Brian Goldstone has spent much of his career examining the lives of people too often overlooked in America’s economic and political narratives.
His Pulitzer Prize-winning There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America offers an intimate portrait of five Atlanta families struggling to survive despite holding down – sometimes multiple – jobs.
In this Q&A, Goldstone discusses the hard-to-grasp idea of having a job, but not having a home, how the research and writing of his book changed his view of Atlanta, and what the solutions are to this ever-widening crisis.
Your book makes the distinction between homelessness as we traditionally imagine it — people living on the street or in shelters — and the “working homeless,” people who have jobs but still can’t afford a place to live. Why do you think that distinction has been so difficult for Americans and lawmakers to grasp?
I was stunned to find how prevalent this phenomenon is: people who are working more than one job, and it’s still not enough to secure stable housing or a roof over one’s head. We as a society have insulated ourselves from asking difficult questions about the economy, structures, the housing system, and what work looks like in this country. We’ve accepted this narrative of broken people instead of broken policies. By putting the onus on those who are suffering this deprivation, we avoid having direct scrutiny. There’s a self-protective dynamic at work. It just becomes easier and less messy to assign blame to the victims.
How did your familiarity with Atlanta — and your understanding of the city’s neighborhoods, history and culture — shape the way you reported the book? And did reporting the book change the way you see Atlanta?
It irrevocably altered my perception of the city. It ruined Atlanta for me in many ways. All these resources and amenities, like green spaces, the Beltline, breweries, eateries – it made it impossible to enjoy those without an awareness of the toll this revitalized Atlanta has taken on working-class families. In the course of Atlanta becoming this transformed city, it’s pushed many people out of neighborhoods and housing altogether. I’m thinking of people who grew up or lived in Old Fourth Ward, Reynoldstown, Kirkwood, and are now unable to enjoy the fruits of the success. I drive by those extended-stay motels on Candler Road and down near the airport where people have been pushed to the margins. Most people don’t realize these places are functioning as for-profit homeless shelters. It’s like a balloon squeezed at one end: as one area of the city sees all this infusion of new capital, the people once there are forced to other parts of the city.
If you could change one policy or assumption about housing in Atlanta, what would you change first?
We talk so much about the need for affordable housing, but affordable for whom? It just can’t be affordable; it has to be safe and dignified. You can find a less expensive apartment, but those places are also dangerous and falling apart – afflicted with mold, rodents, and neglect. The working homeless are making this city’s success possible through their work and labor, but where are they going to live? We need a massive public investment in truly affordable and dignified housing. That will require a paradigm shift in how we think about housing. It’s got to be more than a house; it’s got to be more than accumulating wealth or part of a portfolio to grow. Not while people are deciding if they can pay rent that month or afford to eat, or their kid’s medication or their own insulin.
Has anything happened in Atlanta since you finished the book that has made you more hopeful — or more pessimistic — about the possibility of solving this crisis?
At the federal level, we are far from ending the crisis. The current administration is dumping gasoline on it by cutting safety nets like food stamps and Medicaid and making life for people with disabilities more precarious. On the other hand, talking about the book with churches, community groups, tenant groups, and unions – it’s an incredible reminder that what is happening in Washington, D.C. is not the final word on our housing future. Some people have become radicalized in a way, refusing the old ways and options that we’ve been given around housing. They’re refusing the status quo, demanding a different political and moral imagination. That really does give me hope. It’s heartening to talk to people who have taken their anger from reading the book and seeing what these families were subjected to, and galvanizing them to demand a different kind of city and housing policy.
Goldstone will take part in the Decatur Book Festival’s opening keynote conversation event on Friday, Oct. 2, at 7 p.m. at First Baptist Church Sanctuary.
