There Is No Place for Us : Working and Homeless in America

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • Through the “revelatory and gut-wrenching” (Associated Press) 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

“An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted.”—The New York Times Book Review

In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a rapidly gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. 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: people with full-time jobs who cannot keep a roof over their head, thanks to skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights. 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. They exist in a shadow realm—unseen by most and omitted from official statistics. Yet they are 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.