‘There is No Place for Us’

When journalist Brian Goldstone set out to write a book about homelessness in Atlanta, he thought he knew some things. He’d lived in Atlanta for years, and been a reporter writing about poverty and inequality for publications like Harper’s and The New York Times.

In reality, he told a crowd at an event at First Lutheran Church last week, he found himself confronting even his own misguided assumptions about who becomes homeless, how, and why.

“Something that absolutely shocked me, as I began to do the reporting, is I think I harbored this idea that was sort of unexamined, that when homelessness emerges in a city or in this country it emerges in the poorest areas of a city,” Goldstone said. “I think I assumed that homelessness is kind of a by-product of poverty, that it’s kind of an extreme version of poverty.”There’s some truth to that, Goldstone said. But in writing There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, he came face to face with an ugly truth that’s as true in Greensboro as it is in Atlanta.

“What was absolutely astonishing to me was that homelessness and housing insecurity is exploding in the city I live in, in Atlanta, at precisely the moment that the city is undergoing an unprecedented renaissance,” Goldstone said. “An unprecedented revitalization of urban space, an unprecedented degree of growth.”

This wasn’t just the poverty amidst plenty, he realized.

“There’s actually a casual relationship,” he said. “Somehow this growth, somehow this gentrification, somehow this transformation of the city is actually fueling insecurity, fueling precarity, and really making it more and more difficult for people to remain housed in that city.”

Goldstone’s book follows five families who are part of a growing demographic he calls “the working homeless”—mostly middle and working-class people who worked hard, did everything right, and still slipped through the cracks to become homeless.

In cities in which wages remain stagnant but rents and housing prices continue to climb, in a country where the social safety net that helped build a robust middle class is under constant assault, many people who never expected to find themselves homeless say they simply can’t keep up. The five Atlanta families in Goldstone’s book confronted that reality.

Goldstone shared the story of Celeste Walker, a mother who found herself among the working homeless when her apartment burned down. Rents had gone up considerably since she was last looking for housing, but her wages hadn’t kept pace. Soon she and her children were sleeping in their car and staying at a run-down extended-stay motel they could scarcely afford. A breast cancer diagnosis further complicated things and she worried she would lose her children when she found that as a person working full time and without drug or legal problems, she didn’t even qualify for programs she thought would help her.

The crowd at last week’s talk, co-sponsored by the Interactive Resource Center and PEN America, made it clear that those stories resonate in Greensboro. In a city where elected officials crow about economic growth even as they complain about visible homelessness and pass ordinances targeting it, poverty and plenty are hand in glove here.

“The amazing thing is that [Goldberg] talked about what we see as the tip of the iceberg,” said Greensboro City Council Member Hugh Holston, who attended the talk. “The homelessness that we see, just beneath the surface of that, another 20 or 30 percent, are people who are one illness, one check engine light, one alternator or set of tires away from falling into the abyss. And those examples of the people that we gave are spot on.
As people all over America face mass layoffs, federal tariffs that will increase prices on everyday goods, and the possibility of a recession, Holston said, more people find themselves on the edge.

“It’s very challenging,” Holston said. “And at the same time, we have a lot of nonprofit organizations in our community that are looking at funding cuts and cutbacks who are all fighting for the same dollar—organizations that previously didn’t have funding issues because they were looking at funding beyond the city, beyond the region, and now those funding sources may have been cut. They’re all fighting for the same smaller piece of the pie.”

While the issue is complicated, Goldstone said, a solution seems obvious — prioritizing affordable and attainable housing. Whether communities find the will to do that is the real issue, he said.

Even in his home city, Goldstone said, the barriers to more affordable housing and support for those experiencing homelessness aren’t necessarily partisan and may come from across the ideological spectrum.

In his own neighborhood, Goldstone said, a progressive enclave where Black Lives Matter signs proliferated, he found opposition to low-cost housing out of concern for “the character of the neighborhood” and possible damage to attractive tree canopies.

“You really have to ask yourself,” Goldstone said. “Who are our cities for? Who is all this growth for?”

Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.

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