After Eviction

After Eviction

Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us challenges the widespread public perception of homelessness as a reflection of individual choices, but it also looks beyond the assumption that soaring home and rental prices alone are driving the crisis.

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
by Brian Goldstone
Crown, 2025, 448 pp.

Last May, California governor Gavin Newsom called on local governments across the state to bar tent encampments on public land, offering a model ordinance that would allow cities and counties to “resolve” encampments “with urgency and with humanity.” This push came a year after a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a local law in Grants Pass, Oregon, that barred camping on public land, which effectively criminalizes homelessness. Numerous mainstream Democratic leaders supported the move, arguing that they needed camping bans to keep public spaces safe and to better serve homeless people who refuse services like shelter beds. In the year and a half since the Supreme Court decision, cities in red states and blue states alike have cracked down on encampments, falling into alignment with the Trump administration’s call to “get tough” on homelessness.

Some cities have recoiled at this approach. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called arresting homeless people a “failed response” that “will not get people housed.” Under her administration, Los Angeles has focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into motels, an approach that likely contributed to the first decline in the number of unsheltered homeless people the city has seen in years—though Bass has also been criticized for leaving funds unspent and not delivering long-term solutions. The city of Houston also took a less punitive approach in the wake of the pandemic, moving 25,000 people off the streets not by sweeping encampments but by offering housing. Both efforts relied on a combination of federal, state, and local funds. Additional federal efforts to reduce homelessness among veterans, which rely on providing people access to subsidized housing and case management services, have been widely successful.

While the public response to homelessness remains squarely focused on managing its most visible manifestations, another story is unfolding in what journalist and researcher Brian Goldstone calls a “shadow realm” in his incisive new book, There Is No Place for Us. Goldstone focuses on a largely invisible and growing group of people: the working homeless. These are people for whom full-time work, even overtime, provides too little to survive in a world with rising rents, insufficient and unreliable public transit, expensive and unavailable child and healthcare, and a legal system that allows landlords to operate with impunity.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the number of homeless people increased by 18 percent from 2023 to 2024, the largest percent annual increase since the agency started keeping track in 2007. The crisis is even more acute for families with children, who saw homelessness shoot up by 39 percent in the same year. There Is No Place for Us challenges the flawed yet widespread public perception of homelessness as a reflection of individual choices, but it also looks beyond the assumption that soaring home and rental prices alone are driving the surge. Goldstone traces the effects of a number of factors, from stagnant wages to the decades-long efforts to dismantle public housing to the increasingly large share of the rental market owned by private equity firms.

Ultimately, he argues, the homelessness crisis is the result of decades of neoliberal policies that have shifted an ever-growing share of the responsibility for sheltering people into profit-driven hands, leaving renters subject to austerity and the whims of corporate landlords, private equity firms, and a legal system that rarely works in their favor. “Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” Goldstone writes. “They’re being pushed.”

In There Is No Place for Us, Goldstone takes the reader inside the lives of five working families in Atlanta, Georgia, whose experiences reflect the economic realities facing many low-income people across the United States. Trained as an anthropologist, Goldstone embedded with each family for years, capturing in astonishing detail their daily lives and struggles. He moves between the institutional and the personal with ease, capturing the contradictions built into what he calls an “interplay of growth and displacement, development and deprivation.”

In Atlanta, the billions of dollars spent on renewal and redevelopment—including projects like the Beltline, a multi-use trail encircling the city—have spurred luxury housing construction and pushed low-income people to the margins of the city or outside of it entirely. Atlanta has tens of thousands of new, mostly luxury apartments, yet rents have skyrocketed, resulting in a net loss of about 60,000 affordable units between 2010 and 2023. This has radically transformed a city that once, as Goldstone explains, “typified the ‘poor in the core’ phenomenon seen in many postindustrial urban areas.” In the early 1990s, Atlanta was 67 percent Black; now it’s less than half. Yet 93 percent of homeless families in the city are Black, including all the families featured in There Is No Place for Us.

Goldstone’s ethnographic approach to reframing the narrative around homelessness evokes Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Evicted, which shifted public discourse about eviction and poverty in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis. All the families Goldstone follows in There Is No Place for Us face eviction at some point as they are thrust into homelessness. While it’s difficult to track eviction rates—Desmond’s Eviction Lab at Princeton University collects much of the data that is available—several recent studies have looked at how evictions increase homelessness and economic insecurity, showing that losing housing can not only push people into shelters but also lead to lower wages and negatively affect credit scores. One of the families Goldstone follows received an eviction notice through an automated process after their house burned down. That eviction got in the way of them securing their next apartment. Atlanta stands out for its lack of tenant protections, but efforts to reform housing laws to offer more protection to renters often face fierce opposition across the country.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, 12 million low-income households are severely cost burdened. In no major state, metropolitan area, or county can a full-time worker earning minimum wage afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment, a reality that has grown more acute in recent years. It’s a struggle that twenty-three-year-old Britt Wilkinson, one of the mothers Goldstone follows, knows well. Britt works a low-wage job as a line cook at an airport restaurant, and she is unable to afford an apartment. She and her kids have been camped out on her great-grandmother’s living room floor for months, waiting for the Atlanta Housing Authority to process her application for a Section 8 housing voucher. She submitted her application two years ago.

Britt sees the voucher, a form of rental assistance where tenants pay a fixed percentage of their income toward rent while the federal government makes up the difference, as her only hope for finding an apartment in an increasingly expensive and restrictive rental market. The going rate for an apartment would eat up 80 or 90 percent of her monthly income. This is a dramatic shift from the Atlanta where her family lived for decades. In the 1970s, Britt’s mother and grandmother were able to find an apartment in one of the city’s public housing complexes, where rents are fixed to about a third of a tenant’s monthly income. But by the time Britt had her own children, the Atlanta Housing Authority had either privatized or demolished much of the city’s public housing in favor of subsidized housing models that depend on the private market. Democratic administrations have endorsed and facilitated this shift, which Goldstone argues is one of several policy decisions contributing to the economic impossibilities so many low-income renters like Britt face.

The Atlanta Housing Authority does finally award Britt a voucher, and she settles into an apartment with her kids. But after a year, the private corporation that manages the development where she lives refuses to renew her lease. The property manager explains to Britt that she violated building policy by having the man she’d dated for a short period, who had a criminal background, repeatedly spend the night. By the time Britt went to renew her lease, they’d broken up, but that mattered little, and she was left scrambling to find a new apartment. Goldstone presents many other stories that illustrate the precarity that tenants face, while landlords operate with a free hand. Even when they accept Section 8 vouchers, landlords are under no  federal obligation to offer security beyond a year-long lease.

Britt starts looking again. Months pass and she cannot find an apartment. Many simply cost too much, while others come with a laundry list of qualifications like background checks, credit reports, and references—all common parts of the tenant screening process, which disproportionately exclude renters of color. Housing authorities give Section 8 voucher recipients about two months to find a landlord willing to rent to them, after which the agency recaptures the subsidy and passes it on to someone else. For Britt, the clock ran out. She lost the subsidy she thought would guarantee her growing family stability for years. She wasn’t alone: that year, 2018, 63 percent of the vouchers issued in Atlanta expired before they were used. Nationwide, an increasingly large share of people who receive vouchers never use them; in 2022, nearly half of vouchers were revoked.

At every turn, private actors make a profit off low-income people’s desperation: co-signing companies, private equity–funded real estate firms that see eviction as a business strategy, storage facilities, and many more. Goldstone argues that these companies emerge in the space created by the failure of public institutions and policies to provide for the poor. Among the most egregious are extended-stay hotels. The number of hotel rooms classified as extended-stay has doubled since the early 2000s, and some companies have projected 10 to 15 percent growth in their extended-stay portfolios in the next decade. “Homelessness,” Goldstone writes, “has become big business.”

The families Goldstone follows know this booming industry intimately. Celeste Walker, a single mom raising three kids, calls it “the hotel trap.” She moves into an Efficiency Lodge on the outskirts of town after getting evicted from a burned-down apartment and losing her job as a result. A cancer diagnosis and child-care needs keep her from working full-time, so she sells home-cooked meals from the hotel room window, scraping enough together to pay by the week. That adds up to far more than she would pay in monthly rent, but without the liquid cash, sufficient income, or clean background she would need to find an apartment, it’s her only option.

Celeste eventually visits the Gateway Center, the organization that manages Atlanta’s Continuum of Care, a federally mandated approach that centralizes access to services and housing for homeless people. After an hours-long wait, Celeste meets with a caseworker who asks her a variety of standardized questions designed to evaluate whether she qualifies for services, and if so, which ones. HUD requires local governments to use this kind of evaluation to allocate resources “according to need.” Celeste answers a list of personal questions about her housing status, physical and mental health, drug use, sex work, and family. Within minutes, the caseworker tells her she’s “scored” too low to qualify for housing assistance—despite her cancer diagnosis and the fact that she lives in a hotel with her three kids.

In fact, none of the families Goldstone follows in the book meet HUD’s technical definition of  “literally homeless”: lacking “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” Their status as couch surfers or spending down their bank accounts every week on extended-stay hotels effectively mean they are not vulnerable enough to access the limited services available. A lack of sufficient funding—a problem only made worse by increasing rates of homelessness—means access to those programs is so tightly regulated that many people in need never qualify for help. One group of researchers found that in 2022, the number of homeless people nationwide who are staying with friends or family, often referred to as “doubled-up,” was six times greater than the official HUD count of the country’s entire homeless population. By the end of the book, all of the families Goldstone follows have spent some stretch of time at the Efficiency Lodge on Camden Road. “The extended-stays were not simply filling a gap in the city’s housing landscape,” Goldstone writes. “They were actively exploiting that gap.”

Goldstone estimates that the actual number of homeless people in the United States far exceeds the official count, which excludes people in any number of living situations no one would reasonably consider a “home.” A conservative estimate of the real number, he writes, is 4 million homeless people nationwide. Last year, HUD counted just 771,480 people experiencing homelessness, the vast majority of whom live in shelters. With debate about homelessness focused on managing encampments and much of the public seeing homelessness as a reflection of personal failure, There Is No Place for Us provides a crucial reframing and a road map for thinking about interventions.

The way forward will involve a range of different strategies to shift the power balance between low-income tenants and the landlords, real estate developers, and financial firms that control so much of the housing market today. The list of ideas he offers is long. It includes everything from reforming local single-family zoning laws to expanding the federal definition of homelessness so that more people can get help in an emergency. Many of the interventions Goldstone points to are already playing out on the ground: tenant unions in Connecticut and Kansas City are growing more powerful, and a national tenant group recently announced a cross-state campaign to organize thousands of renters with the same private equity firm for a landlord. Some cities are considering rent stabilization legislation, which, despite ample evidence that such protections can decrease evictions and increase housing stability, remain exceedingly rare in the United States.

While Goldstone advocates these kinds of changes, he argues that addressing the root causes of today’s crises will require massive public investment in new social housing. Such a model would “take housing . . . beyond the reach of speculators and profiteers” by decommodifying it. Like many others, he points to the long history of social housing in Vienna as an example. Some such efforts are underway: the housing authority in Montgomery County, Maryland, recently established a county-level public developer, and advocates are pushing for similar models at the state level in Rhode Island and New York.

But as these campaigns and movements expand, Trump is clawing back already insufficient resources, with little pushback from Democratic leaders. In July, his administration issued an executive order to replace programs that house homeless people with crackdowns that would push people into institutional settings. In addition, the administration wants to eliminate federal management of the Section 8 program in favor of a rental assistance program administered at the state level. The proposal would institute a two-year cap for receiving rental subsidies, a move that could mean 4 million Americans lose their federal housing assistance, thrusting many more into homelessness, and toward the extended-stay hotels lying in wait.

Nina Sparling is pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she worked as an investigative reporter covering housing and homelessness.