‘There Is No Place for Us' Review: Trapped in a Shadow Realm

Wall Street Journal

07-05-2025

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.
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There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
By Brian Goldstone
Crown
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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.