There Is No Place for Us
Working and Homeless in America
Annually, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development conducts a point-in-time count. Across the nation, volunteers disperse to tally heads. They may encounter two unhoused Black men trundling their bedrolls in a shopping cart, seven runaway teens squatting in an abandoned mill, four veterans showering in the public library sink, or one White woman in a wheelchair experiencing a mental health crisis under a bridge. The official math determines how federal dollars get allocated—and this entrenches the myopic, decades-long definition of who is homeless.
The only thing worse than having your plight reduced to a number is not being counted at all. In his monumental work There Is No Place for Us, anthropologist Brian Goldstone organizes his nonfiction narrative around the statistically invisible: the women, children, and men who, according to HUD, aren’t officially homeless (i.e., sleeping either in designated shelters or in places not meant for human habitation) but who contend with chronic housing precarity while hustling at full-time jobs.
Set in rapidly gentrifying metropolitan Atlanta—the first US city to build, defund, and bulldoze public housing—Goldstone’s narrative follows five families, all victims of predatory capitalism, as they negotiate how expensive it is to be poor. Refusing to investigate from afar, Goldstone exposes the infuriating fallacy in the myth of American meritocracy.
