The US faces a national crisis of homelessness and housing affordability like few other times in our history. Increasing rents and housing shortages have had devastating effects on nearly every major metropolitan area in the US and many rural communities as well. This crisis has affected everyone including children, seniors, military veterans, people with disabilities, and people working full-time. In his new book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” journalist Brian Goldstone exposes how the decline of work and pay in the US has left many full-time workers homeless. People who clock in at hospitals, drive for delivery apps, and care for others cannot afford stable housing as increases in rent continue to outpace wage growth.

Goldstone follows five families in Atlanta as they navigate the impossible demands of low wages, skyrocketing rents, and an inadequate social safety net. Through his reporting, Goldstone lived alongside families in extended-stay motels, witnessing the cycles of eviction and rejection, and capturing the resilience of those caught in a system designed to exclude them and in one that often doesn’t count them in official statistics. “There Is No Place for Us” not only brings these unseen lives into focus but also forces us to confront a pressing question: If hard work is no longer enough to keep a roof over one’s head, what does that say about the promise of economic opportunity in the US?

Speakers

• Brian Goldstone, Journalist and Author
• Maureen Conway (Moderator), Vice President, The Aspen Institute; Executive Director, Economic Opportunities Program

---

Transcript

Maureen Conway (00:00:03)

Good afternoon, and welcome. I’m Maureen Conway, a vice president at The Aspen Institute and executive director of our Economic Opportunities Program, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to today’s conversation in which we’re going to be talking with Brian Goldstone about his new book. There it is. There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. This conversation is part of our Opportunity in America series in which we look at the changing landscape of economic opportunity across the United States and try to think about solutions to issues that we face so that we can create an economy in which everyone can thrive.

You might wonder why a conversation series about economic opportunity is focusing on homelessness. And just a little background. Back in March, I read an essay in The New York Times titled, “America is Pushing Its Workers into Homelessness,” which read, in part, “These people,” referring to the homeless, “are not on the fringes of society. They’re the workers America depends on. The very phrase working homeless should be a contradiction, an impossibility in a nation that claims hard work leads to stability. And yet, their homelessness is not only pervasive but also persistently overlooked, excluded from official counts, ignored by policymakers, treated as an anomaly rather than a disaster unfolding in plain sight. Today, the threat of homelessness is most acute, not in the poorest regions of the country, but in the richest, fastest growing ones. In places like these, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen.”

This essay was, of course, written by Brian, and I just found it just horrifying, honestly. It referenced his forthcoming book, and I basically just had to track him down and say, “This is something we really need to be talking about.” It’s so important for those of us who are looking at how do we connect people to work, how do we grow regional economies, how do we think about economic development and economic opportunity to really grapple with this situation in which connecting people to work and creating new jobs is not fulfilling the promise that we wanted to fulfill in terms of giving people the chance to be agents of their own economic destiny and lead better lives. I just felt it was really important for us to welcome Brian to our stage and to have him here today.

On that point, I also wanted to just make a little side note about them. Later in The New York Times I read a different article. Being at The Aspen Institute, this particularly caught my eye. “In a snow paradise, they live in this parking lot.” The Aspen Institute was founded in Aspen, Colorado, which is a snow paradise. It was not the one they were talking about, but reporters, Rukmini Callamachi and Erin Schaff … Pardon for mispronunciation. Their story describes people experiencing homelessness in a wealthy ski town, and they sleep in cars, and they have to prove that they’re working for the right to sleep in their car in a parking lot, and they pay to do this. And even then, local residents are not all that keen on this situation.

This issue of how we’re treating working people who are making our economies function just is really obviously salient to the things that we talk about regularly. And I felt it was really important to track down Brian and bring him onto our stage. I’m so delighted he’s here with us today.

Before I jump into introducing him more formally in our conversation, let me do a quick review of our technology very quickly. For those of you joining via Zoom, all attendees are muted. Please do use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to ask us questions. We’d love to try to bring your questions into our conversation.

Also, we know many people have experience and resources to share, so please do share your experience, comments, resources in the chat. We really encourage you to do that. We also encourage you to post on your social media channel of choice. Our hashtag is talkopportunity. If you have any technical issues during the webinar, you can put that in the chat, or you can email us at eop.program@aspeninstitute.org.

The event is being recorded, and we will share this recording via email following the event, and we’ll also post it to our website. And finally, closed captions are available for this discussion. Please click the CC button at the bottom of your screen to activate them.

Now, let me just briefly introduce Brian Goldstone. Brian Goldstone is a journalist and author. His long-form reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, Guernica, and Jacobin among others. Brian received his PhD in anthropology from Duke University, and he has many other interesting credits. I won’t go through them all. We do have his bio on our website. I thought it was interesting. It also included a stint teaching at Sing Sing Prison. I encourage you to take a look later.

But for now, Brian, thank you so much for being here today, and welcome. We’re delighted to have you.

Brian Goldstone (00:05:37)

It’s such an honor to be with you, Maureen. Thank you so much for the invitation to have this exciting conversation.

Maureen Conway (00:05:46)

Great. And let’s just jump right in. And I just first just wanted to start with the usual question, sort of why this book? You’ve written about a wide range of topics, and I’m curious if there was something in particular that inspired you to write a book, which I believe is your first book.

Brian Goldstone (00:06:05)

It is, yes. The genesis for this book actually began with my wife. My wife is a nurse practitioner, and in around 2018 she was working at a community health center in Atlanta where we had recently moved from New York to Atlanta, and she was noticing this trend among the patients she was seeing. These patients were one after another. They were working at Amazon warehouses packing boxes, or they were working at McDonald’s or Walmart, or they were driving for Uber and Lyft or DoorDash, or they were caregivers. They were home health aides or daycare workers. And when they finished their shifts, they told my wife they were going not to an apartment but to shelters, or if shelters existed, if there were shelter beds available, or they were staying in the overcrowded apartments of others. They were going to these squalid extended-stay hotels and motels. And hopefully we can kind of unpack the phenomenon of extended-stay hotels because it’s a really important site in this book.

Or they were even sleeping in the very cars they had just done airport runs for Uber and Lyft in. They were sleeping in those cars at night. And when my wife told me about this, I was stunned. I had read books about homelessness just as a journalist and before that as an anthropologist. I’ve been sort of interested in issues of poverty and inequality. And I didn’t remember in all of the reading I had done about homelessness ever encountering a sort of explicit discussion of the relationship between employment and homelessness.

And indeed, when I went to an academic search engine around that time, and I typed in working homeless, I expected to just discover this plethora of articles. And there was hardly anything. Of course, in the margins of articles and books, there was a discussion in a classic book called Down and Out in America by Peter Rossi. He actually has this formulation that those in the world of homelessness are sort of, I think as he put it, cut off from the world of work. When it was mentioned, it was in a negative way, that people who are experiencing homelessness actually aren’t part of the labor force and that a job is an exit from this most severe form of deprivation.

I was really stunned when I encountered this trend through my wife, and that led me to write a story for The New Republic following a working family in Atlanta who, by the time I met them, had been homeless for about four months after being pushed out of the kind of rapidly gentrifying, formerly predominantly Black, working class neighborhood they had been renting in. And by the time I met them, they had been homeless for about four months. And I followed them for several months for that story. And when I was finished reporting it, I just realized I had only scratched the surface of this phenomenon.

And I just wondered, is this pervasive? Is this unique to Atlanta? I began reporting in other areas of the country. In northern California. And suffice it to say, I realized that, no, it is not unique to Atlanta, that the trends that are happening in that city are really just representative of what’s happening in any number of other cities around the country. And maybe we can talk a little bit about some of those dynamics that are creating this growing precarity.

Maureen Conway (00:09:51)

Great. That’s amazing.

Your book is amazing, and you follow these several families through their journey, how they ended up in homelessness, and sort of what happens to them and the different systems that they interact with. And I’m just wondering, to sort of set the stage for our conversation, if you can share one of those stories. I think your book does an amazing job just really unpacking the human dimension of it.

If you could briefly share one of those stories, I think that would be great to set the scene.

Brian Goldstone (00:10:26)

For sure. I wish I could tell everyone who’s tuning in. I wish I could tell them about each of the families in the book because each of their experiences and journeys is so-

Maureen Conway (00:10:36)

But they should go get the book and read the book.

Brian Goldstone (00:10:38)

Yes. And each of their journeys sort of illuminates a different aspect of this larger crisis.

But I’ll tell you about Celeste. Her story in the book begins in a really dramatic way. She is leaving work, her warehouse job, in Atlanta. She’s just picked her kids up from school. She’s heading home, and her next-door neighbor calls and frantically tells her she needs to get home because her rental home is on fire. And so, Celeste races back to this rental property. And by the time she gets there, the street is blocked off, and this single-family rental home that she’s been renting has been destroyed by a fire. It turns out that an abusive ex was responsible for the fire. Was later arrested for arson. Celeste had just taken out a restraining order on him. And the only possessions that Celeste and her kids have left at that point are a few loads of dirty laundry that Celeste had put in the car that morning intending to go to the laundromat after work and the few items that were in the kids’ school backpacks. They lost everything else. They were all incredibly traumatized by that episode.

And the Red Cross gave them a few nights at a Howard Johnson hotel near the airport. Celeste thought that her housing search, her search for a new home, a new rental property, would be relatively brief, but what she didn’t realize until she logged onto Zillow and apartments.com and began searching … What she didn’t realize was that the ground had kind of shifted under her feet in the time she had been renting.

As many cities have over the last decade or so, Atlanta has undergone this much celebrated urban renaissance, this transformation of the city center, and the Beltline is sort of the ultimate signifier of this new Atlanta. The Beltline is, I believe, a 22-mile mixed-use trail, former railway line, that runs around the perimeter of the city. And everything the Beltline touches, property values are skyrocketing, and poor and working class people are being pushed out.

She realized that neighborhoods that were once affordable for people like her were no longer affordable. Rents in that period of time had gone up an astonishing 65%. And over a five-year period in Atlanta, in the course of undergoing this renaissance, Atlanta had lost over 200,000 affordable housing units. That was the reality that Celeste confronted when she began looking for another place to live. And she just became increasingly desperate. She was calling on favors from every friend, relative, coworker she could think of. Celeste, when she walks into a room, she’s the most charismatic person in the room. She is hilarious. She’s brilliant. You can’t argue with Celeste because she will always win. She knows everything about everything. And she was calling on favors of people she had prepared taxes for or helped them out watching their kids over the years.

But finally, all those favors had been called in, and her friends’ generosity was exhausted. Celeste and her kids start sleeping in her Dodge Durango. And Celeste was terrified because it wasn’t just a matter of how logistically difficult it was to sleep in her vehicle and then get up the next morning after not being able to sleep all night and go to her warehouse job and get the kids bathed for school in the bathroom of a gas station or a Walmart. But she was also terrified because if the police knocked on her window, they were likely to call it defects. And in a state like Georgia, this is true across the country, over 20% of child removals in Georgia are the result of what is officially categorized as inadequate housing. Celeste was very aware of that reality, and she was terrified that her kids would get taken away on top of everything else she had gone through.

But finally, finally she found a leasing agent who took sympathy, who felt bad for her, and was like, “All right, we are going to get you into this unit.” It would have gobbled up about 70% of Celeste’s income, but she was going to go with it. And then a few days later, the leasing agent calls and is no longer friendly and says, “Why didn’t you tell me about the eviction on your record?” And Celeste is like, “What are you talking about? I don’t have an eviction on my record.” And it turned out that back after the fire happened, her landlord, which was a private equity firm called The Prager Group … They own tens of thousands of rentals across the south. When she called The Prager Group to ask if she could move to another rental in their portfolio, she was told that, in order to terminate her lease prematurely, she would need to pay not only the current month’s rent but an additional month as well. And she would lose her security deposit.

I’m sure, knowing Celeste, she had some choice words for that person, but she told me she hung up in disgust and came to find out several months later that The Prager Group had filed an eviction against her on a home that was literally no longer habitable. And when Celeste drove to that house, it still hadn’t been repaired. And in the mailbox, the sheriff who served the eviction notice wrote on the form, “Served to fire destroyed property.” In a state like Georgia, a tenant doesn’t even have to be notified of an eviction in person. The landlords are able to carry out what’s called a tack-and-mail dispossessory notice, so she wasn’t even informed. And the judge in her absence handed down a default judgment.

And by the time Celeste became aware of all of this, her credit score, this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of low-income Americans, disproportionately low-income Americans, have access to something as fundamental as just a place to live. This three-digit number had been tanked. And at that point, Celeste realized that she was pushed out of the formal housing market. No landlord was going to rent to her now with the Scarlet E on her record, this eviction or this low credit score, so she did what scores of other families and individuals in her situation have done, and she went to an extended-stay hotel.

And I think it’s just important to note that when I use the language of being pushed into homelessness and not falling into homelessness, I have in mind stories like Celeste because, although her story, again, begins in this really dramatic way with the house burning down, it was not the house fire that led Celeste to become homeless. It was just a lack of basic tenant rights and protections.

Maureen Conway (00:18:08)

That is a powerful story. You alluded before to this is happening all across the country and all of that. Also just to sort of … A little table setting. I’m wondering if you can just talk, just say a little bit, about the size of this problem and sort of how we officially estimate homelessness and why you would characterize that as an undercount and what you think might be the sort of scope of this problem today.

Brian Goldstone (00:18:37)

Sure. Right now, there are roughly 12.1 million renter households, low-income renter households, in this country who are at immediate risk of becoming homeless. They are characterized as severely cost burdened. They are paying over half of their monthly income just on rent, and they are at immediate risk of joining the ranks of those who have been deprived of housing in this country.

As far as those who are already homeless, the last two years, the official homeless count has seen the highest level of homelessness since the homeless census began to be conducted. The highest levels on record. Two years ago, it was the highest level, and then this most recent year broke that record. We are witnessing a truly unprecedented and historic homelessness crisis, but what I was absolutely astonished to discover in the course of reporting this book is that, as bad as the official numbers are, the reality of homelessness is exponentially worse.

I was shocked to find that there’s this entire world of homelessness that is out of sight, that what we see on the street, the tents, the encampments, are just the tip of the iceberg. And in a sense, my book is about the rest of the iceberg that is under the water’s surface that is much, much, much bigger than that sort of extreme, most conspicuous edge that is sticking out of the water.

By cobbling together different data sources in the book … Because the official homeless census, which is conducted by HUD, only counts as homeless those who are defined as literally homeless, and those are people who are visible on the street or who are in shelters. But everyone else, all the families I write about in this book, the tens of thousands of families just in Atlanta alone, who are languishing in these extended-stay motels and hotels or doubling up with relatives and others in really bad, overcrowded conditions, sleeping in their cars, all of those people, they literally don’t count. They have been written out of the story that we as a country tell about homelessness.

And I show the real number … And this is a conservative estimate. The real number of those experiencing homelessness right now in America is roughly six times that of the official number. And here in Georgia … Or I’m not actually in Georgia right now. I’m in New York. But in Georgia where I live, if you were to gather all of the families who are excluded from the official homeless census, just those who are excluded, if you were to gather them in one place, they would fill the Braves Stadium, Truist Park. They would fill that stadium three times over. That’s how big this population of those who are uncounted is. We really are talking about not only an officially mammoth crisis, but it’s even bigger once you look at those who have been written out of the story and who don’t count.

Maureen Conway (00:22:05)

That is so powerful. I wanted to … I’m going to ask a couple of questions, but one, I think there was this piece you said in the epilogue where you were talking about sort of the research on homelessness and just this narrowing of the view of the homeless. And you say, “Then is now. Nobody denied that many of the men and women most visibly suffering on streets were struggling with alcoholism, mental health issues, or other disabilities. These conditions, however, had no more caused them to be homeless than a fever caused the flu.”

And I’m wondering … That just really struck me because I think the popular conception is that mental health issues, that substance abuse issues, are a primary cause of homelessness. And yet you’re sort of turning that around.

I’m wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what has sort of conspired or something to leave the general public with this kind of misaligned view of homelessness and why you think that’s a problem.

Brian Goldstone (00:23:17)

I think we have to ask whose interests are served by explaining homelessness as the result of these individual pathologies, these individual choices, or individual problems. Whose interests are served?

And what I found, going back to the 1980s when mass homelessness first erupted in the US, I think it’s easy to forget that homelessness as we now know it, which is pervasive, unremarkable, tragic, yes, but really unremarkable, a kind of predictable feature of the American cityscape … That is a relatively new thing. And in the 1980s when mass homelessness first erupted during the Reagan administration, there was a concerted effort to control the narrative around homelessness, to shape public perception. And deinstitutionalization, which was the process beginning in the 1950s of state hospitals, state psychiatric institutions, being closed down. And that became the dominant way of explaining this burgeoning crisis. And even at that time, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of six.

For those who cared enough to sort of dig beneath the official narrative, the evidence was there. It was empirically there. But the media narrative, the political narrative, really became one of ascribing this catastrophe to these individual problems, to addiction, to mental illness, to even considering homelessness a lifestyle choice. And that attempt to shape the narrative … It was successful.

Later in the ’80s, The New York Times conducted a poll asking New Yorkers at random what causes homelessness. And even though, a few years earlier, it seemed just the decimation of the social safety net, the gutting of funding for public housing, for rental assistance, for all of the sort of interlocking systems that had produced this crisis. Even though that had just happened, when The New York Times asked people what causes homelessness, the first response was psychological problems and alcoholism. The second most common response was laziness. A refusal to work.

Not a single respondent said housing or mentioned housing at all. Again, this was really successful, and I think that we are living in the shadow of that attempt to define the narrative. By narrowing the scope of vision so drastically, by even defining entire segments of the total homeless population, above all, families with children, by defining them out of existence, we have been able to not only define the problem in a way that makes it perhaps more manageable. It’s easier for those in power to say that the problem is being tackled when the problem has been very narrowly defined, and the scale has been reduced.

But by widening the lens, we’re forced to confront a whole different set of root causes, and I believe that’s exactly why so many continue to be invested in a narrative about homelessness that makes it about mental illness and addiction.

Maureen Conway (00:27:00)

No, I mean it’s interesting because … I remember. Well, I remember the ’80s. I’m an old person. But also coming into doing kind of anti-poverty work in the ’90s, I remember learning … The rule of thumb I learned when I started was sort of a third of homelessness is because of mental health issues, and a third is because of substance abuse issues, and a third is sort of a random collection of hard luck, bad luck, or lifestyle choice. There was this lifestyle choice idea.

Brian Goldstone (00:27:37)

And if I could just quickly say one more thing about that, I don’t think it serves anyone to deny that there are people suffering visibly on the street who are in the grip of substance use or who are suffering with mental illness or other disabilities. It seems counterproductive to deny that. But again, as you mentioned, to say that that is what caused them to become homeless, that’s the fallacy.

Because I want to be really clear. While having a disability or being a person of color or having a certain kind of job or being the victim of domestic violence, there are all sorts of things that are risk factors that can make you more likely to be pushed into homelessness, but none of those things on their own cause homelessness.

What causes homelessness … And I want to just be crystal clear about this. What causes homelessness is the fact that poor and working people in this country don’t have access to housing they can afford. And in regions of the country where there’s that toxic mix of skyrocketing rents, low wages, and also a lack of tenant protections, that’s where you see skyrocketing homelessness. You don’t see it in regions that only have especially high rates of, say, mental illness or addiction, as in parts of the south and Appalachia, where my wife is from in East Tennessee. They don’t have this kind of skyrocketing homelessness. It’s when you have those skyrocketing rents alongside the low wages. That’s where homelessness skyrockets. And so I just want to be really clear about that.

Maureen Conway (00:29:27)

No, I really appreciate that. And I also wanted to pose a question from the audience that we were pre-submitted because this one really spoke to me, given having read your book.

The questioner writes, “How does being a woman, especially a single mother, impact the struggle for stable housing?”

I think when you think of the person you see on the street, it’s usually an individual, not a family, although occasionally. And I think most of the families who profiled … Some were married, but more commonly it was a single mother with children. I was hoping you could just talk about that.

Brian Goldstone (00:30:14)

It is true that one of the families in the book is a two-parent household. Maurice and Natalia, and they defy all of the stereotypes one could have about people experiencing homelessness. And their story is really important because it shows that even having two incomes, even having a devoted marriage, and Maurice is an incredible father, even with all those ingredients in the mix, they still sort of are pushed into homelessness themselves and with their children.

But yes, the other families in the book are single parents. Single mothers. And invariably after anyone who writes about these issues publishes anything in a public forum, like when I wrote that New York Times essay that you were referencing at the beginning of our conversation, it’s just a matter of course now that at least half of the comments are going to be … They’re going to zero in on the fact that this is a single parent and ignore all of the structural forces that are then mentioned in that article.

“Why is this woman … Why is she not using contraception? Where is the father? Why is she having three children on her own?” And to that, I kind of want to flip the question and say that America is not unique in having single parents, right? Countries, peer countries and developed countries, wealthy countries, around the world also have high rates of single parenthood.

What is unique about America is that being a single parent consigns you to a fate of often insecurity and even extreme poverty. I would just ask, what is it about America? What is it about our society that says, if you’re a single parent, you are more likely to experience these problems? And yes, again, is having only one income going to make you less stable financially? Of course. But that on its own should not carry any explanatory force in trying to understand why we see this sort of spiraling crisis today.

Maureen Conway (00:32:46)

Yes.

Brian Goldstone (00:32:47)

I don’t know if that answers your question, but-

Maureen Conway (00:32:50)

Well, I think I guess I was going to say I also am frustrated with the sort of like, “Well, why is she having children?” amongst the same people who don’t want to support any sort of family planning approaches.

Brian Goldstone (00:33:04)

Exactly. And we will just do anything. And I say we are here advisedly. Many readers of these articles, many people in our communities and our cities, will do anything to pathologize, others, will do anything to put the blame on the people suffering this precarity, rather than turning the lens on ourselves and just asking, what is it about America that has led to such mounting insecurity across the board in ways that are truly unthinkable in many other peer nations? It’s just people will grasp at any kind of judgment, any kind of verdict, on those experiencing the suffering in order to avoid the scrutiny that would come if we just sat honestly with their experiences and with their stories.

Maureen Conway (00:34:09)

Just to say to the audience, I will probably have another conversation talking about the childcare issues because that’s a whole other morass of things, particularly, that is in effect here. But I did want to pose this question that came in. And as we’re sort of moving to also think about … It’s driven by the low wages, skyrocketing rents, and let’s try to think about what are the solutions.

Barbara Dyer asks, “Since the one thing that ties together those who are homeless is housing, what is your assessment of the Housing First approach?”

Brian Goldstone (00:34:46)

Of the Housing First approach? I think that it is not just a good idea. It is the only paradigm that has the ability to end homelessness in this country. Because if it was housing first that led people to become homeless, it is housing first that will allow people to not be homeless anymore. I mean, it’s just common sense.

Now, the discussion around Housing First has been hijacked in many ways by those who purposefully misconstrue what Housing First is supposed to be. Housing First is not supposed to be housing only. Especially for those who need more wraparound services, they need mental health support, they need other kinds of supports, that is supposed to be there. You don’t just drop someone in an apartment and say, “Now, they’re taken care of.” Housing First is not housing only.

But the alternative that those in power at both the city, state, and federal level in this country are now pushing is, as opposed to Housing First, it’s just criminalizing people for being homeless. Putting them in jail. Ticketing them for the crime of not being able to afford a place to live in this country.

I would just say to critics of Housing First, what they want is to go back to an era where people had to check these boxes. They had to meet these preconditions before they were deemed housing worthy, housing eligible, and that did nothing to make even a marginal dent in the larger homelessness problem in this country.

Housing First is necessary. A lot of the families who I’m writing about and a lot of the people who are sort of part of this population of the working homeless … Housing First doesn’t necessarily apply to them because Housing First is really designed around those who have been defined as chronically homeless, and they have a disability. For many of the people who I’m writing about, yes, disabilities, even mental health issues, emerge as a consequence of now being homeless for a year or two years. People literally feel like they’re going mad after going through the acute stress, the toxic stress, that they are exposed to. The depression. A lot of mental health issues can emerge for them, but what they really need is not Housing First in the way that it tends to be framed.

What they need is housing that they can afford that is not only permanently affordable but that is also safe and habitable. That’s a key part of the discussion. And where they have just basic rights as tenants. Where, if they report unsafe conditions to the authorities, they won’t face a retaliatory eviction which is something that happens across the country. Housing First is necessary, but it’s also important to be clear about even the range of that kind of solution.

Maureen Conway (00:38:21)

No, I think so because I was thinking about some of the people you profiled and just that they were working and that they were proud of their work and what they did and really worked just heartbreakingly hard to support themselves. And when they realized that the label homeless actually applied to them, that that was so counter to their self-image and feeling of self-worth, it was just striking. I guess part of me is thinking, yes, Housing First works for a segment, but there’s a segment that, honestly, they just shouldn’t have become homeless in the first place.

Brian Goldstone (00:39:08)

Exactly.

Maureen Conway (00:39:08)

And how do we start to address that? 

Brian Goldstone (00:39:14)

We have to talk about prevention here. Although right now it isn’t, it should be impossible to attend a conference on homelessness and to not have entire panels about preventing homelessness, stopping it from happening to begin with. Eviction defense. Tenant rights. Tenant organizing. Housing justice. All of these things have to be part of the conversation about homelessness because, even in cities like LA where Housing First has been sort of the guiding paradigm, people wonder why we’re throwing billions of dollars at supportive housing, at trying to build some permanent supportive housing units over there, and getting new housing constructed over there, even though, of course, that is a gargantuan task in a place like California, just getting new housing built.

But we wonder, why is there this relentless churn where, for every one person who gets into housing, another four become unhoused? And the reason is because we’re not looking upstream. We’re not designing policies that keep people in the homes they already occupy. That 12.1 million people who are at immediate risk of becoming homeless … They are the ones who would benefit from a whole different set of policy solutions than the ones that tend to be geared toward homelessness in the space where that problem tends to be defined and tackled.

Maureen Conway (00:40:45)

I’m going to keep asking questions, but I do want to encourage our audience to start asking questions. I realize we’re sort of getting to our last third of conversation, so encouraging people to ask questions.

One is I just wanted to touch on this issue of tenant organizing. You had a story of tenant organizing, and I’m just wondering if you could share a bit about that story. It was also kind of a heartbreaking story, and I’m just wondering if you could share a bit of that and think about what that tells us about what we should expect from tenant organizing and maybe what we could … Are there ways to strengthen people’s efforts to stand up for their own rights? [inaudible 00:41:31]. I’m just wondering about that.

Brian Goldstone (00:41:32)

I’m going to … I promise I will answer that question, but I feel like there’s some necessary context for this organizing effort that happens in the book because it happens in one of these extended-stay hotels. And we haven’t really talked about the kind of world of extended-stay hotels. I was shocked to find that these hotels and motels on the periphery of Atlanta that I had been driving by all the time are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. They are a shelter of last resort for people like Celeste. That’s where she ends up. She ends up at an extended-stay hotel called Efficiency Lodge once she is pushed out of the formal housing market. Out of the formal rental market.

Just in Metro Atlanta alone, there are an estimated 30,000 to 45,000 families and individuals languishing at these hotels and motels. And these places are … The conditions are awful. Just abysmal. We’re talking mold, rodents, leaking ceilings, water dripping down from the ceiling onto your mattress, plumbing that doesn’t work, all manner of just horrific conditions, and it’s also incredibly expensive.

Maurice and Natalia, the two-parent household in the book that I mentioned earlier … They and their children end up in a studio-sized room at Extended Stay America, where in the span of eight months they spent $17,000 just on their room rent. And their rent down the street … This was more than double what they had been paying for a two-bedroom apartment down the road. But again, because they had been forced out of the formal housing market, and they were now locked out of it, they were just forced to pay whatever was being asked of them.

These hotels, it’s just shocking to see how profitable they are. And they’ve really become not only kind of a key site in the sort of ecosystem of homelessness in America, but they’re kind of a new frontier for Wall Street investors looking to capitalize on this crisis. Blackstone and Starwood Capital, private equity firms like them, they’re not only buying up vast swaths of America’s rental housing. And as of a few weeks ago, I got a report from a colleague saying that private equity now owns about 10% of America’s rental housing stock. I still have to fact check that figure, but that’s what this report noted. It’s not an insignificant amount of housing that is now in the hands of private equity. And that housing research shows it becomes increasingly insecure, precarious for those living in it because landlords like Blackstone are trying to squeeze every ounce of profit that they can from these rental properties.

But what is shocking is that these firms aren’t only cornering the market on the rental housing that people might be living in. They’re also cornering the market on the places that people are forced into once they lose their housing. And so Blackstone and Starwood Capital spent $6 billion buying Extended Stay America. That same hotel that Maurice and Natalia are living at where they spent $17,000 in eight months, Blackstone and Starwood Capital bought that chain for $6 billion.

We’re familiar with the line from Baldwin about how extremely expensive it is to be poor in America, but the flip side is how extremely lucrative all this insecurity has become for some very powerful corporations and financial institutions. I say all of that because the organizing that occurs in the book happens at this extended-stay hotel at Efficiency Lodge when a group of families are evicted at gunpoint by kind of a private security firm that the hotel hires during the pandemic to force all these families out because they’ve lost their jobs, and they don’t have income coming in.

Whereas normal tenants were protected by the eviction moratorium, the residents at these hotels were … They had none of those tenant rights, none of those tenant protections, because they weren’t considered tenants. And, in fact, they were explicitly written out of the eviction moratorium.

In the wake of this massive eviction at gunpoint, housing activists tried to organize with the residents, and there’s some hope at first that they might succeed in challenging the owners and getting back into their rooms or even trying to organize with other residents at the dozens of extended-stay hotels lining the roads near Efficiency Lodge. But ultimately, that attempt falters because these people … They are trying to just put food on, but not on a table. They’re trying to put food in the backseat of their car where they’re sleeping with their children. They’re trying to just get shelter. And in the midst of such desperate circumstances, the organizing kind of falters.

The only thing worse than being a tenant in America is not even being considered a tenant, living in this kind of, existing in this kind of, liminal zone, this kind of limbo, where you don’t even have the minimal protections that tenants have. And on the flip side, the only thing worse than being homeless in America is not even being considered homeless because those same families who were trying to organize at first, when they go to the coordinated entry point for the continuum of care which is sort of the centralized point where homeless services are distributed or allocated, they were told, “Sorry, you’re not homeless in the right way. You don’t fit,” .. Again, going back to how homelessness is defined and counted, “You don’t fit the definition of homeless because you’re staying in these places.”

They are in this kind of permanent state of limbo, this kind of purgatory, and that is why they call it the hotel trap. That’s why they refer to it as an expensive prison because it’s virtually impossible to get out of it.

Maureen Conway (00:47:45)

And that’s so powerful. I just want to say also what struck me when this is not homeless in the right way except for at schools where they are considered … It seemed like schools will look at them being housing insecure, not that they can help very much, but again, I felt like that just underscored, for me, at least, how much fear they have of losing their kids because they don’t want schools looking at them and saying, “Maybe I need to send family services.” And then it’s just … anyway…

Brian Goldstone (00:48:19)

And Maureen, I just want to-

Maureen Conway (00:48:19)

I just was like, “Oh, my God.”

Brian Goldstone (00:48:24)

HUD is the federal agency that counts homelessness and that determines the resources that are distributed to localities to combat homelessness and to help families and individuals find stability. HUD controls that.

But another federal body, the Department of Education … They actually do define these families living at hotels as homeless. And also families who are doubled up with others. And that’s why it’s so heartbreaking and infuriating that the Department of Education is now in the process of being dismantled because we are about to lose even just the data, the minimal data, that exists on the number of children who are in this situation. Maybe the Department of Education hasn’t been given the resources to actually get these children and their families into housing, but we’re about to lose even the minimal knowledge that we have about where these children are, what their needs are, and that is truly harrowing to think about.

Maureen Conway (00:49:30)

I have a bunch of questions here from the audience now, so I’m going to maybe throw a few of them at you, and you can pick and choose among them.

One wanted to hear more about the problems of the working poor and if there are things that could change in the workplace. One wanted to know about cities and states that are leading on creating affordable and safe housing. And one was interested in the sort of case for investing in affordable housing and where we can find information about the return, the community, and financial impact. And then one was asking about the unique challenges of people with criminal records. There’s a lot of variety here.

Brian Goldstone (00:50:23)

I’m going to try to do something where I … Let me talk about work a little bit because that’s a really important question, since this is a book … The subtitle is Working and Homeless in America. Let me talk about work for a moment, and then let me try to transition to the question of solutions.

Work. Yes, I think it’s really important. I’m glad you mentioned the workplace because it’s not just wages. Although this is a huge factor, it’s not just the fact that since 1985 rents have outpaced income gains in this country by 325%. It’s not just the fact that today there isn’t a single state, city, or county in the US where a full-time minimum wage worker earns the local minimum wage, which is often higher than the federal minimum wage, where that minimum wage worker can afford just a modest two-bedroom apartment. It’s not just about the wages, although that’s a huge thing. It’s not just about the skyrocketing rents, although that’s a huge thing.

What is also really crucial here is that the nature of work itself has been transformed over the last few decades. Work itself has become ever more volatile, ever more precarious. And what that means is that Celeste, the one whose house burned down in that fire … Later, she is diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer when she’s living at Efficiency Lodge at this extended stay. And what it means is that someone like Celeste is forced to decide between going to her chemo appointment or going to work at the warehouse because that work at the warehouse … Not only does it not pay enough, not nearly enough, for the cost of living in Atlanta, but there’s no sick leave.

It’s that these jobs don’t have benefits. It’s that so many jobs … You don’t know how many hours you’re going to be getting from one week to the next. This just-in-time scheduling. It’s the fact that jobs like mopping the floor at the airport, as another person in the book does, is contracted out to a third party. And they pay … They give Cass, this woman in the book, 29 hours a week because at 30 hours she would be eligible for benefits. It’s the gigification of entire sectors of our economy. It’s really about wages plus sort of the increasing precarity of work itself. And that’s why thinking beyond just housing when it comes to homelessness and starting to look at all the intersecting systems that have produced this crisis …

Not only work either. You mentioned childcare. The lack of subsidized daycare and childcare for these families is absolutely fateful as is the refusal of certain states like Georgia to expand Medicaid and on and on. There’s so many intersecting systems, and we have to … In terms of organizing, tenant organizing, housing organizing needs to link up, I believe, with labor organizing because when we talk about the working homeless, we have to grapple with both terms in that phrase. The work part and the homeless part.

And as far as solutions go, there are all sorts of concrete policy solutions that can be enacted right now, low-hanging policy fruit that can be enacted right now, to ease people suffering, both to keep them in the homes they already have and to make it easier to get into housing they don’t yet have. But at the foundation of any solution, I believe … My background is in anthropology. What I’m really hoping happens when people read this book is that we can all sort of become anthropologists and drop down into our society, into this richest country on the planet, and ask, as an anthropologist might, how did this happen? How have we allowed housing, this most fundamental human necessity … How have we allowed housing to just be hoarded up and auctioned off to the highest bidder? How have we allowed the housing Hunger Games, as a case manager in the book, Carla Wells, as she calls it … How have we allowed the housing Hunger Games to become just the status quo in this country?

And I feel like until that becomes strange to us, until that taken-for-granted fact of American life just becomes outrageous and absurd and weird, and until we have a paradigm shift as a country around what housing is and who it’s for, all of these other policy solutions will only be temporary fixes. And the reason I point to how big this crisis is and that it’s six times greater than the official count … The reason I say that isn’t just to catastrophize. It’s to say that, once we look at the true magnitude, then we will have to acknowledge that these little fixes here and there, a few tiny homes over there, a few more housing vouchers over there … Yes, those are important things, but let’s not tell ourselves that we are addressing this crisis at scale.

The only thing that can do that, I believe, is social housing. It’s public housing done right. It’s a model that has been implemented to stunning success in cities like Vienna, and Finland has effectively ended homelessness, not just street homelessness, which, believe it or not, they actually had something of a homelessness crisis in Finland not too long ago. They have ended this phenomenon through building social housing on government-owned land.

And for those interested, Francesca Mari wrote an incredible piece for The New York Times magazine on social housing in Vienna. And I encourage everyone to go read that.

But once we acknowledge the true severity and scale of this problem, then we have to really imagine a solution that goes beyond our sort of technocratic tweaks and nibbling-around-the-edges solutions that, in the best case scenario, are floated in the sort of housing and homelessness discussion.

Maureen Conway (00:56:47)

Wow. Well, that is a lot. Brian, this has been an amazing conversation, and I did just want to leave our last minute or two for you. If there’s just something that you hope the audience is going to walk away from this conversation with, if there’s one thing you want them to really take away to think about that they can do, or to just really … How we can move forward with this. If there’s one thing you want to leave people with.

Brian Goldstone (00:57:20)

I really appreciate that question. I recently had the privilege of being in conversation with one of my heroes, Sara Nelson. She’s the head of the Flight Attendant Union in America. She’s just a labor dynamo. And something Sara said has become kind of, in retrospect, a kind of mission statement for this book. She said that, before we can fix the crisis, we have to feel the crisis.

And I guess my hope is just that people will read this book, not because I wrote it, not because I want to sell books, but read this book and encounter, just travel with these families on their journeys, feel what it’s like as a parent, feel what it’s like as their children because a lot of the book is also trying to just really get inside what it feels like for these kids to not know, when they’re picked up from school, where they’re going to be sleeping that night, where they’re going to be sleeping the next day, what it’s like to be sleeping in these abandoned storage units or in the car and just the anxiety, the stress, that they carry from their parents. The trauma. To travel with them in those experiences and to feel this crisis. To get beyond just the abstractions. The statistics. Those are important.

But I really think that, until we are so disturbed by what we have forced … And I don’t say allowed. I say forced because this is an engineered neglect. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, this is an organized abandonment of entire segments of our population in this country. Until we really feel what it’s like to be them and to have this most basic human necessity just constantly out of reach, I don’t think that we’ll be able to conjure the political will necessary to even begin to imagine the kinds of solutions that are necessary. I guess that’s what I’m hoping people tuning in right now will walk away with.

Maureen Conway (00:59:31)

Well, thank you so much, Brian. This has been an amazing conversation. Again, don’t forget. Go get your copy of the book. Read it. I don’t know if you can see it. Read it or listen to it as an audiobook. I did a little mix-and-match of those two things. It’s good as an audiobook as well, but I encourage everybody to take a look. Thank you, Brian, so much. And also, stay tuned for news on a couple of upcoming events. On May 21st, we’re going to be having a hybrid in-person and online event on shared success, how small businesses can create good jobs and strengthen their business at the same time.

On June 4th, we’ll be hosting Chris Hughes from the Economic Security Project to discuss his new book, Marketcrafters.

And on June 26th, we’ll host an event as part of our Job Quality and Practice series on advising small business on job quality lessons from CDFIs. We’ve got lots coming up. Please stay tuned.

And I want to say a big thank you to the whole team at the Economic Opportunities Program for pulling together today’s event, including my colleagues, Frances Almodovar, Tony Mastria, Nora Heffernan, Matt Helmer. Matt, I’m mispronouncing your name. Matt Helmer. And our colleagues at Architects.

Thank you so much, and we’ll see you next time.

---

Opportunity in America

Opportunity in America, an event series hosted by the Economic Opportunities Program, considers the changing landscape of economic opportunity in the US and implications for individuals, families, and communities across the country. The series highlights the ways in which issues of race, gender, and place exacerbate our economic divides, and ideas and innovations with potential to address these challenges and broaden access to quality opportunity.

---

Learn More

The Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy. Follow us on social media and join our mailing list to stay up-to-date on publications, blog posts, events, and other announcements.