There’s No Place Like…Home? Addressing Housing Insecurity in Five Acts

There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone (Penguin Random House, 2025)

Reviewed by Kimberly A. Bain

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes famously asks. That question challenges the reader at each point of the  stories of the working homeless in There’s No Place for Us. Brian Goldstone gives a sobering account of four individuals who find themselves in an invisible population of the working homeless in the city of Atlanta who strive against harrowing challenges to secure basic human needs. Their plight is related to the effects of rising housing prices and inequitable government housing assistance programs.

To capture the collective spirit of these experiences, Goldstone organizes the book into five parts and readers are introduced to four central characters, Britt, Kara, Maurice, Michelle, and Celeste . Britt is a young mother-of-two who has been shifting between family residences while tirelessly waiting for subsidized housing. When readers meet her, her hopes for her family are simply to find a way out of the shame of living temporarily with family. Kara is a single mother-of-three working multiple jobs, including a custodial position in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. She has just found out she is pregnant and is considering her options under the threat of eviction and the weight of working while finding daycare for her young children. Maurice is a middle-aged father who lives with his wife, Natalie, and their children, and who is determined to be present for his family while he works for a car rental agency. His family learns their rental unit will be sold, they have limited options for relocation. Celeste, a tough-as-nails, older, single mother-of-three has recently moved her family into the Efficiency Lodge, a transient hotel residence, and is trying to make the best of their situation after her family’s rental eviction due to arson. Michelle is a young mother of a thirteen-year-old daughter and fourteen-year-old son by her first husband and newborn daughter by her second husband. The blended family live in an apartment paid for by her husband’s work as the resident handyman. While seemingly unique, these characters’ experiences often bleed into each other.

In Part Two, “Storm,” Goldstone centers readers on the hopelessness of these four main characters and their families. Britt struggles to find a new place for her family using the Housing Choice Voucher program, subsidized by the state of Georgia to offer reduced rental rates at qualified residences. She is often hit with “No Section 8” or “Vouchers Not Accepted” notices that leave her frustrated and without options when her current lease is not renewed (54). Goldstone uses Britt’s experience to set up the historical context for the privatization of subsidized housing in the U.S., noting that in 1985, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development declared that “[The federal government is] getting out of the housing business. Period” (57). This would result in housing projects profiting private entities, in keeping with Ronald Reagan’s sentiment that “housing the poor should be left to the ‘genius’ of the housing market” (59). Britt’s experiences throughout the book are  part of the bigger picture of inequitable housing practices Goldstone examines.

The statistics reveal an unnerving problem of invisible homelessness that is often cloaked by the employment status of those who refuse to succumb. In Part Two, “Storm,” readers learn Celeste is battling cancer while balancing work and housing insecurity during her time at the Efficiency Lodge in Atlanta. Struggling to pay rent while trying to work under the requirements of her Social Security allotments, Celeste becomes a poster child for the cycle of seeking upward mobility while being limited by government assistance. Goldstone notes that “Celeste’s predicament was increasingly common. The existing support system ignored scores of homeless families who did not fit the government’s definition of ‘homelessness’” (86). Others are similarly affected. “Storm” ends with Maurice and his family applying for SNAP benefits and unsure whether to respond “Yes” to the question, “Are you homeless?”

Part Three, “Possibility,” introduces a new character  to the stories of both Michelle and Celeste. A once-homeless entrepreneur turned local philanthropist, Pink, is posed as a sort of Santa Claus figure whose non-profit, “The Community Boutique with LA Pink: Empowering Dignity through Fashion,” brings hope and support to many of the temporary residents of Efficiency. Pink is a loud, confident woman who runs a clothing donation non-profit. Pink builds a particularly close relationship with Michelle, which plays out in the later parts of There is No Place. Both Kara and Britt find similar possibilities for hope through the receipt of their respective housing subsidies. However, both instances are short-lived. Kara suddenly loses her reserved apartment to another family and Britt loses her apartment to her building’s buyout. Both cases are casualties of Atlanta’s  lucrative gentrification, a “highly orchestrated process, driven by the intertwined interests of real estate capital and urban policies” (117).

Part Four, “Rupture,” lets readers in on the ways private entities seek out particularly vulnerable properties and marginalize many people like the characters in There’s No Place. In Part Four, readers can resonate with frustrations that build and rupture. There are instances of “mass evictions at gunpoint” and of residents’ property being held as a consequence of missing rental payment (252). The struggle for these families on subsidies is often not with the subsidies themselves, which can involve years-long application processes and tireless waitlisting. Rather, the chief struggle is when the property owners in areas with “rent gaps” decide that they would profit more from selling these properties than from continuing to take subsidized rental payments from residents like Kara and Britt. Despite fiscal efficiency, this is the result of Reagan’s initiatives to place the concerns of public housing into the hands of the free market—there is no obligation to those who need the housing.

Part Five, “The New American Homeless,” the final part of There’s No Place, describes to readers the various acts of resistance, in the spirit of James C. Scott, these characters perform. During a meeting hosted by Housing Justice League, Efficiency residents air their complaints after a mother-of-three who is just about to be evicted from her rental dies suddenly. Residents, including Celeste, echo the idea that “That place is death, death, death,” to challenge Efficiency's deplorable living conditions that have been ignored despite its comparatively high rent (274). This account ends in defeat, as resident organizing ends due to frustration at inaction. A point of resistance comes into Michelle’s life when her kids decide to leave Michelle after her descent into alcoholism and erratic tendencies, spurred on by her family’s eviction and the breakdown of her marriage. Michelle’s narrative is concluded by her apologizing profusely to her son DJ for her family’s plight, concluding her story and signaling another type of resistance: accountability.

There’s No Place drives readers down a winding path of deferred dreams with the ever-present roadblocks that lay in front of the people in the book. One might eagerly look for silver linings throughout the book, but they disappear just as quickly as they come, adding to the weight of disappointment for these hard-working individuals. Working while homeless presents many unexpected challenges for the families of There’s No Place that may not exist for those who are unemployed. Readers are challenged to face this unsettling reality of systemic challenges through empathy. As Goldstone notes in his epilogue, “It doesn’t have to be this way. Ours doesn’t have to be a society where people clocking sixty hours a week aren’t paid enough to meet their basic needs” (360). Goldstone issues a call for housing rights, citing Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a guide for lawmakers and readers. In his view, “Housing.is too precious and important to be left to the whims of the market; it is a cornerstone of both dignity and societal well-being” (361).

There’s No Place challenges its readers, regardless of political or social leanings, with a demand for more equitable circumstances. Whatever else it does, this lengthy account certainly forges something of a better understanding of the conditions faced by many working poor. Goldstone urges change in his epilogue and, perhaps, change might come as readers identify with any of one of these characters in their desperate striving to obtain what so many take for granted.

Kimberly Bain is an assistant professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her favorite genres to read are self-help nonfiction and Southern Gothic fiction.