THERE IS
NO PLACE
FOR US
By Brian Goldstone
AVAILABLE NOW
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
“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. Read this extraordinary book. If you’re lucky, you’ll be changed.”
“In this brilliant book, Brian Goldstone lays bare the hidden disaster of housing precarity among America’s low-wage workers, shattering assumptions about who becomes homeless and why. There Is No Place for Us brings it all out into the open. May it move you to act so that we, as a society, might finally shelter all who need it.”
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.
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 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.
“There is No Place for Us is a spellbinding and unflinching portrait of five American families working full-time yet still unable to secure stable housing. Brian Goldstone reveals the brutal realities of a system—all too familiar now for so many Americans—in which hard work no longer guarantees us safety or dignity. The writing is as immersive as documentary. And be warned: this book will devastate you and then set your spirit ablaze.”
“Brian Goldstone has pulled off a rare and stunning narrative feat. He brings us intimately close to five families whose stories expose some of the most devastating realities of American life. 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. It is a tribute to Goldstone that he never, for a second, lifts his focus from the core of the story—the people.”
“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.”
“There Is No Place for Us is at once a profound reckoning with housing inequality and an intimate, never-pathologizing account of people working themselves to death in their struggle to secure a home—proving the lie of American meritocracy in the process. It is an urgent indictment of the narrow definition of homelessness that leaves millions of people in jeopardy and disguises the true extent of the crisis that capitalism has created. Above all, it is a deeply researched, meticulously reported, and care-filled book.”
“There Is No Place for Us is a crucial, masterful book that will change the national conversation about homelessness. Brian Goldstone gives us a wrenching chronicle of what happens when the fact of a home cannot be taken for granted. Poignant and infuriating, his book reveals the tragic myths embedded in the stories we tell ourselves about working hard in America.”
“As Brian Goldstone illustrates in this beautifully written work of heartbreaking journalism, even a grinding cycle of full-time, low-wage work doesn’t guarantee a roof over your head once you clock out. Hidden homelessness is a nationwide epidemic, and There Is No Place for Us shows how rapidly gentrifying cities like Atlanta are becoming epicenters of the crisis. Within these pages, people whose lives and labor have long been invisible are given the space to tell their stories—and to remind the reader that any one of us could end up in their shoes unless something changes on a structural level, and fast.”
“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.”
“Since unhoused people showed up on America’s street corners in the 1980s, mass homelessness has been a public crisis. Yet official data hides the reality, dominant myths blame the victims, and the numbers of unhoused people continue to grow. Brian Goldstone understands we cannot address this crisis until we experience the very human reality of the second-class citizenship that exists for people who have no place to call their own. To read these stories is to know, like those who fought Jim Crow before us, that none of us can enjoy the freedom this nation promises until we guarantee an equal right to a place to be.”
“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—or even to acknowledge them at all.”
“There Is No Place for Us belongs on the
shelf next to Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning Evicted. In illustrating how homelessness is skyrocketing in the richest country in the world, Goldstone has accomplished an incredible feat that is a must-read for anyone with interest in social sciences, equity and one of the defining American crises of our time.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There is No Place for Us is moving and well-researched, and a terribly important book. It is a book that calls on all of us, from concerned citizen to housing scholar, to rethink what we mean by ‘homeless’ and to push policymakers to recognize that the scale of this problem is much larger and broader than the one suggested by the narrow and severely flawed metrics routinely compiled by the federal government. More importantly, however, it pushes us to demand that affordable, decent, and stable housing be recognized in the U.S. as a fundamental human right so that we, as a nation, are required to ensure that every family, every individual, be provided with such housing: with home.”
“Whether you’re a policy nerd or just someone who cares about human dignity, this is a must-read.”
Upcoming Events
Atlanta, Georgia
Wednesday, March 26 @ 7:00pm
A Cappella and Georgia Center for the Book at Decatur Library
In conversation with Malaika Jabali
Baltimore, MD
Monday, March 31 @ 7:00pm
Enoch Pratt Free Library (Central Library)
In conversation with Vann Newkirk
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, April 2 @ 7:00pm
Politics & Prose (Wharf location)
In conversation with Sara Nelson
Greensboro, NC
Tuesday, April 8 @ 6pm
PEN, Interactive Resource Center, and Scuppernong Books at First Lutheran Church
In conversation with Deeona Kelli Sayed
Durham, NC
Wednesday, April 9 @ 5:30pm
Housing for New Hope and Flyleaf Books at Duke University (Gross Hall)
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Springfield, MO
Friday, April 11 @ 3:00pm
Center of Ozarks Poverty Research, Missouri State University (Karls Hall)
Family Action Network (Virtual Event)
Thursday, April 17 @ 7:30pm
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Nashville, TN
Monday, April 21 @ 6:30pm
Open Table and Bard’s Towne Books at First Church of the Nazarene
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Seattle, WA
Thursday, June 5 @ 7:00pm
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Portland, OR
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Powell’s Books
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San Francisco, CA
Thursday, June 12 @ 7:00pm
Green Apple Books