No Place Like Home

‘There Is No Place for Us’ and ‘Placeless’ paired together provide a clear picture of homelessness in the modern age.

by

Magazine

In There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, journalist Brian Goldstone showcases America’s “working homeless” by sharing the lives of five families in Atlanta, Georgia. Through a series of intimate portraits, Goldstone illustrates that “families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness, they are being pushed.”

The “2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cites an unhoused population of “771,480 people—or about twenty-three of every 10,000 people in the United States,” an increase of 18 percent from the previous report. But Goldstone explains in the book’s introduction that “recent research reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the United States, factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms, or doubled up with other people, is at least six times larger than the official figure.”

As Goldstone observes, through his own research and extensive sourcing detailed in thirty-six pages of notes at the book’s end, the traditional myth that “hard work will lead to stability” has been shattered in our contemporary society. “Today, there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment,” he writes. In showcasing the lives of these five Atlanta families, Goldstone welcomes the reader into a new reality where the American dream of working hard to gain stability and success simply no longer applies.

Much of our inability to recognize and deal with the growing unhoused population in this country began in the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As Goldstone notes, “Discourses on poverty had already done much to denigrate the urban poor, so it was a relatively small step to present homelessness as a lifestyle choice, or the result of laziness, or the product of any number of other personal vices. But the main strategy was to link homelessness with mental illness and addiction.”

The narrowing and misidentification of causes and conditions of homelessness, Goldstone argues, “has caused incalculable harm”—whether it is the inability by families he interviewed to obtain services because their particular form of homelessness did not meet the definition of bureaucrats, or because investors are buying up much of the housing and making it unaffordable. In one “insidious twist,” Wall Street firms “are not only profiting off people’s desperation to remain housed. They are also increasingly taking over the markets and industries designed to extract revenue from those who have already lost their homes . . . . Homelessness has now become big business.”

New York-based advocate for the homeless Patrick Markee takes the story from here in Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, by looking at the “phenomenon of modern mass homelessness in our New Gilded Age, an era defined, like its late-nineteenth-century namesake, by exploding inequality and seismic shifts in the economic and urban landscape.”

In examining what he terms “modern mass homelessness,” Markee goes to the places where unhoused people seek and obtain shelter in the nation’s largest city. “Among the 130,000 people homeless in New York each night, around three-quarters of those in shelters were in families, including some 45,000 children,” he writes.

Markee explores the geography of homelessness by visiting a train tunnel, an armory, an intake center, a park, and a former psychiatric wing at Bellevue Hospital. Bringing together history, analysis, and personal experience as an advocate and activist, he shows how we got here and how we might begin to address the root issues that have created and exacerbated this crisis. Markee cautions that this is a “harbinger of wider forms of loss of place—a warning about the looming threat on the horizon [of this New Gilded Age].”

However, he concludes, “over more than two decades I saw repeatedly how homeless people, even while enduring the harshest circumstances, could create community, banding together to struggle against hopelessness and for something better.”

As Industrial Workers of the World organizer Joe Hill, writing shortly after the end of the previous Gilded Age, was famously paraphrased as writing, “Don’t mourn, organize!”