The Plight of the Working Homeless
In May 2018, the house in Atlanta, Georgia, where Celeste lived with her three children burned down. It was an act of arson committed by a man with mental illness she had briefly dated.
Celeste began the search for a new place to live, in the meantime staying in hotels and friends’ apartments, in exchange for cleaning and cooking, her personal passion, as she worked full-time warehouse jobs and juggled her children’s child care needs. Then came the bad news that she had ovarian and breast cancer, for which she needed treatment. She sought help from a social service agency charged with helping the homeless, only to be told that her family was not homeless enough—they had to be living in a shelter or someplace unsuited for human habitation. When she asked about getting into a shelter, she was told it would mean splitting up her family, since her son was fifteen and the local family shelters disallowed boys older than thirteen.
“I wish I had more to offer,” the caseworker told her. “I’m sorry.”
There are many such stories in Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a deeply reported and even more deeply infuriating look into the lives of five Black families in Atlanta as they struggle to meet the most basic of needs: finding a place to live. All are headed by parents who work hard, sometimes at more than one job, but are priced out due to gentrification, corporate landlords, opportunistic investors, and byzantine rules that seem designed to keep people from getting the help—or, more precisely, the housing—they need.
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
By Brian Goldstone
Crown, 448 pages
Publication date: March 25, 2025
Atlanta is the nation’s third fastest-growing metropolitan area and, like many other places, has more people than places to house them. That may sound like an overly simplistic way to frame the nation’s housing crisis, but it is one that is maddeningly overlooked. Goldstone cites a 1986 poll by The New York Times and CBS News in which randomly polled people were asked to name the root causes of homelessness. About a third said alcohol, drugs, or mental health problems; 20 percent cited an unwillingness to work; 19 percent named bad luck. Nobody mentioned housing.
The families Goldstone profiles are subject to all manner of trials and exploitation. They spend hours per day, week after week, searching for available units, plagued by past evictions or low credit scores caused by their lack of money. Housing providers routinely demand nonrefundable “application fees” of $50 or more. Government agencies order them to take classes on such topics as “financial literacy”—which in the case of one profiled working mother would mean quitting her job. “What kind of ‘financial literacy’ would make it easier to afford $380-a-week rent on a $12-an-hour wage?” Goldstone asks.
Lacking any other place to stay, these families sleep in cars, terrified they may awake to a police officer’s tap on the window, the beam of a flashlight falling on children who are about to be taken away. In recent years, Goldstone reports, about 20 percent of child removals in Georgia were due to “inadequate housing.”
There Is No Place for Us does not offer much reason for hope. At one point, protests erupt at a housing complex that evicted families using private security forces armed with handguns and assault rifles. “NO MORE GUNS POINTED AT CHILDREN” read one of the signs. But this effort fizzled out without any real gains.
Goldstone does suggest some policy changes that could be embraced: “banning extortionate application fees, capping security deposits, outlawing biased tenant screening practices, prohibiting discrimination against voucher holders,” and more. But there is simply not enough affordable housing to go around, nor is there the political will to do something about it.
Celeste ended up moving to her home state of Florida. It was, Goldstone notes, an admission of defeat, going back to a place that represented “heartache and abuse, frustration and futility.” She had wanted to build a life in Atlanta. She had dreams of someday opening a restaurant, and she would have been good at it. But Atlanta made no place for her. It was the city’s loss, and a nation’s shame.