Who gets housing, and who is 'disposable'?

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

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."