There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Brian Goldstone, Crown Publishing Group, £23

BRIAN GOLDSTONE  tells us how we are all familiar the stigmatised homeless — “stumble-bum” winos, drug addicts, veterans of foreign or domestic abuse, the deincarcerated, the deinstitutionalised, folks living in Dickensian poverty — but now there’s a new and growing data statistic: the working homeless.

In his new book, Goldstone focuses on five families in the Atlanta area whose plight he sees as a dangerous rift in the social security safety net and a tipping point for the misery to come as class erosion continues to weaken the fabric of society.

“Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” writes Goldstone, “they are being pushed.”

Using Atlanta as a typical example of what’s happening nationwide in the US, Goldstone describes a before-and-after scenario, where impotent wages, combined with gentrification or regentrification and the dearth of affordable housing have made living through the challenges of an ordinary lower-class life a harrowingly day-to-day ordeal.

He writes: “These families find themselves trapped in a sort of shadow realm, languishing in their cars, the overcrowded apartments of friends and relatives, and hyperexploitative extended-stay hotels and rooming houses.”

What’s more: “The problem was much bigger than this particular family or even this particular city. I started seeing it everywhere. In Northern California, I visited ‘safe parking lots’ full of working families living in their cars and minivans.” It is a very serious crisis.

Employing the methods of oral historian Studs Terkel and the social justice instincts of Howard Zinn, the author describes how he interviewed and followed families driven to the streets, styling on five representative case studies to promote his thesis.

He writes: “Events and dialogue were witnessed firsthand or reconstructed on the basis of primary documents, published accounts, and extensive interviews with sources present at the time.”

The five homeless families studied are those of Brittany “Britt” Wilkinson, Michelle Simmons, Kara Thompson, Maurice and Natalia Taylor and Celeste Walker. All of them have young children to raise.

“All are part of the country’s low-wage labor force,” writes Goldstone. “All are renters. And all are Black — as are 93 per cent of homeless families in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement.”

None of them can find a place to call home. When not crashing at the apartments of relatives or close friends, they stay at dumpy motels in the “gritty” part of town, with names such as Extended Stay America or Efficiency Lodge or, as Kara and her children were forced to do, “sleeping in her Toyota whenever she was unable to cover a week at a hotel.”
 
Britt works for low wages as a waitress at Low Country restaurant located at Hartsfield-Jackson airport and she and her kids crash at Granny’s, the kids sleeping in “oversized tote bags” in a corner of her living room, and the vibe being “don’t get too comfortable.”

She is studying to be a social worker and she and her family get by on funds from a student loan. The irony of studying to assist those in need like her is not lost on her. 

Goldstone employs copious descriptive language, in the tone and register of the subjects, rather than quoting them much, as they often speak in banalities and survivalist truisms which demonstrate resilience but which don’t get at the root cause of their rootlessness. Goldstone details the widening divide between rich and poor by elaborating on the absence — intentional, he seems to argue — of low-cost, affordable housing for those barely eking out an existence.

The plight of the homeless comes at a time when Donald Trump is talking about real estate deals in the Gaza Strip.

Goldstone’s prognostication for the US working homeless is sobering.

“The reach of homelessness is expanding. As it pulls more and more people into its grip, we might wonder: Who gets to feel secure in this country? And who are the casualties of our prosperity?”