Working Homeless in America

Let me get this out of the way. You should read Brian Goldstone’s book. There Is No Place for Us is a tender and infuriating work of humanistic reporting and the best book I’ve read so far this year (and it is unlikely to be knocked from that perch).

Goldstone shadowed five Atlanta families who are part of the “working homeless,” a large, rising, and poorly documented population of tenuously housed people whose wages, even for full-time workers, leave them priced out of stable housing. “Working homeless” should be an unspeakable phrase, as it is a profound betrayal of the nation’s implicit social contract. Work hard, keep your head down, obey the law, and you should be able to get the basics of a good life—or at least an apartment—for you and your family. Goldstone shows that whatever truth this fable about the good life once held, it is history. “Today there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.” The families in this book never stop working. They pick up second jobs doing DoorDash, hawk meals cooked on an extended-stay burner, and even sell their blood plasma only to learn they can't out-hustle a predatory housing system.

Before becoming a reporter, Goldstone earned a PhD in Anthropology from Duke University (we overlapped as graduate students but never met). When documenting the details of his respondents' lives, his work reflects the discipline’s use of “thick description,” which aims to capture as many details as possible from an observed event and solicit the interpretations of the participants. Goldstone doesn’t say he conducted an ethnography, but his immersive method is indebted to the tradition, as he spent years hanging out with the families, attending holiday celebrations and bearing witness as folks slept in their cars. Goldstone never resorts to the victim-blaming cliches that substitute for analysis in discussions of homelessness because it remains clear that these families lack resources, not smarts or initiative. And his reverence for language, pacing, and attention to character would not be out of place in a novel. 

There Is No Place For Us indicts America’s economic savagery. Goldstone doesn’t use the abstract language of structural violence, but his story is full of landlords, bureaucrats, and politicians insulated from the pain they inflict by distance, resources, and power. Goldstone’s attention to his respondents’ lives allows him to move between large-scale economic and policy shifts—welfare reform, rising inequality, gentrification, and financialization—and the impact of these systems on the daily survival strategies of the working homeless. For instance, Britt is a working single mother who won a coveted voucher that allowed her to rent an apartment that, sans subsidy, would have cost between 80-90% of her monthly income. Landlords can reject rental applicants for any (or no) reason, essentially legalizing discrimination against the poor. Some states have passed laws that prohibit landlords from refusing vouchers, but enforcement is slow and unreliable. 

The voucher program is loaded with compliance costs, leading reputable landlords to reject vouchers and ensuring that the field of options for voucher recipients is disproportionately populated by dilapidated housing owned by desperate landlords. Reporting code violations opens renters up to retaliatory evictions, forcing them to choose between dangerous substandard housing and the street. Thus, despite a housing crisis, and a sometimes decade-long wait, the program’s administrative burdens mean that securing a voucher does not guarantee housing. The year Britt landed the coveted subsidy, Atlanta “issued 1,674 new housing vouchers; 1,055 expired before they could be used.” Britt was elated when she won the voucher lottery, but her luck was short-lived. A snitching neighbor told management that her formerly incarcerated cousin was temporarily staying in the rental, and Britt was evicted. 

Goldstone shows that Britt’s attempt to secure housing is nested in a series of bi-partisan policy failures beginning with Reagan-era voucher reform (designed to shunt responsibility for the poor from the state to the market), traveling through Clinton’s tough-on-crime welfare reform (banning felons from public housing), and ending post-eviction as Britt abandons her baby’s bed next to a dumpster. 

Economic and bureaucratic violence similarly converged in the story of other families in the book. Celeste’s family became homeless when a disturbed and violent ex-partner burned down her rental home. She lacked rental insurance and wasn’t entitled to her security deposit (getting the $850 deposit back would have required she pay two months’ rent, one for the month of the fire, and an additional month). Celeste declined to pay rent on the burnt-out house, so she was evicted, making it nearly impossible to find a subsequent apartment.

Maurice and Natalia were pushed out of a rapidly gentrifying Washington DC only to be priced out of Atlanta when the condo they were renting was sold. The couple both worked and always paid their rent on time (or early) but were nonetheless denied housing because of bad credit scores weighed down by student loans and healthcare debt. Consistent rent payments don’t improve credit scores, but missing a payment tanks them, because the opaque measures are deeply stacked in favor of lenders and against the poor. 

Atlanta’s economy was strong over the course of Goldstone’s reporting, and working homeless populations are increasing in booming states, showing that a rising tide might lift some boats but can also drown. A strong economy that commodifies poverty creates innovative new ways to fleece the poor, so working hard and keeping one’s head down leads to ruin. Industries such as extended stay hotels developed to essentially prey upon the poor, and many of the families end up temporarily staying in these. Post-eviction, Celeste pays $1,000 or more a month to live in a dirty and dangerous extended stay. Despite her cancer diagnosis, poverty, and the extortion of the hotel, Celeste is defined out of state benefits because she is not “literally homeless.” Activists and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have irreconcilable definitions of homelessness, with the former pushing for a broader understanding that captures the vicissitudes of housing insecurity. The working homeless are likely to cycle through doubling up in small apartments with friends and family, sleeping in their cars, or when resources allow it, staying in overpriced extended stays or hotels. This functional homelessness is not literal enough for HUD. Denying people benefits through definitional fiat makes the government numbers look good by substantially underestimating the extent of the problem. Goldstone notes, 

the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the United States, factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms or doubled up with other people, is at least six times larger than the official figure.

In terms of its focus, scope, and importance, Goldstone’s book is reminiscent of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, and I hope it gets as much attention. In Desmond’s book, landlords occasionally let their humanity get in the way of profits, taking pity on late payees and cutting them a break. Leniency was complicated, and it could come because the owner liked the tenant, couldn’t bear putting kids on the street, or didn’t want to go through the costly process of finding a new tenant. Goldstone shows that housing market consolidation—a few companies owning thousands of homes—coupled with automation have removed this break on cruelty. Corporations found an inhuman solution for human empathy, removing the possibility of exception and evicting by algorithm if rent is three days late. 

There Is No Place for Us, in style and substance, is the opposite of the calloused inhumanity governing housing markets. It is a moral condemnation of a housing economy that denies people access to necessities on the flimsiest of grounds.