‘There is No Place for Us’ tests America's promise that hard work brings security

Americans in recent years have become accustomed to seeing people without homes setting up tents on sidewalks or in parks. Panhandlers at intersections. Cars with windows blocked by cardboard as the occupants sleep.

The five families Goldstone follows through modern Atlanta are less visible, but they’re right there, making your latte and trying to keep their balance on the slippery edge of homelessness. It doesn’t take much, usually a misunderstanding with a shift manager or a broken rule at an apartment, to make them lose their footing.

Readers of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random Family” and Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” nonfiction narratives will recognize Brian Goldstone’s approach. He embeds with families over a period of years to tell a broader story about how our country’s leaders and the policies they’ve enacted have failed our citizens.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” sensitively brings readers into the precarious existence faced by so many Americans, from sketchy emergency shelters to the pricey, run-down extended stay hotels that have bloomed on the outskirts of American cities.

The book isn’t all gloom. There are moments of beauty and joy. But anxiety infuses the stories in this book, and stress permeates every character. The subjects’ dreams are modest. They want safe housing, a decent job and a future where they can enjoy more of life’s small pleasures. It’s heartbreaking to watch even these little dreams fall away.

All the stories in this book, from low-wage airport workers struggling to make rent to single mothers forced to camp in their car, are tests of whether America is keeping its basic promise: work hard and you’ll be rewarded.

Our country has minted the first trillionaire in human history, but a growing number of working Americans can’t afford a home. Wealth inequality is increasing. Social services are disappearing. That’s a choice, Goldstone says, and a failure: “Such suffering is so unnecessary, so utterly preventable. We have the solutions. We have the resources. What we need now is the will to act.”

Read MPR News senior reporter Jon Collins full interview transcript below.

Collins: Paint a picture for me of how you settled on this specific topic, or even how you met the folks that are featured in your book.

Goldstone: My wife Elaine, who is a nurse practitioner, was working at a community health center in Atlanta, and we share a car. So every day, I would pick her up from work, and we would debrief our days. And she started to tell me about this trend she was seeing among her patients. Her patients were working, often not just one job, but multiple jobs at places like Walmart, or they were driving for Uber or Lyft, or they were packing boxes in Amazon warehouses.

What she was learning from them was that when they finished their shifts, they weren’t going to a home; they were homeless. And when she told me about that, I was stunned. Even as an educated person and someone who had even reported and researched on economic injustice and equality around the globe, I had never made the connection between work and homelessness, much less unpacked and investigated.

That really spurred me to first write a magazine story for the New Republic, following one family in Atlanta, and when that was done, I realized that I had only scratched the surface.

That there was so much more to know, and crucially that there were so many systems, not just housing, not just low wages and the volatility of work itself, but so many other systems, childcare, healthcare — that were kind of colliding to make this crisis not only possible, but I would argue, inevitable and predictable.

Collins: The conventional wisdom for Americans would be, “Well, you have a job, then you can afford a house.” But your book really illustrates the divide that many people, especially low-wage workers, are experiencing as they try to juggle everything in their lives and make it work.

Goldstone: Absolutely, for a lot of people, including me, the term “working homeless,” which is kind of at the center of this book, that term is not just contradictory; it's kind of scandalous. Many of us have been taught to believe in America that if you just work hard enough, if you just clock enough hours, you might not be able to buy a mansion, but you will at least have your most basic material needs met.

And yet for the five families who I followed for nearly six years for this book, and the many, many, many people like them, they are working and working and working some more, and it still isn't enough.

And it explodes our ideas about meritocracy — it explodes the American dream. If in the richest nation on the planet, a full-time job or multiple jobs still can't get you a roof overhead, then what is going on? And so that was really the question that was kind of hanging over my reporting throughout this period.

Collins: One of the things that really struck me from your book is the level of stress that people experience. It's not even just people stressed about their job or making a living. It's people trying to envision themselves in a stable place. It permeates every story in your book. What sort of change did you see in them during these six years?

Goldstone: There's a term that public health experts use to refer to exactly what you're describing, and that term is toxic stress. It's so important to just linger on that phrase, toxic stress.

Because that is stress that is so chronic and so debilitating that it can actually alter your brain chemistry. It can fundamentally alter your long-term trajectory. And this was especially harrowing when it came to the children in this book, to see how this toxic stress that they were plunged into and forced to endure was really choking off their futures, choking off their opportunity, choking off the rest of their lives before they had even started.

It's the stress, the ways that it then cascades into other things. The way that sleeplessness can cascade into a car accident, as happened with one person in the book, Kara, and then that leads to yet other tragic things in her life.

The important point that I really want readers to constantly be aware of is that these conditions, these circumstances are not God-given; they are not somehow natural. This isn't a Greek tragedy where these families are just struck with this unforeseen malady. Each of the circumstances documented in the book are utterly preventable.

Yes, people make choices that they regret later on. Yes, these are human beings. These are not superhuman angels or something who can do no wrong. And yet there are whole systems, whole structures just militating constantly against their stability at every turn, and that is precisely what produces that kind of deep, deep anxiety and stress on a daily basis.

Collins: Cars were also, in my mind, a character in your book to a certain degree, they serve as shelter sometimes, right? But they also are necessary in many American cities, especially Atlanta, to be able to get around, to get to work. And when something like a car falls through, everything else cascades behind.

Goldstone: Atlanta, like many cities in the country, is a place where you really have to have a car to get by. For Kara, one of the moms in the book, her car was the way that she was able to earn her income.

Because when the pandemic hit and she lost her job as a home health aide and the kids were out of school and she didn't have any childcare, she put her four kids in the car with her and started driving for DoorDash, delivering food. And so her car was literally the vehicle for her income.

There was one moment in the book where they're at a birthday party. She's taken the kids to the park to celebrate her son's birthday, and her son spills juice on her phone accidentally, and Kara just bursts into a tirade against her son.

Anyone walking by would think, “OK, this is an abusive situation. What's going on here?” But what they wouldn't know was that if this phone died, if this phone was damaged, she wouldn't be able to use her app to drive for DoorDash.

That same car becomes the closest thing that they have to shelter when Kara and the kids are forced to sleep in her car in a Walmart parking lot, terrified that a cop will knock on the window and call Child Protective Services and take the kids away.

Cars are central, and when people ultimately lose their car because they can't make the car payment anymore, and it gets repossessed, that's just one more kind of part of the safety net that has been shredded for these families.

Collins: You really can't talk about income inequality or poverty in the United States without also talking about race. First off, what sort of impacts do you see on folks in that regard? And how did you approach it as a white journalist?

Goldstone: There's a cliche in this country that anyone can become homeless, anyone can experience poverty, that it's colorblind, and to some extent, that's true. There are people from all kinds of backgrounds and of all races who experience this kind of homelessness.

And yet, in Atlanta, where the book is based, even though Atlanta is no longer a majority Black city, an astonishing 93 percent of families who are homeless are Black. That racialized dimension is really replicated in every city around the country.

Here in the Twin Cities, we know that Black and Indigenous families and individuals are overwhelmingly represented in the homeless population. So homelessness is not as colorblind as we would like to believe, and that has a history. There's an entire history of displacement, segregation, dispossession and displacement behind these disparities.

Going into this project, I really wanted to have this kind of demographic plurality. I wanted to have people from many backgrounds — the white working-class family. But the truth was, as I started going to food pantries on Saturday morning and going to shelters, everyone there was Black.

And so I had to confront the question of “What will it mean as a white man to do work where it is going to be primarily about not just black families and individuals, but lots of single mothers as well?”

I just tried to be as acutely conscious at every point in this process of the biases that I was bringing to this, the ignorance that I was bringing. And I hope that some of that ignorance, some of that naivete, was actually productive because it allowed me to have a kind of curiosity about what these families were experiencing.

But that's a question, among many other questions, that really kept me up at night, and that I think anyone doing this work needs to really struggle with.

Collins: Gender was also a huge theme. You saw it repeated over and over in these families that much of the burden falls on the women in the family. Not all of it, of course, but the women in the family and the girls in the family carry a lot of the burdens. How did you think about that, and how did you sort of navigate that fact?

Goldstone: It's absolutely true that in the population of working homeless families, and really just homeless families, they are disproportionately headed by single mothers.

I didn't go out looking for this, but when I met a family where it was a two-parent household, in the book, their names are Maurice and Natalia, it also felt very crucial to show that even in a two-parent household, even with a father who is absolutely devoted to his children and to his spouse, they too can [be] pushed into homelessness by by these larger structures.

I just learned yesterday the devastating news that Maurice died tragically in a work accident. It feels very raw for me because Maurice was so determined that through allowing me to tell his family stories, that this crisis would finally be addressed, and that people would no longer feel the shame of experiencing the kind of insecurity that his own family and so many others do experience in this country.

Gender was in the mix throughout. There are a lot of really bad men in this book. I think that's the only way to put it. There are a lot of men who are not there for their children or their partners, and I just try to show the reality of what was happening, in all of its messiness and authenticity.

Collins: How do you deal with that sort of frustration that there's not a clean ending?

Goldstone: There were so many times as I was writing the book, and even during the reporting, where I wished I was writing a novel, where I could just kind of take the material I had documented, but put a happy ending on it, to give a tidy resolution. There really isn't one.

And Maurice and Natalia, I think, were the closest ones in the book to finding themselves at the end of the book in a place of of peace, and kind of making it through this absolutely tumultuous and wrenching year that they went through when they were homeless with their children living in an extended stay hotel.

I just have to allow that to be. I have to allow the fact that this isn't a novel; that this is real life. And you know, one thing that I believe now is that it's on us. It's on readers. It's on those who encountered these stories. It's on us as citizens to ensure that their ending, which is still being written, their lives, are ongoing, that their ending can find security.

I just always go back to the sheer scale and magnitude of this problem. There are so many languishing in a manufactured invisibility. The fact that as I argue, the real number of people who are unhoused in this country is conservatively about six times greater than the official number.

So close to 4 million men, women and children without homes in this country. The ending for all of those millions of men, women and children remains to be written. That is my hope: that readers will not just finish the book feeling sad, but that they will feel empowered to demand that the suffering end.

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