Working and Homeless in America

Celeste had just finished her shift at the factory when she received a frantic call from a neighbor. It took her a moment to register what he was telling her: “Your house is on fire! You better get here right away!” Panicking, she sped through rush-hour traffic to arrive at a devastating scene: fire trucks blocked the entry to the cul-de-sac where she lived. Beyond the trucks she could see the smoking ruin of her home. A moment later, a school bus pulled up, and Jalen, her thirteen-year-old, hopped off. Mercifully, the bus had been running behind schedule.

Celeste and her three children lost almost everything in the fire – everything except her car, a phone, and a few hampers of dirty clothes. However, as anthropologist and journalist Brian Goldstone explains in his new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown, March 2025), nothing could have prepared Celeste for the housing crisis she had fallen into. Since she had moved into her last home, rental prices across Atlanta had soared. Celeste now found few listings she could afford. Instead of going back to work – her employer gave her two days off, unpaid – Celeste chose to prioritize the search for housing. She was soon fired. Eventually, she made the difficult decision to send her two boys to live with their grandmother in Tampa for the summer. Emergency funds from the Red Cross paid for a few nights in a hotel, but then Celeste and her teenage daughter, Nyah, took to sleeping in the car for weeks at a time.

Finally, in August, after months of searching, Celeste came across a new listing that seemed like a good fit. She applied, paid the $50 application fee, and waited to hear back. A few days later, she got a call from the agent who said that her application had been denied. There was an eviction on her record. Celeste was dismayed; she had never been evicted in her life. She drove over to the ruins of her old home and sifted through the contents of her mailbox. In the pile she found an eviction notice from the sheriff with her address on it. In Georgia, landlords do not have to serve an eviction notice in person.

It turned out that Celeste’s home was owned by the Prager Group, an Atlanta-based real-estate investment, management, and private equity firm that owns approximately 3,000 homes across the city. On the phone, an agent from Prager explained that if she had wanted to break her lease after the fire, Celeste would have had to pay two month’s rent. Celeste never paid, so the firm had evicted her and kept her security deposit. Georgia is one of three states where landlords do not have to guarantee the habitability of their rentals. As Goldstone puts it, “[Celeste] had been evicted, without her knowledge, from a home that had been destroyed and deemed uninhabitable.” However, the most devastating thing about the fire wouldn’t turn out to be the $2,100 she owed the Prager Group. Instead, the bigger problem would be the eviction on her record, “the Scarlet E,” which would plague her search for stable housing for years to come. She and her children rented a room at the only place that would take them – an extended stay hotel, where Celeste paid rates far in excess of the rent she had paid in her old home.

Over the span of two years, There Is No Place for Us follows Celeste and four other working-class families as they struggle to find housing in a wealthy, rapidly transforming Atlanta. Every one of Goldstone’s subjects works full or part time; none of them can find stable housing in the city. To tell their stories, Goldstone sifts through personal journals, phone recordings, court records, and interviews with family members, case workers, and other people who serve the homeless population of the city. The book documents the ways that housing insecurity destroys black families, but it also suggests that, in the last two decades, homelessness itself has become big business. As Atlanta’s real-estate market exploded, a rash of predatory businesses such as extended stay hotels, cosigning companies, storage facilities, and credit repair companies popped up to take advantage of the displaced population. These businesses operate on the fringes of society, but they are often backed by the largest investment companies in the world. For example, Extended Stay America, where some of Goldstone’s subjects live, was acquired by Blackstone and Starwood Capital Group in 2004 for over $3.1 billion.

Goldstone argues that the roots of this crisis go back to the Great Recession. Following the foreclosure crisis of 2009, “giant private equity firms, institutional investors, and corporate landlords” rushed to purchase huge shares of the housing market in cities all over the United States. Greenway and “adaptive reuse” projects like the Beltline in Atlanta drove up property values in historically poor, black neighborhoods and created “rent gaps” that attracted outside investors. Many of Atlanta’s blue-collar workers soon found that they couldn’t afford to live in their own city. Those who stuck it out found little recourse to push back against corporate landlords. In Atlanta, corporate real-estate ownership wouldn’t peak until July 2021, when over the course of a twelve-month period one in every three homes was sold to an investment company.

What stands out from most recent writing about the US housing crisis is Goldstone’s focus on the scale of the problem – indeed, with how we perceive and define the problem of homelessness itself. “Homelessness [is] never a fixed state or a static condition,” Goldstone writes. “It [is] a point along a spectrum: in a motel today, on a couch tomorrow, possibly in a tent a year from now.” Since the 1980s, however, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has taken a far more restrictive approach to quantifying homelessness. Every winter, HUD conducts its nationwide “Point-in-Time Count” of the homeless population. To count as homeless, a person must be living on the street or in a shelter. People who live in cars or hotels, or “double up” with friends or relatives, don’t make the cut.

Over time, this exclusion has led the public to associate homelessness with a specific set of medical pathologies. Goldstone suggests that this is by design. When the homeless population first skyrocketed during the Reagan administration, the federal government restricted research funding to the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Homelessness came to be seen as a condition that afflicted drug addicts and the mentally disturbed.

To this day, the vast majority of the homeless population in the United States go unreported in official statistics. “Narrow the lens,” Goldstone writes, “and perhaps we can persuade ourselves ... that homelessness is a unique condition afflicting a particular type of person. Widen the lens, adjust the focus, and homelessness begins to look very different.” Goldstone suggests that the number of homeless in America is at least six times the number officially reported by HUD. A conservative reckoning is that more than four million families are chronically homeless, the vast majority of them invisible to the government and the wider public. Another twelve million Americans are “severely cost burdened” and at imminent risk of becoming unhoused.

The achievement of There Is No Place for Us is that it renders these people visible. One way of looking at the book is to see it as the fruit of a series of extraordinary journalistic acts of seeing, of persistence, of listening to and learning from the quiet dignity and desperation of people who seem far too quick to internalize their own guilt and irresponsibility. The number of people and places Goldstone visits boggles the mind. (One wonders how, especially given the little he reveals in the book about himself or his process.) Clear patterns emerge, though, as the book invites its reader to understand, step by step, how it is that working mothers and fathers end up sleeping with their families in cars, in derelict hotels, on friends’ floors, or out on the street. You may well be left in fury, especially when you see how inadequate and arbitrary most homeless assistance is. At one point, after Celeste is diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, she swallows her pride and takes a “homelessness risk assessment” called VI-SPDAT developed by a tech company called OrgCode Consulting. The city official administering the test tells Celeste that in order to raise her “risk score” and qualify for aid, she will need to break up her family and send her son, Jalen, to a men’s shelter by himself. The cancer diagnosis makes no difference to the assessment calculus. It’s an absurd dilemma that would make Kafka blush. Disgusted, Celeste walks out.

What does it feel like to be in such a position? How does someone who is homeless and working full time make decisions about where to eat, where to sleep, and where to clean up? These questions form the core of another recent work of reconstructive journalism, Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America by Jeff Hobbs (Scribner, February 2025). Less broad in scope, Hobbs’s book tells the story of Evelyn, who leaves her apartment in Lancaster, California to try and begin a new life in Los Angeles. Evelyn is a waitress; her husband, Manny, works in construction. Together, they parent five children. In Hobbs’s telling, Evelyn clearly does not understand what the family is up against when they decide to move to the most densely populated county in the United States. What she does know is that she can no longer remain in Lancaster. Poverty, violence, and sexual trauma lurk around every corner. She sees her kids falling into the same patterns that have kept her there her whole life. Concerned that city schools are failing her children, she applies for a Section 8 voucher, the primary form of federal housing assistance in the United States, which will require her to pay only a third of her rent. When Evelyn receives notice that she qualifies, she and Manny decide to take the plunge and move the family to LA.

The problem, Hobbs explains, is that qualifying for a Section 8 voucher and actually receiving the voucher are two very different processes. When Evelyn shows up to receive her voucher, she is dismayed to learn that the average wait time for residents is six years. Some families, Hobbs reports, wait ten years from the time of approval to actual funding. But there are more pressing problems. The address she listed on her application – her aunt’s place – is actually in Monterey Park, not the city of Los Angeles. Monterey Park and municipalities outside of the city have their own homeless assistance programs, though these (the official tells her) may soon be scuttled. But as soon as she arrived, Evelyn enrolled her children in Monterey Park schools, and they are flourishing. Dismayed, Evelyn refuses to pull her kids out of school just to receive financial assistance. Surely they will find a way to make ends meet. But make ends meet they don’t. Evelyn, Manny, and the children find themselves living paycheck to paycheck in an extended stay motel just outside Monterey Park. When Manny gets drunk and throws punches at her oldest son, Evelyn takes the kids and strikes out on her own. Eventually, the six of them are living all over the city of LA – sometimes in her car (a Toyota Highlander) and sometimes in a motel provided through an emergency hotel voucher that can be accessed only after 5:00 p.m. each day.

Hobbs’s deep focus on one family results in a somewhat less comprehensive exploration of the structural problems the working homeless face than Goldstone achieves. But the goal of Seeking Shelter is different: Hobbs wants to know how people like Evelyn think and act in circumstances of extreme precarity. By this measure, the book is a success. Over the course of the family’s first few months in LA, we see Evelyn instruct her children in the art of lying to teachers, friends, and social workers about where and how they live. Ever faithful to their mother, the children soon learn how to deflect the scrutiny of adults. As years go by, the family grows extremely close – so close that they refuse to confide in anyone, not even family back in Lancaster, about what’s really going on. The family’s intimacy hardens into a carapace that seals them off from the world. As years go by, they find it increasingly difficult to ask for and receive help. Even after she finds stable housing, it will take years for Evelyn to trust that other people might actually care about her own well-being.

Hobbs ends his book with a plea for faith-based transitional housing programs like Door of Hope, which helps Evelyn get on her feet, find a job, and provide stable housing for her kids. The heroes of the book are social workers like Wendi and Miss Abeba, who refuse to give up on people like Evelyn. In particular, Wendi’s entrance into Evelyn’s life feels like a miracle. Alternating chapters trace Wendi’s own struggle with homelessness decades earlier, which has equipped her to help people like Evelyn.

As necessary as these charities are – and they are desperately needed by so many right now – they cannot prevent the unhoused from needing them in the first place. There is a dramatic scene in Seeking Shelter where the wealthy neighbors whose homes surround a proposed Door of Hope shelter grouse and fume about the decline in property value that transitional housing brings to the neighborhood. Hobbes observes that these people live in a district that recently voted in favor of a homeless assistance tax but then turned around and passed measures that make it nearly impossible for someone to sleep on the streets.

However, a scene that really dramatizes what the working homeless are up against comes from Goldstone’s book. At the height of Covid-19 lockdown, when tenants are no longer able to pay their bills, the owner of an extended stay hotel hires a paramilitary force to storm the building and forcibly remove everyone living inside. It is later revealed that, some weeks prior, the motel received a six-figure Paycheck Protection loan from the federal government. Who called in the troops? No one knows for sure, but a social worker does some digging. He finds that a former Democratic governor of Georgia recently co-owned the hotel with his brother. The brother is now the sole proprietor. The hotel retains the former governor’s services for litigation purposes.

“Most people I work with, they don’t just feel hopeless,” a social worker explains in There Is No Place for Us. “They feel powerless. Because they are constantly subjected to forces beyond their control – even beyond their understanding.” What these people need isn’t just money, she says; they need empowerment. They need the assurance that those who work hard in America can afford a roof over their heads and a safe place for their children to call home.