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Your body heat is rising in this sweaty-packed crowd of 30,000 people descending upon a converted sports stadium, forced to cozy up next to one another amid an extraordinary public health emergency. You can smell each other’s body odor as you wait for your name to be called. A “voucher fever” has spread to everyone you know and the many more you don’t. Your heart-rate is up; your eyes are racing back and forth. The mood is fit to blow.
Everyone haphazardly rushes the crumbling government office that has but a few hundred vouchers to distribute, by lottery, among tens of thousands desperate to win the jackpot: an American home virtually paid for by the government, even if it comes with strings attached. The dust settles on several people trampled underfoot after a stampede occurred at a similar event a year later, by a crowd measuring more than a mile long.
This isn’t a scene cut from a dystopian sagas like World War Z or The Road. Nor did it occur in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. This scabby reality unfolded outside a cramped Housing Authority office in a wooded suburb southwest of Atlanta in 2010 when 30,000 people showed up for the chance to claim 455 available housing vouchers. The stampede occurred in 2011, when the Department of Health and Human Services used a local sports complex in the Redbird neighborhood of southwest Dallas to hand out a similarly tiny portion of housing vouchers on a first-come, first-served basis, for the first time in years.
Both stories are woven seamlessly into There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone’s stunning narrative account of the working poor whose unhoused ranks have swelled over the past generation, largely without any notice or regard from media or public agencies.
Building his book upon a sturdy web of narrative detail and propulsive storytelling, Goldstone, a journalist trained as an anthropologist, follows five Black families in Atlanta as their full-time jobs and dreams of upward mobility are interrupted by a crushing inability to keep themselves housed. The booming economic development projects that surround them — like in every major U.S. city — are driving up rent prices higher and faster than the minimum wage can sustain. And the welfare system, by design, does not recognize their plight.
There is early twentysomething Britt: a fast-food server, sometime security guard and other times hairstylist, mother of five. Early thirtysomething Kara Thompson: a medical worker and later a DoorDash driver, mother of four. Then there’s thirtysomething Celeste: a warehouse worker whom we meet just before she’s diagnosed with cancer and right after a jilted lover burns down her rental home — all while raising three children on her own.
The book’s working parents include the steadfast Natalia and Maurice Taylor, a State Farm call operator and a rental car salesman, respectively, with three kids. Then there’s the fortysomething Michelle, a back-to-school mother of three who grinds her way through the narrative as she struggles with inner demons, especially after her husband Jacob, a maintenance worker, leaves the picture.
But desperation, Michelle has told her kids since they were younger, forces you to get creative. On a frigid January day, while Michelle ventures out to scrounge for scraps — eventually panhandling so the family can survive — her teenagers, D.J. and Danielle, know to always stay indoors, often watching their toddler sister Skye, spending their time on a thin layer of bath towels near a heap of discarded cleaning supplies, water buckets, and random small appliances. D.J. and Danielle know they mustn’t make any noise so they can keep staying safely in their secret hovel, undetected by the outside world. For the last four nights, the family has been living in a cramped storage closet of the extended-stay hotel A2B, where Michelle had recently found a job but then lost it.
Michelle was about to give up after hours of holding a paper sign that reads, “HOMELESS PLEASE HELP,” when a kind passerby offered to call her church’s homeless outreach coordinator, Phillis. Within an hour Michelle was in Phillis’ hatchback driving around to find the cheapest motel possible, where Phillis paid the first two weeks’ rent upfront from her church’s emergency fund. Michelle’s new temporary shelter was the Efficiency Lodge, where much of the book’s drama unfolds when multiple characters separately end up there.
At the heart of Goldstone’s nonfiction dystopia is the Efficiency Lodge, a world where landlords have become warlords who sic their hired mercenaries — suited up in battle gear and armed with AR-15 automatic rifles — to evict working families at gunpoint, like what occurred at the Efficiency Lodge in September 2020.
Here, “law and order” doesn’t exist for the dozen put-out families, as a sympathetic county commissioner and police lieutenant explain, in so many words, when they arrive to meet the displaced crowd. Several days earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had announced a federal moratorium on evictions to curb mass death sentences to the at least 12 million households reportedly at risk of eviction. But within hours, a county magistrate tells police they have no authority to stop the landlord’s militia. Plus, a proviso buried in the fine print of the moratorium excludes residents of hotels and motels from federal protection.
Pandemic or no pandemic, there are no happy endings here. There never was for Natalia Taylor, who — while in an extended-stay motel when Covid hit — experienced the early weeks of lockdown “less as a rupture than as a continuation of the distress she had been feeling for much of the past year,” Goldstone observes.
The sting of modern homelessness essentially creates a state of permanent pandemic that seems to take on the status of a super villain: wreaking chaos and suffering through the power of invisibility.
The human surplus of those who are homeless while working in America numbers at least 4 million. The latest record-setting totals of over 770,000 unhoused Americans only counts people at homeless shelters or encampments, not those who sleep in their cars, double up with friends or neighbors, and languish in extended-stay hotels.
“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,” Goldstone writes bluntly in the introduction. “A low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen,” he adds, as unemployment remains at a generational low.
Natalia and her husband Maurice, like the others, spend the book in an agonizing search for an elusive American Dream that has no place for them. At one point, while living in the “expensive prison” that Maurice has come to call their extended-stay, with its whopping weekly rent nearly twice as much as they paid at their old apartment before getting evicted, Maurice says to his wife: “This is not a home, and I’m scared we’ll start to think it is.”
Despite how There Is No Place For Us reflects its magnificently stylistic impression of a gripping novel — punchy chapters that squeeze the spirit of its characters through the wringer of a punishing plot — readers will find no profound arc of change in protagonist or circumstance. Upon each final word on the page, the families arguably suffer just as badly (if not worse) than when we first meet them.
But that’s life. Or, more accurately, that’s the “policy choice” of mass homelessness that has emerged only in the last generation, as Goldstone points out. “The reality is that for these families, there is no tidy resolution, no dramatic turning point where things suddenly get better,” Goldstone tells Rolling Stone.
“This is what happens when housing is treated as an investment vehicle, a luxury, rather than a basic human necessity,” he says. “And unless something drastic changes — unless we collectively decide to value people’s well-being more than property values — this catastrophe will only continue to deepen.”
