An Emergency Born of Prosperity

Zoe Adams considers “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” by Brian Goldstone.

By Zoe AdamsNovember 13, 2025

• Politics

• Economics and Finance

EACH YEAR, during the last 10 days of January, volunteers and public employees from across the country head into the night to count the homeless. The “sheltered homeless” get counted annually, the “unsheltered homeless” every other year. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) orchestrates this counting ritual, known as the Point-in-Time Count, which aims to provide an “annual snapshot of the number of individuals in shelters, temporary housing, and unsheltered settings” across the United States. In January 2024—the most recent data we have available—the Point-in-Time Count found that approximately 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the US, an 18 percent increase from 2023 and the largest one-year bump since 2007.

These statistics are troubling—and even more troubling, they woefully underestimate the problem. HUD’s strict definitions of “sheltered homeless” and “unsheltered homeless” create categories that render visible only a particular kind homelessness. A colleague of mine, Dr. Sarah Kler, an internist and addiction medicine physician in Boston, has participated in the Point-in-Time Count four times in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island. “It’s easy to approach someone resting in a sleeping bag near South Station in Boston and ask the survey questions,” she told me. “It’s much harder, painfully awkward even, to go up to a group of people standing by a bus stop at 11 p.m. and ask, ‘Do you happen to be experiencing housing insecurity?’”

How might the survey label someone who is doubling up with a friend? What about a family living in an extended stay hotel or a rooming house? And what about sleeping in a car and going to work in the morning? Does a car qualify as shelter? The government-imposed categories of sheltered versus unsheltered break down when you begin to look more closely. If these individuals ended up in the annual count, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the United States would be approximately six times larger than what is estimated by the Point-in-Time Count, bringing the total up to almost four million people. That’s nearly the entire population of the state of Oklahoma.

In There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (2025), anthropologist and journalist Brian Goldstone follows, from 2019 to 2022, five families across Atlanta who are fighting to remain housed or to secure housing. Goldstone chooses to focus on “the working homeless,” a phrase that reads like an oxymoron. If you work hard in this country—the land of the American dream—shouldn’t you be able to afford to rent an apartment? Goldstone drops a bomb: there is no city, county, or state in the US where a two-bedroom apartment is in reach for someone who earns minimum wage and works full-time.

Goldstone argues that people are not slipping into homelessness but are being actively “pushed”: “[W]hat we’re seeing today is an emergency born less of poverty than prosperity.” Rapidly gentrifying cities and urban redevelopment projects are forcing families to occupy what he hauntingly terms a “shadow realm,” a liminal type of homelessness where people sleep in cars, friends’ apartments, or “extended stay” hotels.

Media narratives will tell you that addiction and mental illness have contributed significantly to the rise in homelessness. But in what direction does the causal arrow actually point? Many social scientists and housing advocates would argue—Goldstone included—that the media narratives are in fact a common misconception. Housing unaffordability is largely to blame for homelessness. And trying to secure one’s fundamental right to shelter leads to increased rates of mental health conditions and substance use disorders.

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A book about the working homeless could be set in many cities across the United States, but Goldstone makes a compelling case for Atlanta. In the 1930s, the first public housing project—Techwood Homes—was erected in Atlanta under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration. Techwood wasn’t designed for Atlanta’s poorest families; it was intended for upwardly mobile middle-class white families who had become poor during the Great Depression. A separate housing project was built on the city’s Westside for Black families, yet few could afford it. Enter the white flight of the 1950s and ’60s, when families left projects like Techwood in droves for the suburbs. But right at the time when housing projects like Techwood became desegregated and majority-Black, politicians wanted to start tearing them down.

Techwood—like other Atlanta housing projects—was bulldozed in 1995 to make way for the 1996 Olympic Games. Forty percent of schoolchildren were living in Atlanta’s housing projects at that time, more than any other city in the US, but that didn’t stop the Atlanta Housing Authority. One billion dollars in private investment flooded this area of Downtown Atlanta in the wake of the destruction of Techwood.

The construction of the Beltline in 2005, a 22-mile loop of trails and parks connecting 45 of Atlanta’s neighborhoods, contributed to this legacy of destruction. The Beltline is a more palatable version of the urban renewal of yore—think Robert Moses and his building of the Cross Bronx Expressway—due to its emphasis on green space. But parks and rail trails displaced people of color much like Moses’s highways and bridges did. Many tenants of affordable complexes such as southeastern Atlanta’s Gladstone Apartments became homeless for the first time as a result.

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There Is No Place for Us reads like horror. Not the blood-and-guts kind, but like a fever dream of never-ending bureaucracy with systems that are fated to fail no matter how hard a working mother tries to house her children. The depth of Goldstone’s reporting makes the characters feel close-up. Like when we first meet Britt Wilkinson, a young mother of two who finally gets off the Atlanta Housing Authority’s waiting list for a housing voucher. She receives an email notification after a long shift at a fast-food restaurant in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport—you can feel her fatigue and despair turning into hope. But as Britt starts to scroll on Zillow, she realizes that no landlords or property managers will accept her voucher. We watch her naivete harden into jaded anger as she desperately tries to find a home. This whiplash—where social services overpromise and underdeliver—happens repeatedly to the families Goldstone follows.

Joyful scenes also repeatedly take on an eerie quality as we wait for the other shoe to drop. We first meet Maurice and Natalia Taylor on date night at a park near their new two-bed, two-bath in Sandy Springs, an increasingly white suburb of Atlanta. They both work full-time jobs and pay their rent early. They’re enjoying a bottle of Pinot Grigio on a picnic blanket, fantasizing about their future as their kids play at home. But not for long. Natalia soon learns via text that her landlord is selling the condo they just moved into. She scrambles to find a new place, but no landlord will accept their application due to low credit scores. That leads Maurice to sign up for Liberty Rent, a “cosigning company” that acts as a third-party guarantor on leases for people whose rental applications would otherwise be denied, in exchange for an exorbitant fee. The expense it takes to secure a new apartment sinks Maurice and Natalia into debt out of which they can’t climb. Months later, they have no choice but to check into Extended Stay America.

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The most fascinating aspect of Goldstone’s reporting is his focus on the extended stay hotel industry. Atlanta is home to dozens of extended stays, largely concentrated in poor Black neighborhoods, the kinds that have been deemed poor candidates for gentrification. When you can’t afford rent, don’t want to sleep in your car, and can’t go to a homeless shelter (few exist for women and children), a place like Efficiency Lodge—an extended stay in Atlanta with 11 locations and the slogan “Stay a Nite or Stay Forever”—becomes your next best option.

These hotels were created to exploit people experiencing housing instability. Many of Goldstone’s characters call this the “hotel trap.” Like payday loans, bail bondsmen, or cosigning companies like Liberty Rent, extended stays feed off the most vulnerable, charging high rates for mold-infested rooms and offering none of a tenant’s legal protections. Maurice and Natalia refer to Extended Stay America as their “expensive prison”: they end up spending 17,000 dollars over the course of their time there. It is expensive to be poor in the United States.

The book’s most harrowing scene also occurs at Efficiency Lodge. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, millions of tenants fell behind on rent across the country, and the occupants of Efficiency were no different. Goldstone recounts how guards in SWAT-style uniforms barged into the Efficiency Lodge and evicted several families at gunpoint. Nyah Walker, whose mother Celeste had endured chemotherapy for ovarian and breast cancer while living at Efficiency, watched the scene with horror while nursing her newborn from a neighboring room. Was her family next?

Efficiency’s management team had hired a private security detail to carry out these evictions—known as “self-help” evictions or “lockouts”—in the hopes of bypassing the need for a writ of possession, or formal eviction notice. This was illegal, and the Atlanta Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit against Efficiency. But what kind of legal status did people living in extended stay hotels even hold? Were they guests, tenants, or something in between? Was the hotel owner an innkeeper or a landlord?

Prior to COVID-19, management had declared that guests who stayed at the hotel for more than 90 days were legally considered tenants and would be threatened with eviction through the court system if they were unable to pay rent. But because eviction courts were closed due to the pandemic, management reversed course, claiming that families at Efficiency were now just guests and no longer had the legal rights of tenants. If a guest could not pay, then they had to leave immediately. The Center for Disease Control’s federal eviction moratorium during COVID-19 also did not apply to people living in hotels, motels, or temporary housing. People living at extended stays during the pandemic were not only economically exploited but also legally invisible.

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Predatory capitalism isn’t the only factor that has contributed to the rise of working homelessness in the United States. The federal government has largely abandoned the problem of housing: what is left is our aging existing public housing system and a housing voucher program, established in the 1970s as a free-market solution to the problem of homelessness. Instead of government-funded housing, a voucher could get a poor family into an apartment owned by a private landlord. But as we saw with Britt, landlords can exercise bias wherever they see fit, refusing to accept tenants with vouchers because they don’t want to rent to poor people or are too overwhelmed by the administrative requirements of the program.

The Atlanta housing voucher program came with many strings attached: Britt had only 60 days to secure housing before her voucher expired. Finding an apartment took over her life—she checked her phone obsessively and even reduced her work hours to devote time to the housing search. But Britt couldn’t find an apartment in time and lost her voucher. Britt is not alone; 1,055 of the 1,674 housing vouchers allotted by the Atlanta Housing Authority that year expired.

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I saw Goldstone speak at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the spring of 2025. He spoke a bit circumstantially, like any academic, but his demeanor bordered on anxious. There were many local housing advocates and organizers in the audience. Goldstone isn’t just writing to write; he’s using immersive journalism to humanize a segment of our population who have been rendered invisible. Goldstone is challenging how we have historically defined and stereotyped homelessness in our country, who gets counted, who gets left out, and why.

Goldstone doesn’t devote much time to possible solutions—that’s not what this book is about. He points to some strategies like the social housing program in Finland (where housing is removed from the private market) and direct cash assistance for rent, which is currently being rolled out in Philadelphia. But the rise of tenants’ unions across the US offers perhaps the most hope.

I spoke with Hannah Srajer, president of Connecticut Tenants Union; the group’s seed funding came from a labor union whose workers were pushed into homelessness despite working 80 hours a week. As Srajer told me, “when the market dictates your fundamental right to shelter, the only possible solution to the crisis of commodification of our homes is the tenant union. It fundamentally changes the dynamic between tenant and landlord.” She then posed this hypothetical: “If 70 percent of people living in a 60-unit building form a tenant union and threaten to rent-strike, that landlord could lose tens of thousands of dollars, a significant risk to landlords whose business model depends on debt. That’s real power.”

In the wake of the armed evictions at Efficiency Lodge, the residents began to organize with help from the Housing Justice League. They held meetings, they protested, and The New York Times even covered the illegal evictions. But attendance at organizing meetings fizzled. The tenants were constantly on the precipice of being unable to care for themselves and their families. How can tenants whose lives are so precarious organize, a process that requires tremendous resolve? This is a constant struggle, but Srajer told me that “when tenants understand they have a path to resolve the serious issues they face—like unsafe living conditions, abusive managers, and untenable rents—they organize because housing is so fundamental to our ability to survive and thrive.”

Housing lawyers can also help. In 2022, long-term residents at Efficiency, represented by Atlanta Legal Aid Society, won the right to be classified as tenants rather than guests, affording them legal protections under landlord tenant law. This set a precedent for extended stay hotels across the state of Georgia and beyond. This may seem like a drop in the bucket, but when guests become tenants, and lockouts are deemed unequivocally illegal, the working homeless—and the exploitative conditions that dictate their lives—become more and more visible. And with visibility comes power.