Book Review: ‘There Is No Place For Us' shines lights on a homeless population often ignored
The public's perception and debate over homelessness is usually fixated on people living on the street, encampments or shelters. That view ignores an even larger segment of the population, often dubbed the 'invisible homeless,' people without stable housing who are living with friends or family or other locations such as extended-stay hotels.
That population is the focus of Brian Goldstone's book, 'There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America.' It's a revelatory and gut-wrenching exploration of an often-ignored homeless population that is key to understanding poverty in America.
The book follows the lives of five families in Atlanta, a city where gentrification has pushed rent and housing costs out of reach for many low-income workers.
Goldstone's narrative pulls readers into the daily challenges that the families face daily, from navigating a byzantine process for housing vouchers to enduring laws that offer more protections to landlords than renters.
Its structure and pace keeps readers engaged as it underscores how many working families are teetering on the edge, and the obstacles that are thrown in their path in finding stable housing.
Goldstone also explains how the problem has been exacerbated by a deliberately narrow definition of homelessness that left out the kinds of families he profiles.
'Everyone else was written out of the story,' Goldstone writes in the book's epilogue, which also details potential policy solutions. 'There Is No Place For Us' offers a chance to put this population and issue back into the story.
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Forbes
14-05-2025
- Forbes
Building Communities Of Support For Foster Families
On a given day, 400,000 children in the U.S. are living in foster care, with more than 100,000 children awaiting permanent homes. And while about a one-third of American adults consider fostering, most don't—deterred by a broken system that offers little support to parents. Enter Susan Silverman and Second Nurture. Working with communities, mostly synagogues, she transforms fostering from an experience of isolation to one of belonging and shared responsibility, making the journey less daunting and creating ways for everyone to help. Her philosophy: "All of our children are all of our children." Ashoka's Danielle Goldstone caught up with Susan to learn more. Danielle Goldstone: Let's start at the beginning. How did you start thinking of this idea? Susan Silverman Second Nurture Susan Silverman: It was really about two emotional pulls. One was fostering—I grew up in a family that fostered, so it was up close and personal as I was a foster sister. The other was being a rabbi and understanding the power of community. What helped crystallize this was an experience in Israel around 2015 when the government was trying to deport asylum seekers. Some colleagues and I created a program asking fellow Israelis to sign up to hide families in their homes. Within a week, we had 2,000 families volunteering. It showed me the power of a household, the power of family and community. I realized that this could work for any vulnerable population, melding those two things—family and community. If you think about family values in an expansive and loving way, it's really powerful. Goldstone: So you started to apply this insight to foster care. Silverman: Yes. Initially, we planned to partner with synagogues and churches to encourage them to foster, but that was a big lift. But we discovered people coming to our cohort meetings were mostly already fostering. We learned there's a 30-50% drop-off rate of foster families within a year, so we shifted focus. Now we support existing foster families so they can succeed with help from their Second Nurture 'host community.' Since returning to in-person meetings after Covid, none of our families has stopped fostering. Goldstone: Remarkable. What kind of support do you offer? Silverman: Practical support. We reach out to the community members saying, "We need a tutor, we need this or that," and people volunteer. So many people want to support foster kids and families, but it feels overwhelming and amorphous. But when there's something specific they can do, they step up. Goldstone: Why are faith communities good partners? Silverman: They're already gathering with a sense of purpose and values. No community is like, "Oh, screw the orphan." Most, at least in theory, want to help. Our partners, mostly synagogues, are already engaged with issues like homelessness, mass incarceration, drug abuse, human trafficking—and the foster experience is the number one feeder into all those problems. If you went to a soup kitchen and asked how many people were raised in foster care to any extent, maybe 80% would raise their hands. That's because when you 'age out' of foster care at 18 or 21 with no safety net, no one to say "come live at home and save money," you're vulnerable. If foster families are successful—whether through adoption or helping biological families get back on their feet—children don't age out without support. Goldstone: Are all your host communities faith communities? Silverman: Currently, yes. But we're just starting to work with an LGBTQ center. Right now, they're referring people our way, but my hope is they'll become a host community formally because they have many foster and adoptive families and a strong centralized community. Goldstone: What needs to be in place in a host community for Second Nurture to agree to partner? Silverman: Well, our approach has evolved. Initially, we approached synagogues saying, 'We will provide lots of stuff.' Now we are more open source, more an AA kind of model where they have to find the people from the community to run the program. Our most successful community started from its members reaching out to me saying, 'Hey, we heard about Second Nurture. We want to do it in our synagogue.' Goldstone: How does your approach affect foster kids and parents and host communities? Silverman: For the kids, the most magical part is being in a space where they don't have to explain their lives—why they're new to a family or why they have other parents they visit. They just get to be themselves. As for foster families, Second Nurture creates a sense of belonging. They're often the only foster family in their neighborhood or school. Research by iFoster found that a sense of belonging is crucial. During our community meetings, practical solutions emerge organically. When someone mentions a challenge, others often have solutions. We've also partnered with Change Reaction for one-time financial assistance—like when someone is about to lose their car insurance. We partner with A Home Within for free therapy for foster kids so families. We bring in volunteer massage therapists, organize parents' nights out with childcare and restaurant gift certificates. The nice thing is parents choose to go to dinner together. For faith communities, participating is empowering and builds multigenerational connections. You'll see 80-year-old women and teenagers playing with the kids. One rabbi said it's his favorite part of being a rabbi, that Sunday every month when the cohort gets together. For Jewish communities facing rising antisemitism, there's been an unintended positive outcome—a beautiful merging of worlds. Goldstone: And your bigger goal is integrating into the foster care system as a whole, no? Tell us more. Silverman: That's right. If this approach could be taken up by the system overall, that would be best—making it less siloed and incorporating communities throughout the U.S. We work closely with child services in LA and Boston. I'd love to grow this outward, put ourselves out of business if the system could take it over with the same love and support. Goldstone: Susan, your work draws out the power of relationships, which feels so hard in our digital lives. How do you create strong relationships? Silverman: I wish we could take credit for that but it just happens. It's not a genius idea, right? It's really very basic. These communities exist. People need community, peanut butter and chocolate, it just works. So, I feel like our job is to convene, to support. You know, a teenager was just doing his school volunteer hours with us and then planned to be done when one of the foster kids said, 'I'll see you next month, right?' He said, 'Yeah, you'll see me next month,' and he hasn't stopped volunteering. Because there's a little kid saying to him, I like you and I want to see you next time. The teen responded to that love, that connection. In a sense, there's only one thing we need to do. We need to respond. Susan Silverman, an Ashoka Fellow, is the founder of Second Nurture that operates in the U.S. and Israel. Danielle Goldstone, an Ashoka interviewer, is the founder of innoFaith. This interview was condensed for length and clarity by Ashoka.
Wall Street Journal
07-05-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘There Is No Place for Us' Review: Trapped in a Shadow Realm
When we first encounter Celeste Walker, she is paying weekly rent for a room at a shabby extended-stay motel in a run-down part of Atlanta. Eight months earlier, the single mother of three had returned from working at a warehouse to find her home destroyed by an arsonist, a man she once dated. With the house unlivable, she stopped paying rent and eventually received an eviction notice from the landlord, lowering her credit rating and hampering her ability to rent elsewhere. She and her children then went through a series of temporary living arrangements, including her car. She also discovered she had cancer and was forced to cut back on her working hours for treatment. Finally, she found a room she could afford at a place frequently visited by county health inspectors, but full of people facing problems like hers. According to the Atlanta school system, that made her and her children officially 'homeless,' since they had no place to call their own. Grab a Copy There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America By Brian Goldstone Crown We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Amazon Barnes & Noble Books a Million Bookshop Celeste—not her real name—heads one of five Atlanta families portrayed in Brian Goldstone's poignant 'There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.' Over a three-year period starting in 2019, Mr. Goldstone, a journalist, immersed himself in their lives and interviewed dozens of social workers, landlords, attorneys, activists, public officials and others involved with them. His ethnography seeks to rebut the view that the homeless are people who suffer from afflictions such as substance abuse or mental illness and live on the streets or in shelters. A far larger group, he contends, work regularly, sometimes at more than one job, but cannot afford stable accommodations and move—or are forced to move—repeatedly. It is difficult not to feel sorry for these families. Through in-depth and often heart-rending accounts, Mr. Goldstone shows why they lack stable housing and face difficulties in acquiring it. But his ideas about how to help them turn out to be superficial and unpersuasive. Although alcohol, drugs and mental illness caused some of their problems, the women who are the central figures in each family seem to live, according to Mr. Goldstone's account, under a cloud of misfortunes and bad choices such as car accidents, illnesses, broken appliances, unexpected pregnancies, abusive spouses, Covid-19, cancelled leases and lost jobs. Government assistance, social workers and community activists make little difference in their lives (other than by raising hopes before dashing them). Still, they persist, going from low-paying job to low-paying job, finding shelter where they can (including with friends and relatives) and caring for their children as well as possible.
New York Times
26-03-2025
- New York Times
Working While Homeless: In America, It's All Too Common
Britt, a mother of two whose roots in Atlanta go back five generations, stared at the signboard near the road where she used to live. The previous year, her affordable housing complex, Gladstone Apartments, had been razed to make way for a new development called Empire Zephyr, whose digital rendering showed a mix of condos and townhouses 'starting from the low $400s' and promised 'lush greenery, budding culture, energy and soul.' The construction site both impressed her and made her utterly despondent: 'Wow, this will be really nice when it's done. But me and my kids? There's no place for us here.' The moment is wrenching. Before Britt finally secured a unit in Gladstone, she had been struggling to find a home. Her story is one of several that the journalist Brian Goldstone tells in 'There Is No Place for Us,' his powerful new book about 'the working homeless' in the rapidly gentrifying city of Atlanta, where someone with a full-time job can still get priced out of a place to live. 'The city's renaissance has exacted a heavy toll on its low-income residents,' he writes, explaining that between 2010 and 2023 the median rent shot up by a staggering 76 percent. The people in this book work a lot, and earn very little. Sleeping in cars, crashing with friends or paying for a decrepit room in an extended-stay hotel, they are 'trapped in a sort of shadow realm.' Politicians have been incentivized to define homelessness narrowly, including only people living in shelters or on the street. A true measure of homelessness in America would be six times the official figure, Goldstone writes, pushing the number up to more than four million. 'There Is No Place for Us' offers an immersive narrative of how five Atlanta families found themselves in the direst of straits yet statistically invisible: 'They literally did not count.' For some of Goldstone's subjects, the precipitating event is a violent catastrophe. Britt left the father of her kids after he pulled a gun on her. Celeste moved to Efficiency Lodge, an extended-stay hotel, after an ex-boyfriend burned her house down. The decline in Maurice and Natalia's fortunes is more gradual, a slow slide into ruin. Having been priced out of their hometown, Washington, D.C., they moved to Atlanta in 2013, and lucked out with a rental they could afford. Then their landlady announced that she was selling the condo. The event plunged Maurice and Natalia into the city's skyrocketing rental market. They have three children, one with autism, and they needed to live in a neighborhood with decent schools. Thus began a vicious circle involving a co-signing service, a roach-infested apartment and a private equity firm that automated evictions with an algorithmic ruthlessness. When Natalia had a panic attack, a psychiatrist gave her bad advice, instructing her to cut her hours at the call center where she worked in order to qualify for paid leave, without offering an accurate picture of what such a move would entail. The ensuing scything of their income pushed the family over the edge: 'Their leaky boat was now sinking.' 'There Is No Place for Us' is an exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's 'Random Family' and Matthew Desmond's 'Evicted.' Goldstone, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, conducted interviews, sifted through court records, watched video footage and pored over diary entries in order to produce an intimate account of some of the most difficult years in his subjects' lives. The entrepreneurial Celeste started a cooking service from her room at Efficiency that came to a halt when her abdominal pain and loss of appetite turned out to be symptoms of ovarian and breast cancer. She could not live in a family shelter because she had a 15-year-old son, and family shelters would not take boys older than 13. Despite being a cancer patient, she did not score high enough on the Vulnerability Index for assistance because she was not in a shelter or on the street. Celeste kept a hot-pink composition notebook that she used as a journal. As the country started locking down during the early days of the pandemic, she lost her job at KFC. 'God,' she wrote, 'I know you say don't worry but I'm human and the nature of my flesh is to do so. God, you know my heart and I know you promised to never leave nor forsake me.' Given the demands of immediate survival, collective action is hard to marshal, and even harder to sustain. When a group called the Housing Justice League organizes protests at Efficiency to draw attention to cruel lockouts during the pandemic amid execrable living conditions — mold infestations, broken doors and sagging ceilings — momentum soon sputters out. As one community volunteer puts it during a meeting, gesturing at all the poster boards, 'What's the point of all of this if these families don't have a place to live?' And even if these families do eventually find a place to live, they often pay a premium for being poor. Maurice and Natalia were charged a 'risk-management fee' for an apartment that effectively doubled their security deposit. But they figured their monthly rent would still be cheaper than what they were paying for their cramped room at Extended Stay America, which Maurice called their 'expensive prison.' 'There Is No Place for Us' is a moving book. It is also appropriately enraging. Incremental remedies, Goldstone argues, have only worsened a problem that stems from the assumption that housing is ultimately a commodity, 'and that the few who own it will invariably profit at the expense of the many who need it.' Landlords, especially corporate ones, push up rents even when they don't have to because they know how much power they wield in a captive market. Goldstone quotes the owner of one property management company spelling out his advantage in the starkest terms during the pandemic: 'Where are people going to go? They can't go anywhere.'
