Working and Homeless in America
By: Brian Goldstone
Narrators: Brian Goldstone, Dion Graham Random House Audio
ISBN: 9780593237144
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Publication Date: 03/25/2025
Format: Other
My Rating: TBR (ARC)
Through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the “working homeless” in cities across America
“Read this extraordinary book. If you’re lucky, you’ll be changed.”—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family
The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.
Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.
By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.
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Praise
“There Is No Place for Us is a book of unusual power and range. Each page is propelled by the integrity of Brian Goldstone’s careful labor, tracking people who must fight an American madness, as the stakes keep getting raised. The facts are a devastation, and a calling.”
—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family
“In this brilliant book, Brian Goldstone lays bare the hidden disaster of housing precarity among America’s low-wage workers. . . . May it move you to act so that we, as a society, might finally shelter all who need it.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit
“Brian Goldstone has done something remarkable: distilled clearly, in compelling narrative form, so much of what has gone wrong in America since the 1970s. The heartbreaking brutality and inhumanity of the world he depicts will shock many readers—as it should. If you read one book this year—or this decade—it should be There Is No Place for Us.”
—Adelle Waldman, author of Help Wanted
“A spellbinding and unflinching portrait of five American families working full-time yet still unable to secure stable housing. The writing is as immersive as documentary. And be warned: this book will devastate you and then set your spirit ablaze.”
—Antonia Hylton, author of Madness
“Deeply reported and written with an empathy that brims from every page, There Is No Place for Us is an epic account of crippling inequity, capitalist predation, and inert bureaucracy. . . . [Goldstone] has pulled off a rare and stunning narrative feat.”
—Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
“A crucial, masterful book that will change the national conversation about homelessness . . . Poignant and infuriating, [it] reveals the tragic myths embedded in the stories we tell ourselves about working hard in America.”
—Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves
“Brian Goldstone’s blistering investigation into the true scope of America’s ballooning homelessness crisis beautifully depicts the tenacity and heart of several vulnerable families struggling to survive in a system that refuses to help them.”
—Roxanna Asgarian, author of We Were Once a Family
“A tremendous achievement in reporting, in narration, in emotional and intellectual understanding. Brian Goldstone’s book will stand with J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and other works that tell the story of our country by telling the stories of our fellow citizens.”
—James Fallows, author of Our Towns
“Heartbreaking . . . Learning of the harsh obstacles of daily life for [the working homeless] will both distress and outrage any reader with an ounce of empathy.”
—Booklist
“A model of ethical journalism . . . [Goldstone] trains an empathetic eye on families that are struggling in an increasingly gentrified city. . . . Make a place for this book alongside Jane Jacobs’ classic Death and Life of Great American Cities.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Harrowing . . . Goldstone weaves a richly detailed narrative of his subjects’ increasingly desperate struggles. . . . It’s a gripping, high-stakes account of America’s housing emergency.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Photo: © Elaine Brown Goldstone
Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a PhD in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family. WEBSITE
