In conversation with Jeff Hobbs, moderated by Mary Brosnahan; 3:40 – 4:30 pm at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
Brian Goldstone
Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a Ph.D. 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.
MFOB featured book: There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
By telling 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. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something appalling and seemingly oxymoronic 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 by a thriving one. Today, there isn’t a single county in America where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.
Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Brian reveals the human cost of this crisis by ushering us into the lives of:
- Maurice and Natalia seek opportunity in Atlanta but are blindsided by housing instability when their landlord sells, forcing Natalia into homelessness.
- Kara juggles cleaning hospital floors, raising four kids in her car, and battling rejection in the housing system as she dreams of launching a cleaning business.
- Britt, rooted in Atlanta for generations, is pushed out with her two children when her long-awaited affordable unit is bought out by luxury developers.
- Michelle loses her home after her fiancé misuses rent money, and despite her drive to become a social worker, childcare barriers trap her in a cycle of hardship.
- Celeste, despite her resilience and ingenuity during cancer treatment, is denied housing aid and left to survive in a crumbling system that deems her “not homeless enough.”
Shockingly, all of these people are part of 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. There Is No Place for Us brings them out of the shadow realm and puts them front and center, where they—and this societal failure—should be. To do so, Brian spent more than three years reporting the book, dividing his time between a squalid extended-stay hotel—a de facto homeless shelter where two of the families were living—and the cars, congregate shelters, and relatives’ apartments that the other families were cycling in and out of. He followed the parents as they worked gig jobs, and met with caseworkers, teachers, and child welfare investigators; he went with them to court, to plasma donation centers, to homeless service agencies. The duration of the reporting allows us to see that homelessness is less a decisive turning point or intractable “condition” than a continuum of insecurity. We feel the anguish of their circumstances all the more because we see what came prior to it.
We’ve long been told that work is a solution to poverty and homelessness (“Why don’t they just get a job?”). There Is No Place for Us offers a forceful rejoinder to that idea.
