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New York Times
26-03-2025
- General
- 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.'
Washington Post
22-03-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Who gets housing, and who is ‘disposable'?
Celeste Walker's housing crisis began in the spring of 2018, when the two-bedroom house she was renting for $850 a month in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta, went up in flames. After she and her three children spent a few nights in a hotel paid for by the Red Cross, Celeste struggled to find an affordable place to rent on her income as a warehouse worker. When she applied for a smaller apartment that would cost $1,025 a month, she was swiftly rejected. Celeste discovered that the private-equity real estate firm that owned her now-uninhabitable rental had served an eviction notice after she refused to pay two months' rent to break the lease after the fire. Kara Thompson, an EKG technician at an Atlanta hospital, was pushed into crisis after complaining about the broken water heater in her two-bedroom rental. After a month of struggling to keep herself and her four young children clean without hot water, she threatened to withhold rent until her landlord fixed the problem. But landlord-friendly Georgia didn't require property owners to guarantee habitability or forbid them from 'retaliatory evictions.' Soon Kara, too, would have an eviction on her record that made it next to impossible to rent another apartment. The Walkers and the Thompsons — both families led by single Black working mothers — quickly found themselves in a downward spiral of housing precarity, one step away from sleeping on the street. The Walkers spent 18 months in a room at an extended-stay hotel that cost more per month than their burned-down house, before falling one rung further down, to a dilapidated rooming house. The Thompsons regularly slept in Kara's Toyota Avalon when they couldn't afford even the cheapest hotel rooms. Despite their lack of stable housing, neither the Walkers nor the Thompsons would be considered officially homeless under the federal government's current definition. Only people living on the street or in shelters fall into this narrow category. Research suggests that the total population of people experiencing homelessness in the United States — including people living in cars or hotel rooms, or doubled-up with friends or family — is several times larger than the official figure, which was 770,000 in 2024. 'There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,' by journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone, shines a light on what the author calls the 'shadow realm' of working people who are not considered officially homeless but lack a fixed place to sleep at night. As Goldstone writes, in the popular imagination homelessness is linked to 'individual pathology' — primarily mental illness and substance use disorders, but also 'laziness' or an unwillingness to hold down a job. Americans cling to the idea that if we work hard enough, not only will we avoid homelessness, but we will one day become homeowners. Indeed, the myth of the American Dream depends on a decoupling of homelessness and employment. But Goldstone exposes how working families like the Walkers and the Thompsons, 'besieged by a combination of skyrocketing rents, low wages, and inadequate tenant protections … are becoming the new face of homelessness in the United States.' The five Atlanta-area families he follows sleep in their cars, on the floors and couches of relatives' and friends' crowded apartments, or in exorbitantly priced extended-stay hotels and rooming houses riddled with vermin and mold. They tell themselves that these arrangements are temporary, but with their eviction records and bad credit scores — as well as low wages that don't keep up with rents in a rapidly gentrifying Atlanta — true housing security is beyond their reach. By compassionately telling these families' stories and excavating the systemic forces behind their housing insecurity, 'There Is No Place for Us' shifts the paradigm on homelessness, revealing how America's disinvestment in public housing and relentless pursuit of free-market growth has come at the terrible expense of poor working families. To report 'There Is No Place for Us,' Goldstone drew on his background in anthropology, spending more than two years immersed in the lives of five families. He observed them in their hotel rooms and the apartments they managed to rent for stretches of time. He accompanied them to work, family gatherings and visits to the Gateway Center, the 'coordinated entry' hub for accessing the woefully limited assistance that public agencies and nonprofits are able to offer to homeless people in Atlanta. Goldstone stitches together a textured and extraordinarily detailed narrative of each family's multiyear struggle to keep a roof over their heads. The effect is reminiscent of 'Random Family' (2003), Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's much-acclaimed portrait of life in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx overtaken by the drug trade. Like the Walkers and the Thompsons — and 93 percent of homeless families in Atlanta — the three other families Goldstone profiles are Black. The adults range in age from their early 20s to their mid-40s, and are all low-wage workers; they support children ranging from infancy to teenage years. Three of the families have deep roots in Atlanta, a city that was 67 percent Black in the early 1990s and is now 47 percent Black. As Goldstone recounts each family's trials, he seamlessly weaves in explanations of the systemic reasons behind them. He explains, for instance, how Britt Wilkinson, born and raised in Atlanta, faces a far more difficult housing market than the one her family knew for decades. Wilkinson, a mother of two who works in food service, spent the early years of her 1990s childhood in the East Lake Meadows public housing complex, where five generations of her family lived. By the end of that decade, the complex was demolished to make way for the redevelopment of an adjacent golf course. Housing has been an issue for Wilkinson and her mother ever since. As Goldstone explains, this family was experiencing the consequences of the end of the federal government's relatively brief experiment in subsidizing low-income housing at scale. Complexes that had been erected in the New Deal era to provide affordable housing for White working-class people had, by the 1970s, become majority-Black and highly stigmatized. The federal government began to cut funding, leading to the deterioration of complexes and eventually their demolition. 'The federal government had created the very conditions that were later pointed to as evidence of the 'failure' of public housing,' Goldstone writes. In place of publicly owned housing projects came the Housing Choice Voucher Program, popularly known as Section 8, which left housing for the poor up to private landlords. As Wilkinson found when she was miraculously selected for a voucher after years of waiting, they are increasingly difficult to use in Atlanta, where gentrification has pushed up rental prices. Since Wilkinson's childhood, Atlanta has successfully employed tax incentives and other public subsidies to spur private investment and development. This 'engineered renewal,' Goldstone explains, has displaced lower-income Atlantans farther and farther from the city's core, which is now studded with luxury housing units that make up 94 percent of the new apartments built in the city over the past decade. Wilkinson's much-awaited Section 8 voucher expired before she could find a landlord who would accept it, and her family was back to couch-hopping. Throughout 'There Is No Place for Us,' Goldstone makes clear that the Reagan era's 'neoliberal revolution — marked by large-scale privatization, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and major reductions in social spending' — laid the groundwork for the conditions that push families like Wilkinson's into homelessness. Predatory industries have cropped up to maximize profit on vulnerable people once they fall into crisis. Worst are the extended-stay hotels relied on by four of the five families Goldstone followed. One double-income family with bad credit and an eviction on their record came to see their room at an Extended Stay America as an 'expensive prison.' The eight months they lived there in 2020, as they tried and failed to be approved for an apartment, cost them $17,000. That year, Extended Stay America raked in $96 million in profits; it was soon purchased by Blackstone for $6 billion. The extended-stay hotel business is booming in 'places where working people are most likely to be deprived of housing,' Goldstone writes. The people who end up languishing in these places are at the bottom of a 'housing caste system,' and the hotels cash in on their desperation and lack of other options, often charging twice as much as the apartments in the area that won't rent to their customers. Sarah Jones, a senior writer at New York magazine, says this class of people is seen as 'disposable.' In 'Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass,' Jones grapples with how the covid-19 pandemic exposed preexisting societal conditions that leave certain groups of people especially vulnerable. This includes those experiencing 'official' homelessness — Jones notes that New York City's shelter system, for instance, had an age-adjusted covid mortality rate that was 50 percent higher than the city's cumulative rate by February 2021. But even before the pandemic, officially homeless people were dying prematurely — their life expectancy is just 48. Indeed, as Jones writes, 'trends in COVID mortality were built on long-standing social inequalities,' meaning the virus caused disproportionate harm not just to people experiencing homelessness but also to seniors, people with disabilities, poor people, 'essential' low-wage workers, Black and Indigenous communities, and incarcerated people. Jones forcefully argues that our country's capitalist system deems the deaths of such people acceptable. Throughout the book, she draws on Friedrich Engels's theory of 'social murder' — which posits that society is guilty of murder when a worker dies a premature and unnatural death — as well as the theory of social Darwinism, to lay the blame for covid deaths on our economy's relentless quest for profit. 'Disposable' lacks the deep, sustained reporting and detailed narratives that drive 'There Is No Place for Us.' But five years after the World Health Organization declared covid a pandemic, Jones's book stands as a reminder of the lessons our country has willfully ignored — an especially stark one with Donald Trump back in the White House and further shredding the social safety net. Both 'Disposable' and 'There Is No Place for Us' force readers to reckon with how American society has drawn lines that assume certain people are undeserving of security, in health and in housing. Our calculus rests on a capitalistic system that pushes profits to those at the very top while inflicting suffering and even death on those at the bottom. 'We have taken it for granted that housing is a commodity, a vehicle for accumulating wealth, and that the few who own it will invariably profit at the expense of the many who need it,' Goldstone writes toward the end of his book. We could just as easily, he and Jones argue, take for granted that housing and health are human rights and public goods, and that all levels of government should invest in them as such. We could take for granted that none of us is disposable. Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia and the author of 'The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.' Working and Homeless in America By Brian Goldstone. Crown. 420 pp. $30 America's Contempt for the Underclass By Sarah Jones. Avid Reader. 287 pp. $30
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Amid Changes at the National Archives, the Carter Library Cancels a Civil Rights Book Event
Three book events at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta were abruptly canceled late this week, raising questions about whether leadership changes at the National Archives and Records Administration were affecting programming at the 13 presidential libraries it oversees. The events, which featured authors of books on climate change, homelessness and the civil rights movement, had been scheduled months earlier. But this week, the authors were told they would have to move to other venues and the events were removed from the library's website. Among the affected authors was Elaine Weiss, whose new book, 'Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement,' tells the story of the Highlander Folk School. In the 1950s, it began organizing 'citizenship schools' where Black southerners were trained to pass the Jim Crow-era literacy tests designed to prevent them from voting. In an interview, Ms. Weiss said the event had been arranged in November. But on Thursday afternoon, she said, her publicist at Simon & Schuster informed her that she had been told it could not go forward because the library, which was facing staff cuts, now needs approval from Washington for all programming. (Simon & Schuster declined to comment.) Ms. Weiss said that she did not know whether the event had been called off because of the subject of her book. But she called the sudden cancellation 'chilling.' 'The idea that a program about a book about democracy has to be approved by someone in Washington was and should be for everyone very scary,' she said. 'The book is about voting rights, and about using education as a liberating tool.' The other speakers whose events were canceled include Mike Tidwell, the author of 'The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street,' and Brian Goldstone, the author of 'There Is No Place for Us,' about five 'working homeless' families in Atlanta. By Friday evening, information about all three events had been removed from the library's website. In a statement, Crown, Mr. Goldstone's publisher, said that the local bookseller helping organize the event contacted it on Feb. 19 'to let us know that the Carter Library would now need to seek approval from the National Archives for all programs, even those already scheduled.' The next day, the publisher was told it would be moved to a different location. Multiple inquiries sent to several officials at the Carter library received no response. The press office of the National Archives in Washington declined to answer directly whether it had discussed the events with the Carter Library. But in a statement, it said that it 'entrusts' leadership at each presidential library to make programming decisions. 'Programs and events must always advance and uphold NARA's core mission: to preserve the records of the United States and make them available to the public,' the statement said. 'On this issue, leadership at the Carter Presidential Library is empowered to make their own decisions about scheduling events and programs.' The cancellations at the Carter Library come amid broader turmoil at the National Archives, as President Trump works to remake the federal government through budget cuts and seeks retribution against perceived foes. On Feb. 7, President Trump, who has tangled with the archives over his reluctance to return classified documents after leaving office in 2021, abruptly fired Colleen J. Shogan, the national archivist. (Shogan, a former official at the Library of Congress and the White House Historical Association, was appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.) Mr. Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting archivist, and announced on Feb. 16 that Jim Byron, the chief executive of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a private group connected with the Nixon presidential library in California, would manage the archives 'on a day-to-day basis' until a permanent archivist is appointed. Earlier this month, the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston abruptly closed its doors to the public in the middle of the day, after what a member of the Kennedy family claimed were staff cuts demanded by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency. (The library reopened the next day, and the archives did not provide any explanation for the brief closure.) Some planned events at the Carter Library appear to be unaffected. An event on Feb. 26 featuring the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, author of a new book on presidential pardons, was still scheduled. Other events still listed on its website include an event with the African-American artist Lonnie Holley. Ms. Weiss's event will now be held at the Georgia Center for the Book, a private nonprofit affiliated with the Library of Congress. She said it was ironic that an event about the fight for equal voting rights would be canceled at the Carter Library, an institution dedicated to the legacy of 'a man who stood up for democracy around the world.' 'We are being told that we all have to tell 'patriotic' stories about American history,' she said. 'To me, this is the most patriotic story imaginable.'
