How America Failed the Unhoused

Maurice and Natalia, whose landlord sells their building, fall behind on the rent at their new apartment, having sunk their savings into securing it in the first place through a company called Liberty Rent, which will cosign leases for tenants with poor credit in exchange for a high up-front fee. The couple are evicted from the new place and move to an Extended Stay hotel, where the monthly rent is $2,200; plus they are still in debt to Liberty Rent for the money the company paid after they were evicted.

And there is Michelle, a mother of three who loses her home when her boyfriend, the father of her youngest child, loses his job. Michelle’s story is also told through the lens of her oldest child, DJ, who is thrust into the role of parenting his siblings as his mother relapses into alcoholism. Michelle quits her job at the Salvation Army, running the desk of the shelter where she once lived, and ends up in the arms of an abusive boyfriend. DJ takes his siblings to his great aunt’s place, and Michelle ends up in jail, then sleeping on the street, then fleeing an abusive boyfriend without her belongings, then, finally, on Facetime with her children. Crying, she tells them that she has to go away and get “straightened out.” We don’t know where or how. And then she is gone. Goldstone doesn’t try to bring these stories to a neat or happy ending, in part because none of them have ended yet. We have merely been afforded the opportunity to dip into these lives for a time.

The stories in There Is No Place for Us are not just a litany of unconnected Bad Events, though the specific twists and turns are very bad. The book is a powerful narrative of exactly why it is so hard even for people working as hard as they can to get secure housing: shitty landlords, extortionate extended-­stay hotels, impossible-to-­access social services and housing vouchers. They do everything they can and still end up in Hell. They are products of an extremely abusive and dysfunctional system.

Who is creating and enforcing that system? There are the landlords, of course: from the enormous corporations with their algorithmic rent increases, which own thousands of units at a time and disproportionately purchase lower-­cost housing, all the way down to the seedy individuals who gouge on the rent for dilapidated extended-stay hotel rooms. (Overcharging people who have no money is, seemingly paradoxically, remarkably profitable.) There are also the courts and judges who enforce landlord-protecting laws, such as ruling that a renter whose only recourse, whose only mote of power, against an abusive landlord is to withhold rent should not have done so. (This part of the system also includes the police, who enforce these evictions with guns.) And there are the local government employees, such as the one who sighs and seems sympathetic when an incredulous Celeste finds out that her cancer doesn’t qualify her for public assistance because her “vulnerability score” isn’t high enough, according to the her caseworker: Yup, that’s crazy, but it is what it is, and it’s the government employee’s job to do the crazy thing over and over again. Next, please.

But what else is there for that government worker to do? Nothing. She has no ability to legislate housing or appropriate more funds. She too is just part of the system, and her part is to enforce the limits of the programs. She is a border guard of the welfare state and can only act in that capacity. Even if these programs are ostensibly meant to help those in need, they also serve a different purpose: to get everyone back to work. This system ties work to survival as viciously and plainly as it can. It gives you no choice but to clock in to have your best chance (but no guarantee) of a secure place to live. And it helps when you are surrounded by evidence of what happens if you don’t—more and more homelessness, shuttered businesses in declining neighborhoods, people out of their minds with illness or grief or addiction, big new prisons, sirens, glass and blood on the sidewalk, death. It can always get worse.

This unfulfilled bargain is the heart of Goldstone’s research: The “working homeless” are a large population of people whose labor is still being extracted by an exploitative system, even as every other supposed benefit of living in this country and working for a living has been denied to them. The economy depends on their labor, and their labor is a direct result of their need to survive, every single day. Without being this close to the knife’s edge, they might do something better.

The subjects of the book do attempt to find alternatives, seeking out the remaining forms of public help, which are often impossible to get or to hold onto. Their efforts to survive are barely enough. Michelle sells food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar just to pay the rent on the awful hotel room where she and her children live, one basic necessity of survival elbowing out the others for a moment. Kara uses her food stamps to stock her freezer with meat, but it spoils when her electricity is shut off after months of implausibly high bills—likely due to bad wiring in her apartment complex. Management and the electric company pass the blame back and forth, leaving Kara with no recourse. Without public assistance, and with everyone else struggling too, the only choice is to keep working until you literally can’t. The problem here isn’t unemployment: It’s that the only jobs that Goldstone’s subjects can get are terrible, exhaustingly far away, unpleasant, and always underpaid.

The deftness with which Goldstone weaves together these personal tragedies with the details of the systemic cruelties that explain them is remarkable. Celeste gets evicted from her burned-down house because the state of Georgia, incredibly, allows landlords to do that—a policy choice, made intentionally. Even when Britt is briefly able to use an unbelievably rare housing voucher—only 1,674 were issued that year in the entire state—she can’t find any landlords who will accept it, because they don’t have to and because the market in Atlanta is booming, as gentrification pushes mostly Black families farther and farther out. (Of those 1,674 vouchers, Goldstone writes, 1,055 expired before they could be used.) Britt is later kicked out of a derelict building because investors can make more money selling it. The rippling effects of these policy decisions are felt mainly by those who had no hand in them.

The complexity of these issues has always been the challenge of so-called “policy reporting,” at least in my experience of writing about healthcare: How do you tell stories about the impact of purposefully byzantine policies and laws on people’s lives when the details are usually so complicated that most people would lose the thread? How can you accurately explain why someone lost their health insurance for bureaucratic reasons, a situation often involving a lot of phone calls or letters or false explanations from customer service representatives, without the reader just closing the tab? Yet Goldstone has managed to do that here for one of the most complicated issues in the country, with wide-ranging causes and consequences that touch on many aspects of modern American life. It is an incredible feat.

In the end, the effect of There Is No Place for Us is stunning and bleak. Goldstone tells stories of undeniable injustice, none of them with a happy ending or a victory for the good guys. Each story is incontrovertible evidence that the American dream is a lie and that hard work, loving your family, getting good grades, or whatever other bullshit this country supposedly reveres doesn’t guarantee a safe living. In fact, they have absolutely no bearing on whether you end up OK or sleeping in your car with your three kids.

These stories are not five individually explicable outliers concerning people who were simply unfortunate; instead, they are five out of millions of similar stories. As readers conclude There Is No Place for Us, they will feel both the deeply personal impacts of the tragedies explored in the book—the particular beloved children’s toys that stung parents’ hearts when they imagined them tossed in the trash during an eviction; the foods the families ate or cooked for others; the mornings that our subjects had no sleep and had to take the bus to work—and the horrible breadth of it all. Every tragedy is unique, and yet in some respects it is not; these tragedies are everywhere, all the time, just often hidden from sight.

And what does it mean to have these stories laid out? If there were any justice, it would lead to enormous change. They are stories of people so obviously oppressed by our institutions and forces far beyond their control—people who are not merely unlucky or who have made bad choices—that the need ought to be clear. A book like this ought to be a rallying cry, the 21st-century equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Our problem, clearly, is not a lack of information in the halls of power. Yet the experience of the first five months of the Trump administration has shown that more information outside the halls of power seems to have a limited impact on whether anything changes, too. Reading this book might not cause any policy to change. But it should change how Americans see each other and themselves, or at least our assumptions about what hard work gets you. If the deal is off—if working hard, following the rules, and scraping together everything you can doesn’t ensure a good life for you and your children—perhaps it’s time to stop imagining that the source of the problem is some hypothetical layabouts who aren’t working as hard as you. Perhaps if enough people realize this, and after enough years of letting it sink in, we might have a cure for America’s work mind virus.