The invisible homeless crisis that official statistics miss

Vox

25-03-2025

is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade.
'The only thing worse than being homeless in America is not being considered homeless in America,' says Brian Goldstone, a journalist and ethnographer. America's homelessness crisis extends far beyond what we see on the streets, and Goldstone wants us to pay attention to those who are hidden from public view.
In his new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Goldstone examines the lives of families caught in extended-stay motels, sleeping in cars, or shuffling between precarious arrangements — situations that often leave them uncounted in official homeless statistics despite housing instability. His reporting challenges the longstanding American narrative connecting homelessness with unemployment or an unwillingness to work.
I spoke with Goldstone about the distinction between 'falling' and 'being pushed' into homelessness, the stigma attached to the homeless label, and his perspective on what meaningful solutions might require. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
You note that many people with unstable housing situations resist identifying as 'homeless.' How does this reluctance to adopt the label affect both individuals' experiences and our collective understanding of the housing crisis?
There is absolutely a stigma attached to the term 'homeless' and there's also a way in which HUD's prevailing definition of homelessness — where only those who are sleeping on the streets or in homeless shelters count — has filtered into the public narrative and the public imagination. The people I'm writing about in my book belong to that public — they themselves often don't recognize themselves as homeless when they're doubling up with friends or sleeping in motels. They're often surprised to learn, for example, that their kids' schools, and the Department of Education, do consider them homeless if they're in those situations. These official metrics and official ways of conceptualizing the problem absolutely impact the people experiencing it on a psychological level.
One person in my book, Celeste, her house burns down and when she finds she can basically secure no other apartment because an eviction has been filed against her, she and her son wind up at this extended stay hotel. At some point a social worker at her son's elementary school gave her this homeless resource list. But Celeste was like, 'I'm not putting that homeless label on me and my kids.' Part of it was this idea that she didn't want to speak something into existence, she didn't want to make this homeless category her identity. But in practical terms, she also ignored those resources until she was later diagnosed with cancer and she realizes that she's in this hotel trap that's virtually impossible to get out of.
So there was that tension of refusing the [homeless] category, but then realizing she needs the category. We have a measure of poverty in America and a lot of people who fall under the poverty threshold don't want to necessarily think of themselves as impoverished, but that that definition and threshold is absolutely essential for determining and parceling out resources.
Most of the reporting for your book was done before homelessness really blew up post-pandemic as a political issue in the US, with encampments and then the Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court case. Tell me about your decision to not bring that more recent history into the book.
I didn't know a pandemic was coming, but in retrospect, I think it's really important to show that the emergency that we became more aware of during the pandemic — when we saw how absolutely threadbare the social safety net was — was already well on its way. The pandemic intensified rather than produced this housing catastrophe.
As far as how all this relates to the encampment sweeps, the criminalization of homelessness, the war on unhoused people that has been unleashed and given the green light by the Grants Pass decision, I tried to not draw a clear line of demarcation between the kind of homelessness that has become the object of those sorts of crackdowns, and the more invisible or hidden population that I'm writing about, which are largely working families.
By and large these tents on the street are like the tip of the iceberg, and that's the most extreme edge of homelessness in America. A lot of the people I'm writing about in the book are like what's under the water surface. But it's important to say that this is all one giant iceberg. The more extreme and acute this emergency gets, the more visible it becomes, because it simply pushes up to the surface. But until we address what's under that surface or or out of view, that visibility will continue. There just won't be enough places for it to hide, so to speak.
Other countries have for-profit housing systems but don't experience our level of homelessness. Based on your reporting, do you see a way forward that could maintain aspects of our current system while meaningfully addressing homelessness, or does the solution require more fundamental change?
I hesitate to enter directly into debates over market-rate housing and zoning reform and tenant rights and rent control. My own view is that we need everything like that, and nothing on its own is going to be sufficient. The only thing that might truly be sufficient is a massive investment at every level of government in social housing.
I think that we can only convince ourselves that these kinds of half measures are adequate when we have narrowed the scope, magnitude and nature of the crisis. I don't think that a few tiny homes here or a couple of permanent supportive housing units over there are anywhere close to what we need to truly address the magnitude and severity of this problem. But it doesn't mean that we don't also need those things. So yes, something fundamental has to change in how we approach housing in America.
Some of your characters developed a fairly cynical view of the homeless services industry, and we have a new Republican administration casting doubt on the idea of more subsidies to help. Certainly reading your book one could see a little bit how that might be true. What is your own view now?
I think the current system is very much working within the constraints that have been imposed on this world of homeless services, and in many cases they're doing the best they can with what they have. Homeless service providers have been told to prioritize those who — according to certain scholars and experts on this issue — are most at immediate risk of dying on the street and so they're trying to ration out scarce resources. I think the problem is not the system itself. It's what has shaped that system.
You focused a lot in your book on extended stay hotels and motels — which are these last-resort options where people pay a lot of money for pretty poor quality conditions, receive none of the traditional tenant protections, and are often not counted as officially homeless when staying there, even as they can't afford to go anywhere else. They exist in such a gray area of our housing conversation. How are you thinking about these places today?
For the thousands and thousands of families and individuals living at these extended stay hotels, which are effectively for-profit homeless shelters, they're places where the casualties of America's housing crisis have been consigned and then people find it almost impossible to leave. The way I think about them often is like — the only thing worse than being homeless in America is not being considered homeless in America. The only thing worse than being a low-income tenant in America is not even having the 'privilege' of being considered a tenant.
I think the people living in these hotels are at once the most vulnerable renters in America and the most vulnerable homeless people in America. And I know it sounds paradoxical that those two things can coexist, but I think that's what makes these places so important for us to reckon with.
You write that families aren't falling into homelessness, they're being pushed. Who or what is doing this pushing, and how does that change how we think about addressing the problem?
There's this language of 'falling into homelessness,' which almost makes it seem like someone tripped, or like they've been struck by a natural disaster. That there's something, unavoidable, beyond their control, beyond anyone's control, and it just kind of happened to them. I argue in my book that the immense wealth accumulating in cities across America, and the revitalization of urban space, isn't just sort of existing alongside this deprivation and precarity, but that it's actively producing it. And so when I talk about people being pushed into homelessness and this kind of insecurity, I'm really trying to insist on that causal relationship.
You highlight the 'working homeless' throughout your book — people who have jobs yet still lack stable housing. How does this reality challenge the longstanding American narrative that connects homelessness with unemployment or unwillingness to work?
Many people in this country, especially those who are not experiencing this precarity themselves, have needed to believe a story about poverty and homelessness that says if people just work harder, if they just get a job, they will be okay. Yet in some cases, certain jobs can actually make it even more likely that homelessness will be waiting for you and I think that's really, really hard for us to come to terms with. What was so shocking to me is just seeing people work and work and work and work some more and work some more after that and it's never enough. It's never enough to secure their most basic material needs, housing being the most essential, arguably, among them. That reality is not new, that didn't just happen in the last few years, but the scale is new.
People across the political spectrum almost need to believe certain things about homelessness because acknowledging the reality calls into question too many of the fundamental assumptions that we in the United States hold dear, like the necessity for hard work. And I'm saying that hard work is not enough in this country.