What is homelessness? Ask someone walking down the street in a U.S. city, and they are likely to talk about people sleeping on park benches, or in tents pitched in a park, or perhaps folks asking for change on the corner. That’s what most people likely think of when asked what “homeless” means and, in fact, is pretty consistent with the way that most scholars who study the topic conceive of the phenomenon as well. They may distinguish between “sheltered” and “unsheltered” homelessness, with the former being those staying in temporary shelters, and the latter being those “sleeping rough” on cardboard, in tents, or against a building, perhaps scrounging a bit of an overhang for just a little bit of protection from the elements.
In his new book, There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone shows us another variety of homelessness, contesting our stereotypes and narrow definitions. Goldstone tells a story that’s very different from the typical media picture of street homelessness. He effectively redefines homelessness as being without a home, when home means something, somewhere that feels like a home, someplace stable enough to be called home. This sort of homelessness is one of a severe and violent housing instability that is less visible than street encampments.
The popular narrative of homelessness often sees it as a coastal problem, one that is particularly severe in California. This stereotype is also one in which mostly single people, sometimes with substance-abuse problems or severe mental illness, are unable to find work and so without the means to find housing, they sleep on the streets or in tent encampments. If they are able to find some sort of housing, it is often in shelters. This portrait is one of a highly visible problem, with encampments near downtowns or in heavily-trafficked areas getting the most attention, both in the press and on social media. This is an “in your face” problem, one that irritates businessmen and city leaders who worry about a city’s image when recruiting the next convention or wooing the next job applicant. It’s such a big problem for them precisely because it is so visible.
What if the homelessness problem was actually much larger, and more varied, than the stereotype of the hyper-visible street homeless? What if there were other types of homelessness, including people holding down one or more jobs and still not able to afford a decent, stable place for their family? What if they didn’t mostly sleep on the street? What if many did not have substance abuse problems? And what if the face of this other homelessness was often one of families with children, moving from place to place, school to school, and never feeling “at home”?
This new homelessness—working homelessness—is less visible, but it is unclear that it is any less harmful, especially because it involves so many families with children. And in some ways, it may be a tougher policy nut to crack, due in large part to its lesser visibility. In the stories that Goldstone tells, families are doubled up with family or friends, or living in unsustainable conditions in extended stay hotels. Tech bros are not going to have to sidestep their way around them on their way to their offices in San Francisco or Los Angeles. They are neatly tucked away in pockets—usually less-desirable pockets—of lower-income urban or, often, suburban parts of metros like Atlanta. Often located on commercial arterials or just off highways, dilapidated old apartment buildings and extended stay hotels are something that many folks rarely see, or drive by without understanding that families are stuck in such places, stuck until they are forced to find the next squalid, unsafe, or unstable residence.
Goldstone combines the narrative skill of a journalist with the depth and analysis of a Ph.D. anthropologist, which he is, to tell the story of five families in metropolitan Atlanta, who bounce from place to place, never finding any sort of stability, doubling up with relatives, friends, or acquaintances for short periods of time, often with families living in just one bedroom. Other times, families are forced to live in squalid, unhealthy, and unsafe conditions until they can find something better, if they can find something better. And even in such conditions, stability—any sense of true home—is absent, with one event after another keeping them in this sort of homelessness, into having to find yet another place—even if just for a week or two—to live, to survive.
There is No Place for Us is moving and well-researched, and a terribly important book. It is a book that calls on all of us, from concerned citizen to housing scholar, to rethink what we mean by “homeless” and to push policymakers to recognize that the scale of this problem is much larger and broader than the one suggested by the narrow and severely flawed metrics routinely compiled by the federal government.
More importantly, however, it pushes us to demand that affordable, decent, and stable housing be recognized in the U.S. as a fundamental human right so that we, as a nation, are required to ensure that every family, every individual, be provided with such housing: with home.
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3 thoughts on “Less Visible, But Still Homeless: Workers Who Can’t Afford a Place to Live”
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And some are neatly tucked away in academia, working as adjuncts, often performing the same work (but more of it) as their tenured peers.
I fully understand and agree with his perception of the new, working homeless. My rent, electric, and gas bills were almost $1800. It would have been hard enough to keep making, haha, with Fauchi’s Covid that was quite a test of human behavior, and the deaths & losses of businesses and dignity. Deaths from the untested shots so that the 2 pharmaceutical companies would flourish, and as Kamala kept stating in speeches, “reduce the population.” I would have paid it but my rental house was falling apart , toxic, and infested with something worse than fleas, bedbugs, or roaches. I can kill those, and move on. This was something new and impossible to kill. The exponential growth rate made it a huge burden just to keep it at bay. I refused to pay almost 2K a month for that. It was my choice to get evicted and not try to pay. This way, I could try and save up some money to live in peace. I am surviving with no help with housing, No food stamps because they say that I owe March 2020 food stamp money back. I never received any! It is what it is. One day soon, our world and country will get better!
Without much effort I can name a half dozen books that cover this same territory. Write about the problem solvers, the small scale and large scale work being done to address this. Isn’t it embarrassing to keep trotting out the same rundown apartment buildings book after book?