point-in-time count showed the highest level of homelessness since that count began to be conducted in the mid-2000s.

So two years ago, it was the highest level on record and then the most recent count this past year broke that record. So the official number is just catastrophic.

But what I document in the book by cobbling together different data sources is that the true scale, the true severity of homelessness in the United States right now is, and this is a conservative estimate, about six times greater than that official number. The official count showed about 770,000 men, women, and children unhoused this past year. And I argue that the true number is closer to 4 million.

So we're talking about a truly cataclysmic phenomenon that is severely undercounted and I would argue severely misunderstood.

And it's in line with something I recently read of a study that said that 60% of Americans don't earn enough to meet their basic needs. And that among those basic needs is shelter.

Yes.

And you say that housing is now unaffordable for half of all U.S. renters, according to one study. So, you know, give or take 10%, that kind of fits in with that earlier number.

Talk about the kind of disconnect between the wages that people earn and the cost of housing.

Yeah, it's really at the very heart of why we're seeing this skyrocketing homelessness in America right now. The growing chasm between what people are earning in their jobs and what it costs to just afford a place to live is growing wider and wider, that chasm. And I showed in the book that since 1985, rents nationwide have outpaced income gains in this country by 325%. So, you know, that statistic is about as succinct an explanation as I can think of why homelessness is spiraling in the way it is.

And, you know, another really shocking statistic is that right now in America, there is not a single state, city, or county where someone earning the local minimum wage and working full-time, and I say local minimum wage because in many states, the minimum wage is higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

So a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage, not a single city, state, or county in the U.S. where that person can afford just a modest two-bedroom apartment.

So, the idea that you could just leave, say, New York or L.A. or San Francisco, these places that tend to get much of the attention when we're talking about the affordability crisis, the idea that you could just leave one of those urban centers and go somewhere cheaper, that's a refrain I've heard many times from people in the course of working on this subject, that is really not feasible.

There really is nowhere to go in this country where you can afford rent as a low-wage worker. Of course, there are little pockets of affordability, but those places are just rapidly disappearing.

Now, you focus this book on Atlanta, and in fact, you focus on five families that you follow in Atlanta. You talk about homelessness as a problem less of poverty than prosperity, with Atlanta as your exemplar. Talk about this seeming paradox.

In basing the book in Atlanta, I suggest that Atlanta really is representative of what any number of cities across the country are witnessing right now.

Atlanta, over the last decade or so, has undergone this much-celebrated renaissance, this kind of transformation of its urban center. What used to be called the inner city has become a playground over the last several years for those wealthy enough to afford the many amenities that have emerged.

The new green space, the transformation of old industrial buildings and complexes into boutiques and stylish hotels and cafes, and all the recognizable hallmarks of gentrification and, quote, revitalization, have definitely been there in Atlanta over the last decade or so.

The population of the city has grown much, much wealthier. It's also become much whiter. A lot of the black working class population has been pushed out.

And so that trend, that kind of revitalization, I found is kind of, it's not just happening alongside skyrocketing homelessness and sort of mounting insecurity where housing is concerned, but it's actually fueling that insecurity.

There's a causal relationship between the success that a city like Atlanta is experiencing and the growing inability of its poor and working families and individuals, the people who actually and paradoxically, I would say, and also perversely power that very growth, who make that very success possible, they're finding it increasingly difficult not just to stay in the neighborhoods where they grew up, but really to just have housing at all.

And that dynamic, that's why I say that this is less a crisis of poverty than of prosperity, that it's the product less of a failing economy than a booming economy.

It's an economy that is thriving just not for a growing number of the people, again, who are making that economy work and making that economy possible.

So that is something that any number of cities across the country are also seeing, from Nashville and Charlotte to Portland and Phoenix, you name it. This is just as much a Seattle story, a Charlotte story, a Nashville story, as it is an Atlanta story.

And it's also an indication of widening income inequality, because the poverty is there and the poverty is being driven by the prosperity.

There's a cliche, I think, where we say, how is it that so much wealth, such extreme wealth can coexist alongside such severe deprivation in America or in many of our cities?

And again, I'm trying to show that this isn't just a phenomenon of sort of coexisting, but that one is actually making the other possible.

I often think of a Toni Morrison quote that she delivered during a commencement speech at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1980s, where she said something to the effect of, “imagine, envision, if our fun, our enjoyment wasn't made possible by the deprivation of another.” And that could in some ways be the epigraph for this book, because so much of what we, and I say we sort of advisedly here, so much of what we enjoy about our cities today is really being made possible by the insecurity and precarity of our neighbors.

And as I said, you follow five families, but you open with someone who you don't follow in the book, Cokethia Goodman. She's a home health aide who became homeless despite working full-time.

Why did you choose to start with her story, and what does her situation represent about the crisis of working homelessness in America?

Yeah, well, I started with Cokethia Goodman in the book's introduction, because she was actually my entree into this world of homelessness that is out of sight and has been rendered invisible.

Around 2018, my wife, who's a nurse practitioner, was working at a community health center here in Atlanta where we live, and she began to notice this trend.

Patients she was seeing were working at Amazon warehouses or at Walmart or at McDonald's, or they were, you know, daycare workers, or they were driving for Uber and Lyft, and when they were finishing their shifts, they weren't going to an apartment.

They were going to shelters or in some cases sleeping in the very cars they had just done those airport runs for Uber and Lyft in.

And she was stunned by this trend, because these people had none of the sort of markers of homelessness.

They were actually very concerned to make sure that the people in their life, their co-workers and kids' teachers, didn't know that they were homeless. So she was stunned by this trend, and when she told me about it, I was stunned. I had been reporting on different issues around the world, often very kind of bleak topics, but this was happening right in my backyard.

And I remember at that time typing the words, working homeless, into an academic search engine, because I just wanted to see what kind of literature there was on this connection between employment and homelessness. And I was shocked to find that there was virtually nothing about that link.

When work and employment was discussed in the literature on homelessness, it was negatively. It was kind of in the way we might expect that, that work is absent from the phenomenon of homelessness.

As Peter Rossi put it in one of his sort of, in one of the seminal books about homelessness called Down and Out in America, he said that homelessness is cut off from the world of work.

So that was kind of the taken for granted assumption, I think, in a lot of the literature.

And I just began to wonder, you know, what my wife was seeing, was that common? If so, why was it common?

And so, Cokethia Goodman was the first person who I ended up following for a magazine story for the New Republic. I ended up following her and her family for several months.

But by the time I met them, they had already been homeless for, I believe, about three months. And their story really, I came to discover, was emblematic of this new American homelessness.

They had been renting a home in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Atlanta called Peoples Town, which was a historically black working class neighborhood.

And this neighborhood was adjacent to the Beltline. And the Beltline is sort of the ultimate signifier of the new Atlanta. It's a 22-mile mixed-use trail that circles the city.

And everything the Beltline touches, property values are skyrocketing. And poor people are being pushed out because their rents are also skyrocketing.

And that's what happened to Cokethia and her kids. Her landlord had actually purchased this home as an investment vehicle. And she realized it was a good time to sell. So she prematurely terminated Kokithi's lease, even though she had been kind of a model tenant. She had done everything right, never missed her rent, but her lease was terminated.

And that was the first domino that fell for them. And they ended up renting another home on sort of the periphery of the city. That home was soon condemned, even though it was even more expensive than this other rental home.

And then, as I say, by the time I met them, they had been homeless for several months already.

So yeah, I think Cokethia's story very much captured all the dynamics we've already touched on, the ways that this insecurity is being fueled by all this newfound wealth and soaring property values and so forth, a really booming economy.

And after I finished that story, I realized I had just scratched the surface. There was so much more to investigate. And that's why I ended up expanding that story into a book where I then followed five different families in Atlanta.

And these stories are just heartbreaking. All of these families are Black. Why did you only follow Black families? You're not saying that the problem of homelessness doesn't affect White families as well or Latino families, but why did you follow Black families?

Yeah, you know, there's a few different ways of addressing that question.

So let me just start by saying that when I began this project, when I began to write the book, I did have this aspiration to kind of check all the different demographic boxes to achieve a kind of diversity among the families I was following.

And even to focus not only on families, but individuals as well.

Because of course, we know that homelessness is not just a problem among families, you know, parents with children.

But as I began to report more and more, I realized that in Atlanta, although Atlanta is no longer a majority Black city, it used to be, but now it's, I believe, about 47%.

So it's no longer a majority Black city, but the families experiencing homelessness in Atlanta are 93% Black.

So in some ways, to find a white family or a white individual who was experiencing homelessness here in Atlanta, it began to feel almost like a forced endeavor, you know, to seek out the one family somewhere out in the suburbs, you know, who is struggling in this way.

It felt a little forced because that just wasn't the population that I was encountering as I was doing this reporting.

If you go to a food pantry on a Saturday morning here in Atlanta, it will be almost entirely, you know, made up of Black families and individuals.

So that's one way of answering the question, is just that there is a deeply racialized dimension to this crisis.

And that racialized dimension takes a different form and in different regions and different cities.

So in Minneapolis, where I was recently, there's a huge proportion of the homeless population that is indigenous and Native American.

In Northern California, where I reported on homelessness, in Salinas, a city near Monterey, the overwhelming number of families and individuals experiencing homelessness were Latino and immigrant populations.

So that racialized dimension does take a different form depending on the place where one is investigating this issue.

But race really is, I would argue, inescapable from understanding this catastrophe.

And this goes back, there's a history to that number.

There's a history to that disproportionality.

And where Black Americans are concerned, one of the families in the book, one of the main people, Natalia, she, in the course of reading a history book, at one point in the book, she begins to see how her own insecurity goes back to 4 million enslaved people being freed, being emancipated into a country, into an economy where they were systematically deprived of ownership rights and property rights, where they were essentially forced into a labor economy of low wages and rent and debt.

And that continued through a legacy of redlining and restrictive covenants that made it impossible for Black Americans to own homes in certain places or to own homes at all.

So all of this has a history. This didn't just emerge overnight. And so that's one way of answering the question.

And another kind of practical explanation for why families, not individuals, is just that when I was setting out to report this book, I knew that I wanted to immerse myself in the day-to-day lives of those I was writing about.

I knew this would be not just a quick drop-in, get the story and leave kind of thing, that this would be a multi-year project.

And so this was less a matter of me finding the families I would write about or the people I would write about than a very complicated negotiation, like who is going to allow me into their world, into their life, in such a way that their experience won't just be explicable and understood, but felt, felt in a very visceral way because of the depth of the engagement.

And these just happened to be the families where there was that kind of mutual understanding. And so part of it was just kind of the contingency of who was just willing to have me immersed in their lives in this way.

Well, Brian Goldstone, as I said in the beginning, it just comes so vividly to life in this book, There Is No Place For Us, Working Homeless in America.

So let's dive a little deeper into some of the situations these families face. First of all, could you talk about the hotel trap, what you call that the hotel trap? Maybe Kara might be a good exemplar of that or Celeste?

Maybe Celeste, actually. Celeste, because she ends up even opening a kind of makeshift restaurant out of her hotel room at Efficiency Lodge. I know I'm using this word a lot in our conversation, shocked, astonished, stunned, but I truly, I mean, that was my, along with anger and grief, astonishment was sort of the dominant feeling I had throughout reporting this book.

And one of the things that just really shocked me was that these budget hotels and motels that, as a resident of Atlanta, I had been driving by, you know, all the time, pretty much every day, places that are not far from where I live with my family, that these are not actually hotels and motels in the way we might think of them, but they're actually extremely profitable homeless shelters.

These extended stay hotels make up a key site of the ecosystem of American homelessness today. They are a key site, and they are just an absolutely neglected site.

There's been so little research and reporting on these places.

And so one of the hotels in the book where I ended up kind of embedding myself for over a year is called Efficiency Lodge.

And Efficiency Lodge is an extended stay hotel on a road called Candler Road in Atlanta. And on this one road, just within about a one-mile vicinity, there are probably a dozen extended stay hotels and motels just like this one.

These are places where people who have been pushed out of the formal housing market, who because of an eviction on their record or low credit scores, they can't get into a standard apartment.

And so they find themselves living in these hotels where the conditions are just squalid, where just abysmal living conditions.

We're talking black mold, ceilings about to cave in, electrical outlets where you can't plug anything in because it will start a fire, just really terrible conditions, rodents, cockroaches.

And yet these places are also very, very expensive.

So Celeste, who I mentioned a moment ago, Celeste, her story begins in a really dramatic way where the rental home that she and her children have been living in burns down, an abusive ex set it on fire.

She had actually recently taken a restraining order out on this ex-boyfriend, and he was arrested for arson. But I'm really careful to show that as dramatic as that was, it wasn't the house fire that caused her and her children to become homeless.

It was the fact that after that fire, the landlord who owned that home demanded that she pay not only the current month's rent, but an additional month's rent as well, plus lose her security deposit if she wanted to be released from her lease on this home that had just burned down.

And when Celeste refused to do that and hung up and discussed, she found out months later that they filed an eviction against her. So by the time she found out it was too late, the judge had already delivered a default judgment in her absence, and her credit had been tanked.

And she then understood why she was being denied at the apartment she was applying for.

So she and her kids did what countless families and individuals are doing, and she went to Efficiency Lodge, to that hotel on Candler Road.

And she thought it would just be a temporary thing. She would save up enough money to get out and pay off the eviction debt, get into a new apartment.

But you used the term hotel trap. That is the term that people use to describe these circumstances. Because once you get in, it is almost impossible to get out.

And there was a hotel motto looming behind the manager's desk when Celeste and her kids first checked in. And the hotel motto said, stay a night or stay forever.

And as time went on, that motto began to feel less like an invitation than a threat.

Another family in the book, Natalia and Maurice, they described their hotel room at Extended Stay America as an expensive prison. And the reason they call it an expensive prison is because it's nearly double what they were paying for a two-bedroom apartment down the road that they had been evicted from.

And they're now living in a studio-sized hotel room with their three children, where Natalia is working at a State Farm call center, taking calls in this hotel room with her kids in the background.

Just awful conditions in this room where I spent many hours with them.

And again, it's almost double, no, more than double, than what they had been paying for an apartment, a two-bedroom apartment down the street.

And one last thing I'll say about these Extended Stay hotels, this world of Extended Stay hotels, is that they are proliferating across the country.

And one really startling fact is that many of us are now familiar with the reality of private equity firms and Wall Street investors buying up growing swaths of America's rental housing units and making that housing ever more volatile and insecure and precarious for those who are renting those units by jacking up rents and evicting people en masse and getting wealthier tenants in.

But what is really startling is that those same Wall Street investors and private equity firms are also buying up the places where the families who I write about in this book and the millions of families like them are ending up once they become homeless.

So Blackstone and Starwood Capital, two private equity giants, during the pandemic, they saw how profitable all of this insecurity could be. And they bought Extended Stay America, the same hotel that Natalia and Maurice described as an expensive prison. They bought this hotel chain for $6 billion. Because again, they saw just how profitable all of this precarity had become.

And yeah, I think we've heard the James Baldwin line about how extremely expensive it is to be poor in America. And I think what these hotels demonstrate, along with a whole range of other business models that are really designed to capitalize on the suffering of these families and individuals, what these hotels show is sort of the flip side of that Baldwin line. You know, not just how extremely expensive it is to be poor, but how extremely, again, profitable homelessness has become.

A kind of vertical integration model. You buy up the rental properties, you evict people en masse, often according to a kind of algorithm, and then you're buying up the properties that they are forced to go to. I mean, it's just really horrific.

And then what about, you know, the classical relief that is supposed to be there. Things like Section 8. Talk about Section 8 and how well or not well that works.

Yeah, so another family in the book, Britt and her children. Through Britt's story alone, you could kind of tell the history of housing policy in the United States.

So Britt, her roots in Atlanta go back five generations, and she actually grew up in public housing in Atlanta.

Atlanta was the first city in America to build public housing in the 1930s under the New Deal.

And later, in the 90s and 2000s, Atlanta actually became the first city in the country to begin demolishing all of its public housing.

So Britt, when she was born in the early 90s, she lived in public housing with her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother.

But when her public housing complex was demolished, she and her mother were displaced, and they were actually homeless.

They actually lived in these extended stay hotels when she was a child.

And as an adult, when the book opened, she's working at the Atlanta airport, the crown jewel of Atlanta's economy, the busiest airport in the world. Her mom, Cass, also works at the airport. Britt works at a restaurant called Low Country, kind of a Southern food restaurant. And her mom mops floors at the airport.

And Britt is determined when the book opens that as unaffordable as Atlanta is becoming, she is going to make a home for herself and her children in the city. And the key to that being possible is securing a Section 8 voucher.

When all of those public housing units were demolished, what replaced the model of public housing was a kind of private-public partnership, basically distributing vouchers to poor renters who could take those vouchers to the private market and get a landlord to rent to them.

And this voucher would subsidize the majority of their monthly rent.

So Britt, two years before the book opens, has won the voucher lottery. And I just want to flag the fact that this essential program, this essential means by which low-income families in this country are able to have something as basic as a place to live, this thing is distributed through a lottery, through a lottery system, because only one in four families who qualify, who check all of the boxes, to qualify for this program actually receive it, actually receive the subsidy.

And because resources are so scarce, because Congress has so severely underfunded this absolutely vital lifeline, only one in four families receive it, and it's distributed through a lottery system.

So Britt has actually won the lottery. She was picked, and she ended up not getting an apartment right away, but ending up on the waiting list.

And in some cities, the waiting list is decades long just to get actually to get that voucher. But in Britt's case, she was lucky. It only took her about two years to get off of the waiting list.

And when the first chapter of the book ends, Britt gets the email that she's off the waiting list.

But long story short, because of the nature of Atlanta's rental market, because of how, and I use a term here that real estate agents like to use, how hot the rental market has become, how extremely competitive, where you have multiple tenants trying to get into a single apartment anytime it's advertised, because of how competitive the rental market has become and how scarce affordable housing is, Britt can't find a single landlord to accept her voucher.

And she gets an extension. And when that extension deadline comes and goes, she actually ends up losing that voucher.

And the year that Britt loses her voucher, something like 1,100 families in Atlanta who won that lottery, again, who checked all of those boxes, about 1,100 families out of 1,600 lost their vouchers also for the same reason. 1,100 out of 1,600. 1,100 out of 1,600.

And that is by no means exceptional. That is consistent with the numbers we see across the country.

It just seems like the height of cruelty. I mean, why is it even set up? Surely the people administering the program know that it's really hard to find a landlord who will take the Section 8 vouchers. They give them only two months to find a place. It just seems like it's a cruel game.

It is a cruel game. It's absolutely a cruel game. It's what one of the case managers in this book, Carla Wells, who has been kind of in the trenches of homeless services for most of her adult life, she calls it the housing hunger games.

And I think that's a very apt description of what families like Brit and Celeste and Maurice and Natalia and Cara and Michelle, what they find themselves suffering through.

And then there's other kinds of assistance that is supposed to be there. There are shelters, homeless shelters. Now, they have a pretty bad reputation too, but in comparison to the extended stay hotels, at least they're free. I mean, the extended stay hotel, the efficiency costs $257 a week for this substandard.

Yes. And it's the cheapest one. Many of them are double or even triple that amount.

Unbelievable. So, in order to get into a homeless shelter, you obviously have to be homeless.So, tell us about, I think it's Cara, is that right? Who went to try to get into a homeless shelter and was told she wasn't homeless.

So, that was, I mean, that did happen to Cara at one point in her story too, but the situation that I really go into detail with is Celeste, where that same mother whose house burned down and she ends up at Efficiency Lodge, she tragically is soon diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer.

And even though Celeste, I mean, like many of the people in this book, she prides herself on her work ethic. She works at a warehouse stacking boxes and she is just a tenacious worker.

But when she is diagnosed with cancer, she's then forced to decide, is she going to go to her chemo appointment or is she going to go to her warehouse job?\

Because if she goes to her warehouse job, and this is just, I want to flag this as well, that it's not just about poverty wages that our workers are earning.

It's also about the nature of work itself. The fact that so many jobs like Celeste's don't provide sick leave. So Celeste is forced to decide because if she doesn't show up for work, she doesn't get paid. And if she doesn't get paid, then she can't pay her weekly rent at the hotel, and then she and her children are on the street.

So she just becomes increasingly desperate to get out of this hotel trap. And she's been very resistant to even putting the term homeless on herself because she has kind of this name it and claim it theology.

And the flip side of that is, you know, she feels like if she names herself as homeless, that's what will become her identity. That's what she will become. And so she's been very resistant to having that label on herself.

But finally, she gets so desperate to get out of this hotel to get some kind of assistance that she goes to this place called Gateway Center in downtown Atlanta.

And every city in the country has their own version of Gateway Center. It's kind of the hub for homeless services where it's called a coordinated entry point where anyone seeking assistance has to go. It's this kind of centralized location where, again, scarce resources are parceled out in a kind of triage manner.

And when Celeste shows up at, I think, 4.30 in the morning, there's already a line circling the building because people start lining up in the middle of the night.

And after standing in line for hours, and she's nauseous from the chemo, and she's in really bad shape, but she has her manila envelope filled with all the documents she's going to need.

She's been rehearsing the story she's going to tell this caseworker about the unjust eviction when her home burned down, and her credit score, and her work, and her cancer diagnosis.

But finally, when she's seen by the caseworker, the interview lasts just a couple of minutes, and she's asked all these questions that have nothing to do with her situation.

A standardized set of questions about things like, how long have you lived on the street?

When was the last time you were in jail or prison?

Do you engage in sex work?

Do you use drugs?

What kind of drugs?

And to all of these questions, Celeste says, no, never, none.

And she's kind of incredulous, like, why are you asking me these questions?

And at the end, the caseworker says, I'm so sorry, ma'am, you're not vulnerable enough to qualify for help.

And she said, and in fact, you don't fit the definition of homeless.

And this is such a key moment in the book because the federal government through HUD has come up with a definition of homeless that basically says, if you are not on the street or in a shelter, you don't count as homeless.

So every year, that homeless census that I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, every year when that's conducted, they are only counting those who are visible on the street or living in a shelter.

Everyone else is excluded. Everyone else literally does not count.

So the fact that Celeste was living in this awful hotel room or that other families are in their car or doubling up, tripling up with others in overcrowded apartments, none of those people are counted.

And so the woman says to Celeste, the caseworker says to Celeste, if you do want to be considered homeless, you have to go to a shelter.

And Celeste says, fine, I'll go to a shelter.

It just so happens that in DeKalb County, where Celeste lived, there wasn't at that time a single family homeless shelter available. So that's why people like Celeste are in their car or in these hotels.

But the caseworker says, actually, there is a shelter that you could go to in the city of Atlanta. And Celeste says, fine, I'll go there if that's what I have to do.

And then the woman pauses and she says, I'm so sorry, you mentioned your son just turned 15. And Celeste says, yeah. And she says, the family shelters don't allow boys over the age of 13. So the only way you would be able to go there is if he went to a men's shelter by himself.

And Celeste, of course, is not going to break her family up and send her son to a men's shelter. So she leaves Gateway Center empty handed.

And that story is just so, again, so symptomatic, so representative of how not thousands, not tens of thousands, but I would argue, not I would argue, the data shows roughly 3.2, 3.5 million families and individuals in this country who aren't part of that official count.

Her story is just like theirs. They haven't earned the designation homeless.

And really, the only thing worse than being homeless in America is not even being considered homeless to begin with, because then you are truly locked out of assistance and left to fend for yourself.

And even when there is assistance, it seems that it's so hemmed in. You cover a program, Brian Goldstone, in this book, There Is No Place For Us. You cover the program, The Housing Justice League in Atlanta. What strategies are they using to fight displacement, and how effective have their efforts been?

Well, one of the most encouraging things that have come out of this just catastrophic housing and homelessness crisis in America is that in recent years, we have seen the emergence of a really vibrant movement for tenant rights and housing justice.

We've seen tenant unions spring up, not just in places like San Francisco or New York, but in Kansas City, in Philadelphia, in Minneapolis, in West Virginia.

We're seeing tenant unions really just burgeoning in this country in direct response to these untenable and just awful conditions for tenants.

Housing Justice League here in Atlanta is – they're not a tenant union, so it's a somewhat different model.

Housing Justice League is a non-profit organization, but it's made up of volunteers, and it's basically people who have said, we are not going to sit by while our neighbors become the casualties of our city's renaissance and our city's success.

We are not going to just watch as the very people who are making our city possible, the people taking care of our children, taking care of our parents in caregiving positions, the people stocking our shelves at grocery stores, as all of these people are, again, not just pushed out of their neighborhoods and displaced, but pushed into homelessness.

And so Housing Justice League, they actually mobilized when at Efficiency Lodge, this hotel that I spent the bulk of my reporting, where Celeste ended up and where other families in the book ended up.

In the pandemic, this is kind of a surreal, to put it mildly, a surreal moment in the book when about a dozen families are evicted at gunpoint from Efficiency Lodge because they have, this is during the pandemic, they have lost their jobs.

They're unable to pay their weekly rent.

And the hotel hires this, in effect, a private militia, private security squad to go room to room and put semi-automatic weapons in the faces of the families living in these rooms to force them out.

And Housing Justice League very quickly mobilizes.

They stage a protest outside of the hotel that draws the media.

And for a while, there was actually an attempt to organize with the residents at this hotel, to organize for them to be able to return, to organize for better conditions, to organize just for due process so that if they're evicted, it has to go through the court system and not through this private security squad.

But that organizing effort, as I show in the book, ultimately just faltered because these families, they were just trying to meet their immediate material needs.

And they just had no space in their life for activism and organizing.

And that's one of the really painful truths that readers encounter in this book, is that the people who are closest to the problem, they are the ones closest to a solution.

And yet they are also the ones who have the least to give where time and resources to organize are concerned.

And so given the scale of the homelessness problem that you've covered in this book, what policy changes do you believe are the most urgently needed?

Well, in the epilogue of the book, I point to a whole kind of menu of policy solutions that kind of fall into two broad categories.

One is keeping people in the homes they already have.

That is just astonishingly missing from much of the conversation about homelessness in this country, which tends to focus more on getting people off the street, getting people out of shelters and into housing.

We don't talk nearly enough about keeping people in the homes they already have. In other words, preventing homelessness from happening to begin with.

And the kinds of solutions there are really practical things like ensuring a right to counsel in eviction cases where someone has a lawyer on their side, in the same way that in a criminal case, you are guaranteed an attorney.

We have research that shows when tenants have a lawyer on their side in an eviction case, frivolous evictions are much more likely to be dropped.

So things like right to counsel, things like rent stabilization or rent control, things like just strengthening tenant protections and habitability requirements so that tenants aren't refusing to pay their rent when they're living in slum conditions or unsafe conditions.

The other main category is getting people into housing they don't yet have, which of course just means just radically increasing the supply of dignified, safe, truly affordable housing in this country.

But at the heart of both of these categories of solutions, I argue that before we can really meaningfully address this crisis at scale, once we've acknowledged the true reality, the true severity of homelessness in America, to meaningfully address that at scale would require, in my view, just a fundamental paradigm shift where housing is concerned.

I'm an anthropologist by training, and one of the kind of classic moves that anthropologists talk about, like in Anthro 101 courses, is that the point of anthropology is to make the familiar strange. And nowhere is that more urgent, I would argue, than when it comes to housing.

We have allowed housing in America to just basically become a luxury, to become a commodity that can just be hoarded by the few at the expense of the many, many more who just need a place to live.

And then it's auctioned off to the highest bidder.

And I think that before this homelessness crisis can really be meaningfully addressed, we have to be stunned by what we've allowed housing to become.

That we've allowed the housing Hunger Games to become the status quo really needs to be made strange to us.

And I think until we are shocked out of our complacency, we will continue to just kind of nibble around the edges where solutions are concerned. We'll continue to look for just these little fixes.

And of course, we need everything on the table. We don't have the luxury right now of choosing between, you know, visionary large scale transformation or temporary fixes. We need all the fixes on the table.

But I just fear that we won't really end this catastrophe until we just change how we think about and treat housing in this country.

And your book, There is No Place for Us, Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone, is just such a terrific contribution to that.

We're facing a situation where long established programs like Social Security and Medicare, much less Medicaid, are being slashed and burned. Section 8 housing, it looks like, is under threat. But it's a bipartisan attack.

I mean, you have Gavin Newsom just wanting to will away the homeless by destroying the encampments. What's your response to this moment in American politics?

It's difficult to find words for how terrifying what we're witnessing right now truly is. It's difficult to put that into words. We are seeing, as you mentioned, just an already shredded social safety net, not just where housing assistance is concerned, but all of the interlocking systems, healthcare, child care, education, all of the interlocking systems that are labor protections, work, that have made this crisis possible.

It's like gasoline is being dumped on this fire, and it is truly just horrific what we're seeing. But it's absolutely crucial to be honest with ourselves that this did not begin with Trump.

The reporting on my book began during the first Trump administration, and it went through the Biden administration. Now we're in the Trump administration.

The circumstances I was documenting, the situations these families were dealing with, they changed not at all during those years. The abandonment, the wholesale abandonment, I would argue, the engineered neglect of poor and working people in America has been a bipartisan phenomenon.

And we can't just lay the blame at the feet of the right or Republicans. I think that this has been a bipartisan phenomenon.

And I think that if this is going to change, it will have to come from a truly bipartisan commitment, which seems almost hopelessly utopian to talk about right now, to imagine, given the severity of what we're looking at, where these just basic things are being stripped away.

But I think that it will only come when there's a recognition that the people who are being pushed into homelessness are not just Democrats.

It's not just in blue cities where this is happening. This really is a national catastrophe. And until people across the political spectrum demand that those in power, that their policymakers take this seriously, we will continue to just go deeper and deeper into this disaster.

Well, it has been such a privilege to talk with you, Brian Goldstone, about this book, There Is No Place For Us. It's such an important book, and I want to thank you so much for coming onto the show to talk about it.

Oh, thank you, Francesca.

It was really an honor to speak with you.