There Is No Place for Us

Working and Homeless in America

De: Brian Goldstone

Narrado por: Dion Graham, Brian Goldstone

Through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the “working homeless” in cities across America

“Read this extraordinary book. If you’re lucky, you’ll be changed.”—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges listeners into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.

Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.

By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.

©2025 Brian Goldstone (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“There Is No Place for Us is a book of unusual power and range. Each page is propelled by the integrity of Brian Goldstone’s careful labor, tracking people who must fight an American madness, as the stakes keep getting raised. The facts are a devastation, and a calling.”—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

“In this brilliant book, Brian Goldstone lays bare the hidden disaster of housing precarity among America’s low-wage workers. . . . May it move you to act so that we, as a society, might finally shelter all who need it.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit

“Brian Goldstone has done something remarkable: distilled clearly, in compelling narrative form, so much of what has gone wrong in America since the 1970s. The heartbreaking brutality and inhumanity of the world he depicts will shock many readers—as it should. If you read one book this year—or this decade—it should be There Is No Place for Us.”—Adelle Waldman, author of Help Wanted