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Invisible Crisis

The hidden phenomenon of working homelessness Techwood Homes, Building No. 8 in Atlanta, Georgia. | Library of Congress

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in Americaby Brian Goldstone. Crown, 448 pages. 2025.

Celeste Walker was picking up her kids from a friend’s when a neighbor called to tell her that her rental house, in an Atlanta suburb, was on fire. By the time she got home, the place was a soaked and smoldering ruin, surrounded by firefighters. In a flash, the family’s possessions were reduced to her children’s backpacks and a few hampers full of dirty laundry that had been sitting in her SUV. She learned from investigators that the fire was arson, set by a man she briefly dated.

Celeste called her landlord, the Prager Group, an Atlanta private-equity firm that gobbled up $350 million of single-family rentals during the foreclosure crisis, to ask if she could move to a different property. Sure, a representative told her. But in order to break the lease on the burned-down house and get her security deposit back, Celeste would need to pay two months’ rent. Outraged, she hung up the phone.

Celeste had moved from Florida to Atlanta with dreams of opening a restaurant. After the fire, though, she was struggling to survive. For a time, Celeste and her kids bounced between hotel rooms and friends’ floors while she worked a warehouse job and looked for other apartments in Atlanta’s cutthroat real-estate market. Only when she got rejected for a new lease did she realize how deep her troubles ran: there was an eviction on her record, a leasing agent told her. How could that be? After Celeste hung up on Prager, she learned, the company had served an eviction notice to the charred and clearly vacant property. When she didn’t respond, the court handed down a default judgment in favor of the landlord. This stain on her record would make it all but impossible to find a decent home.

Eventually, Celeste used up the Red Cross aid she received after the fire and exhausted the crowded spots where her family could crash short term. They began sleeping in her SUV to save money. Circumstance and callous corporate policy had thrust her family into the ranks of the working homeless.

Celeste’s dilemma is increasingly common, as Brian Goldstone reveals in his devastating new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. He follows five pseudonymous black families in gentrifying Atlanta who can’t make rent despite holding down jobs as delivery drivers, health aides, and house cleaners. All wish to make a better life for their children. Instead, they are stuck living out of cars, relatives’ apartments, and “hyperexploitative” extended-stay hotels. Their plight illustrates a hidden problem: in no state today can a minimum-wage worker afford a two-bedroom apartment. And more than eleven million Americans are severely cost-burdened, spending an average of 78 percent of their income on housing. “Besieged by a combination of skyrocketing rents, low wages, and inadequate tenant protections,” Goldstone writes, “people whose paychecks are not enough to keep a roof over their heads” are becoming “the new face of homelessness in the United States.”

The book arrives at a moment when homelessness has reached record heights, affecting around twenty-three out of every ten thousand people in the country. At the same time, our political landscape has grown more hostile to people without housing. Government officials and tech billionaires cast them as jobless and dependent, mentally ill and addicted, a threat to public order, property values, and economic growth. The Supreme Court’s recent Grants Passdecision allows authorities to punish people for living on the street—without any kind of mandate to provide them with shelter. Politicians like California Governor Gavin Newsom have called for encampment sweeps; he even participated in one as a publicity stunt. Donald Trump’s new housing secretary, Scott Turner, proposes incarcerating unsheltered people in a maze of detention centers.

Underpinning these decisions is a long and deliberate discourse designed to minimize homelessness. Our ruling class scapegoats the unsheltered, making those living in tents and below highway overpasses the evening-news face of the problem. In reality, Goldstone contends, the working homeless represent the vast majority of people without housing, in Atlanta and in America at large. Yet they are essentially invisible, unlisted in official counts and often unaided by government programs. While the working homeless may have resources slightly more plentiful than their unsheltered counterparts, it’s clear that no hard barrier separates the two; relentless hardship pushes at least one family Goldstone follows onto the street for a time. His choice to focus the book on this population, then, is obviously not a moralizing one—an attempt to draw some specious distinction between the between bootstrapping strivers and undeserving layabouts. Instead, There Is No Place for Usseeks to redefine homelessness for our era of florid profiteering and a wilting welfare state as a condition more widespread than most Americans understand.

The eviction on Celeste’s record was hardly her only obstacle to finding stable housing. In the years that she had been living in her rental, the market had shifted around her. At her previous home, she had paid a manageable $850 a month. When she found a far smaller apartment in the same school district, it was going for $1,025. Simply to apply, she forfeited a nonrefundable $50 fee. Extortionate fees abound today in Atlanta’s rental market: for applications, administration, “risk management,” “cosigning companies” to guarantee your lease, missed payments, and so on.

Part of the problem is that Atlanta is booming. From 2000 to 2014, the city was the fourth-fastest gentrifying in the nation. Goldstone, an Atlanta resident, has witnessed this process firsthand. His book grew out of immersive magazine journalism revealing a rising crisis. As speculators have transformed once affordable black neighborhoods—dotting them with Playskool-colored condos, warehouses repurposed for luxury retail, and cafés with names like Baker Dude—longtime residents have been priced out.

These changes are not so much a natural urban evolution as the result of a decades-long social engineering campaign by dollar-eyed elites determined to stoke real estate investment. A successful bid for the 1996 Olympics helped rebrand Atlanta as a “world-class” city attractive to global capital. In the new millennium, the Beltline, pitched as a twenty-two-mile mixed-use trail, began inflating prices everywhere in its path. The nearly $5 billion megaproject, Goldstone writes, is “a prime example of planned gentrification,” in which city officials used tax incentives to boost development that would draw wealthier in-movers. Then came the rupture of the Great Recession, when hundreds of thousands of homes in the city’s metro area entered foreclosure between 2009 and 2012. In the aftermath, private-equity vultures descended on the carcass of Atlanta’s single-family housing market, ultimately hiking rents, imposing fees, and ramping up evictions. Since 2010, median rent in the city has increased by 76 percent, while Atlanta’s low-income housing stock has plummeted. Wages have flatlined for the lowest earners, who are now crammed into Atlanta’s most desolate neighborhoods.

Not too long ago, Atlanta was more hospitable to low-wage workers like Celeste. The city was home to some of America’s first public housing, “bright, cheerful buildings,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt called them when they were built during the New Deal era. By the 1960s local authorities had integrated the projects, allowing black families whom discrimination had excluded from homeownership to move in. Some in Goldstone’s book recall them as vibrant communities.

At precisely that moment, however, the federal government began slashing funding for public housing. Certain complexes became hotbeds of disrepair and crime. Authorities, in turn, used these conditions as cover to dismantle the buildings and “revitalize” the neighborhoods they occupied with for-profit, mixed-income housing. In the decades since, Big Real Estate has gorged itself not just on the fat from luxury rentals but also on the scraps from poor people’s rooming of last resort. Privatized non-solutions came to rule housing assistance, the so-called Housing Choice Voucher chief among them. Today, developers and investors supply the homes, working families use their vouchers to move in, and the government subsidizes the rent. But the money Congress allocates to the program invariably comes up short, leaving fourteen million eligible households without help. In this context, homelessness and misery seem like byproducts of prevailing social policy.

Those who do receive housing assistance are treated to the privatized system’s shambling dysfunction in cities like Atlanta. Goldstone relates the story of a mother who received a voucher after spending years on the Atlanta Housing Authority waiting list. In a subsidized two-bedroom apartment, she paid just 30 percent of her income in rent (around $600 a month), freeing her up to buy a used car, stock the fridge with food, and throw birthday parties for her kids. But then her landlord refused to renew her lease, and no one else would rent to her. She was plunged back into homelessness. Increasingly, Atlanta property owners discriminate against voucher holders because they can collect higher rents from unassisted tenants. And when people can’t find housing within the program’s strict sixty-day timeline, they lose their voucher altogether. In 2021, the AHA issued 1,674 new vouchers; 1,055 of them expired.

In Atlanta, black neighborhoods enduring the ruptures of gentrification are doubled by those the city has abandoned. “Although they appeared worlds apart,” Goldstone writes, “these areas were intimately connected, like a balloon squeezed at one end.” In desperate expanses of liquor stores, plasma donation centers, and dilapidated houses, there are what amount to for-profit homeless shelters. The book’s most shocking revelations originate from its look into the “shadow realm” of extended-stay hotels, which prey on families whose eviction histories or poor credit scores have pushed them out of long-term rentals. They cost far more than a traditional lease, maintain slum conditions, and provide not even the scant protections afforded to Georgia renters.

Goldstone singles out this industry for special condemnation. “The extended-stays were not simply filling a gap in the city’s housing landscape,” he writes. “They were actively exploiting that gap.” During the pandemic, as other hotels sat empty, these budget chains were brimming over. In 2020, one company called Extended Stay America maintained a nearly 80 percent occupancy rate and reported $1 billion in revenue nationally. This figure did not escape the notice of private-equity investors: Blackstone and Starwood Capital, eager to expand into new housing frontiers, formed a partnership to buy the company for $6 billion.

After failing to find an apartment, Celeste and her kids landed at one such hotel, Efficiency Lodge, where she rented a room for $257 a week. (Other families Goldstone follows pay as much as $550 at similar hotels.) At first, she felt relieved to have relatively stable lodging. She even operated a makeshift restaurant out of her room to supplement her income, in hopes that she could excavate herself from debt. But a cancer diagnosis upended her plans. When she began a course of chemotherapy, it became impossible for her to work consistently.

Efficiency Lodge began to feel like a prison. Mold and roaches plagued the residents. When the pandemic hit and work became scarce, many of Celeste’s neighbors fell behind on weekly rent. At one point, management hired an armed security force to conduct mass lockouts at gunpoint. Despite their long-term residency, the occupants were unjustly denied the rights of tenants—and nascent organizing by the Housing Justice League was no match for the company’s legal tactics.

Government aid for those without housing, meanwhile, is increasingly austere. Cancer persuaded Celeste to ask for help, despite her reluctance to identify as homeless. But she confronted a dystopian system of means-testing for scarce resources. At Gateway Center, a former jail that serves as Atlanta’s main hub to access local agencies and nonprofits, families line up early in the morning and a calcified bureaucracy performs an intake process, mandated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to determine what help they get.

There, Celeste told a caseworker that she didn’t use intravenous drugs nor have HIV, and that she had never been arrested—all facts that detracted from her score on the official Vulnerability Index. Not even her cancer diagnosis quite tipped the scale. But the main obstacle was that she didn’t meet the HUD definition for “literal homelessness.” To qualify, she would need to enter the shelter system. Doing so, the caseworker regretfully explained, would mean parting with her fifteen-year-old son, who was too old for a women and children’s shelter. “Absolutely not,” Celeste said. “I’m not going to let my family be separated.” She left Gateway empty-handed.

The vivid portraits Goldstone draws in There Is No Place for Uselicit compassion, empathy, outrage on behalf of the working homeless, much as Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, the book’s most obvious forebear, did a decade ago for people suffering that colossal and related problem. He writes with unusual depth and humanity about people whose stories political and media elites largely prefer to ignore. The thing that stomps off every page of Goldstone’s book is the brute and brainless injustice of a system in which faceless mega-landlords and pinioned government functionaries are in charge of daily decisions with life-wrecking stakes. When you look closely at the consequences of the profit-seeking and cost cutting that define housing policy in this country, it’s no wonder that its architects would hide the swelling mass of the new American homeless in shame.

Because officially speaking, the working homeless barely count: HUD doesn’t record people living in cars, hotels, or others’ apartments. That exclusion is intentional, Goldstone argues. The homeless population surged in the 1980s alongside President Ronald Reagan’s move to privatize public services and drastically reduce social spending. Federal officials, nervous that the public would blame the growing crisis on these policies, instead emphasized its link to “individual pathology” in an attempt to disguise the scale of the problem. Over the years, this discourse congealed into conventional wisdom, now boosted by the country’s richest reactionary losers: “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie,” Elon Musk recently wrote on X. “It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.”

Precisely the opposite is true. Most are ordinary people trying and failing to scrape by. Nationwide research found that those living doubled up with others because of economic hardship exceed the official HUD homeless count by a factor of six. In Georgia, around 118,000 residents experienced doubled-up homelessness in 2022. All told, the actual number of people without housing in America may reach more than four million, Goldstone writes, dwarfing HUD’s most recent count of 770,000.

What’s to be done? An accurate accounting of the problem would be a start. Actually housing the homeless, however, is a more complex political battle. Goldstone is skeptical of popular supply-side solutions that simply aim to tweak the private rental market, and he has little time for expanding the broken voucher system, the plan that Desmond favored in Evicted. Some of Goldstone’s prescriptions are designed to shift the radical power imbalance between landlords and renters: instituting right-to-counsel and just-cause eviction protections; banning extravagant fees and landlord discrimination against voucher holders; expanding tenant rights to residents of extended-stay hotels. But true transformation, he insists, demands public investment in decommodified forms of social housing, like limited-equity co-ops, community land trusts, and especially Vienna-style public rentals on government-owned land: “There is a growing consensus that, as in other times of national emergency, all levels of government—federal, state, local—must intervene directly.”

Consensus is surely an overstatement. Today, America’s slumlord-in-chief is taking a razor to the safety net. The Trump administration plans to cut HUD by half, with even steeper reductions in the office that serves the homeless. Musk’s sweaty-palmed Department of Government Efficiency recently canceled tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts for affordable housing intended for the poor and homeless after a review of the nonprofit developers’ websites found terms hinting at “diversity” and “equity.” And then there’s the stopgap congressional budget, signed by Trump, under which more than thirty thousand households are projected to lose their housing vouchers. Despite some optimistic local offerings, like a new public developer in Seattle, a large-scale social housing program does not appear to be forthcoming. Most policymakers, regardless of party affiliation, would still prefer to snake-charm the private sector into providing homes for the poor.

As Celeste’s experience shows, that strategy is not working. In the end, Atlanta’s rising costs displaced her. She’s not alone: since 1990, the city’s black population has declined by 20 percent. Returning to Florida, where Celeste grew up, heralded defeat, the death of her dream to open a business and achieve stability for her family. When she and her boys packed the car to make the six-hour drive to Tampa, Goldstone writes, they still didn’t know where they would be living.

Millions more people, buried under the rent and living one paycheck to the next, could easily find themselves forced out of house and home. All it takes is a job loss, a cut to assistance, a vindictive landlord. “Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” Goldstone writes. “They’re being pushed.” To the extent that there’s hope for change, it rests on these precarious renters and workers coming together to demand that the ruling class of the wealthiest nation in history provide dignified housing as a basic social good. Such a movement is not without precedent. But it’s no accident that today so many Americans are caught up in their struggle just to get by.