Ep. 368 The Homelessness Myth Doesn’t Match Reality with Brian Goldstone

Written By Megan Caballero

Today on The Stacks, Brian Goldstone is here to talk about his book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. The book examines the growing phenomenon of the "working homeless"—people who work full time and still remain unhoused—by following five families in Atlanta over the course of a few years. Goldstone explains how he connected with the families he followed in the book, who officially is counted as homeless,  and why he decided to center his book in Atlanta.

The Stacks Book Club pick for April is Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 by Lucille Clifton. We will discuss on Wednesday, April 30 with Tiana Clark returning as our guest.

 
 

Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Brian Goldstone 0:00

So the chasm between what people are earning and what it costs to have a place to live is by no means unique to New York and LA and San Francisco. There is no city or county in the entire United States of America where someone earning the local minimum wage can afford a modest two bedroom apartment, and I argue that the sprawling tent encampments that we see driving around LA or San Francisco are only the tip of the iceberg of this far deeper catastrophe.

Traci Thomas 0:43

Traci, welcome to The Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host. Traci Thomas, and today I am thrilled to welcome to the podcast. Brian Goldstone, Brian is a journalist and the author of a brand new book that came out last month called there is no place for us working and homeless in America. The book explores the world of the working homeless people who are employed full time but still unable to afford permanent housing by following five families in Atlanta today, Brian and I talk about how he found and approached the families to cover in this book how America got to a place where housing became so unaffordable, and what he thinks can be done about it. Don't forget, our book club pick for April is blessing the boats by Lucille Clifton, Tiana Clark, will be back on Wednesday, April 30 to discuss the book with us. So make sure you read along and tune in. Quick reminder, everything we talk about on each episode of the stacks can be found in the link in the show notes, if you're listening to the show, if you love the show, if you want to support the work of this show, head to patreon.com/the stacks and join our bookish community, also known as the stacks pack, or check out my newsletter at Traci Thomas, dot sub stack.com or I give you some exciting perks and a lot of hot takes. Joining these communities is the perfect way to support the work of the stacks and make sure you get this podcast in your ear every single Wednesday. Okay, y'all that does it for us today. Now it's time for my conversation with Brian Goldstone.

Okay, everybody. Welcome to the stacks. Brian Goldstone, author of there is no place for us working and homeless in America. Brian, welcome to the stacks. Hi, Traci. It's so good to be with you. I'm so happy to have you. I'm so excited. I think when I've reached out to your team to have them send me this book, at the end of last year, I said, please send this book. I think it was built in a lab specifically for me it is. I'll let you tell the people what it's about. But for those of you who love the kind of non fiction that I love, narrative embedded with people deep dive into systems that are fucked up, there is no place for us is is our book? So Brian, in about 30 seconds or so, will you tell people about about this book? Yeah. So the book follows five families in Atlanta who are part of a growing but largely hidden crisis, the dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across the country. And these are people with full time jobs, Uber drivers, janitors, warehouse workers, whose paychecks simply are not enough to secure stable housing for themselves and their kids, and so by following these families journeys over a period of about two years in the book, it shows how this toxic mix of skyrocketing rents, low wages, a lack of tenant rights, along with forces like gentrification and racialized displacement are just driving more and more people into homelessness in America. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the word harrowing gets used too much to describe books like I think they throw it on anything, not this one. This was that was the only word I could think of as I was reading it. It's such an intense experience for the reader, which only leads me to believe it's an even more intense experience for the people who are living it. I'm curious, when did you become familiar with this group of people, this working, homeless and and what was it about, you know, specifically working homeless, as opposed to, I guess, like broadly unemployed homeless, that was inspiring enough for you to want to write about it.

Brian Goldstone 4:39

So the genesis of the book was in about, I think, in 2018 my wife is a nurse practitioner, and she was working at a Community Health Center in Atlanta, where we live, and she was just struck by the number of patients she was seeing at this community health center, people who didn't have insurance, that's why they were there, but who were working at Walmart or.

Or, you know, driving for DoorDash or Lyft, or working at McDonald's, or any number of other jobs. And at the end of their shifts, they were going not to an apartment, but sleeping in their car, or even in a homeless shelter, in one case, on the street. And she was stunned by like, this trend that she was seeing, and when she told me about it, I was pretty stunned. I had been reporting on, you know, things usually really difficult things in different parts of the world, but this was happening in my own city, my own backyard, and so that was kind of the initial question of like, is this some bizarre anomaly, or is this pervasive? And if so, like how pervasive and why? So I ended up writing a magazine piece for the New Republic. I recorded that over the course of about seven months. So it was pretty it was pretty deep into this one family's experience, and it was in the course of reporting that story that, on the one hand, like I just realized there were so much more to say and investigate, and so many systems interlocking to make this crisis, this phenomenon, possible. And I also realized that I was just like I was meeting all these people in the course of reporting that not just case workers and church volunteers and, you know, social workers and housing activists, but also like individuals and families who were also experiencing homelessness while working in the labor force. And so it kind of organically, as organically as I think a book can emerge, it sort of emerged in that way, out of out of that reporting, yeah, for people who are listening to this, you know, and as I was reading the book, I was confronting a lot of my own notions of homelessness, and who is homeless and what it means to be homeless.

Traci Thomas 7:03

And I'm, I'm wondering if you can this is in the book, for sure, but I'm wondering if you can explain a little bit to the audience, like who is considered homeless and who is counted as homeless, because those are sort of two things, it turns out.

Brian Goldstone 7:18

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, a huge impetus for the book, for writing the book, was my own astonishment at how there's this kind of like received or prevailing narrative about what homelessness is, what causes it, who is homeless, and then the reality that I was confronting in my in my research and reporting, and, yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to believe, or to remember, that mass homelessness in America is like a relatively recent thing. It's a it emerged in the 1980s as many of America's maladies did under the Reagan administration. Shout out to Ronald Reagan. Yeah, he always manages to make an appearance in these conversations.

Traci Thomas 8:09

You have a whole chunk on him in this book, like towards the end, like, where you sort of go into detail about what you're going to talk about right now. Yeah, I had just read that Reagan biography, and I was like, this isn't in the biography. Weirdly, I wonder why not?

Brian Goldstone 8:23

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Reagan administration made a concerted attempt as more and more people around the country were being forced out of their homes to shape the public perception and sort of story that America told about this emerging crisis and that basically, I mean, at first they tried gaslighting the country and saying it's not actually happening. Like one of Reagan's deputies actually said there are no people on the street, and people like everyone else, had to just look outside their windows and see that was a lie. But so once, like denying the reality became impossible. They began to kind of shape the perception and and it boiled down to like making people believe that homelessness was the product of mental illness, untreated mental illness, and addiction, alcoholism, these kind of personal pathologies, these individual pathologies, and they actually like as we're seeing today under the current administration, researchers who wanted to study the effects of, say, like, racist housing policy on this growing population of homeless Americans were not funded. There was even an article that's, I think it was in Time magazine. It was Reagan versus the social sciences. So, like, there was this very deliberate effort to make the general public believe that this emergency that was like, was not a product of de.

Deliberate policy choices, that it was like these individual failings. And you know what that neglected was the fact that even at that time, the fastest growing segment of the total homeless population were children under the age of six. So like from the very beginning, the rhetoric and mythology did not match the reality and but most Americans bought into the myth that and the sensationalist media accounts. And by the end of the 80s, a New York Times poll asked people like, what causes homelessness? And the number one answer was like psychological problems. And then after that, it was laziness and like a refusal to work. So what was it on the list? Because that's what I thought was really interesting. What was not the answer that what gave, what not a single person answered with, was housing. So like, astonishingly, housing from the very beginning of home, of the emergence of mass homelessness in America over the last four decades. Like housing, strangely, was like missing from that conversation, I mean, and that is clearly a win for Reagan, right? That he was able to, like to be the person who started mass homelessness, and then not even have it connected to housing or like housing crises at all. I think that's like for maybe a win, yeah, or to like, his administration's destination of social safety net, housing being a really important part of that, the stripping away of funding for public housing, of rental assistance so like and to get to another part of the question you were originally asking, like, about the kind of invisibility of this at that time. You know, it wasn't just shaping the perception when you can narrow the kind of characteristics of those experiencing homelessness down to this, you know, down to alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, you can exclude everyone who doesn't fit into that. And over the years, like a definition, an actual definition of homelessness materialized where, and they call it literal homelessness, that this definition determines who gets counted every year during the federal homeless census. And so, like all of the families I write about in this book, are not counted in the census that is given to us every year as the public you know, like, here's how many people are homeless in America.

Traci Thomas 12:29

And that's because the people who are literal homeless have to either be living on the street or in a shelter.

Brian Goldstone 12:38

That's right.

Traci Thomas 12:39

And so the people in your book are because they're working and they have some income, they are able to pay for these extended stay hotels. So a lot of people end up there. Other people end up staying on in an extra living room or on a couch or on a floor, and family members houses. And so those kinds of, those people who find those kinds of housing are not considered homeless in the eyes of the homelessness census, even though they do not have their own place to live, and also rooming houses are the other kind of third,

Brian Goldstone 13:17

Yeah.

Traci Thomas 13:17

Place that people end up In the book.

Brian Goldstone 13:20

Yeah, totally. I mean, there's, like, this whole array of temporary situations that people cycle in and out of. You know, a lot of even the people I followed in the book, they are in their car. At one moment, they're trying to get into a shelter the next there are no shelter beds available. Or in one case like the shelter says, Yeah, you can come, but your 14 year old son has to go to a men's shelter by himself because we don't allow boys over the age of 13 in our shelter so like so they don't go to the shelter, and they end up spending the entirety of their weekly and monthly income at this squalid, extended stay hotel, but it's they're always very temporary and and, yeah, they're all kind of sites or spaces of homelessness, but only a very, very narrow sliver of those experiencing homelessness in America are counted, like the Families I write about, like literally don't count. They're literally written out of the story.

Traci Thomas 14:28

Yeah, and there's another thing you cite about counting in schools like that, some school districts or schools count differently. They count kids who live in extended stays, and that the number of like, children, just the children far exceeds the total number of homeless people. According to this census, which I thought was just like, oh, okay, well, this data is not matching. It was like 300,000 kids and then like 10,000 homeless people. Absolutely, absolutely. And the federal Department of Education.

Brian Goldstone 15:00

Life does count families living in hotels or living temporarily with others in these kind of precarious situations. They do count them as homeless, but the Department of Education does not control and determine the allocation of resources for homeless assistance, right? So that's HUD, that's like so you have two federal agencies, HUD on the one hand, and the Department of Education on the other, but one of them determines who gets help, and the other one. I mean, it's important that the Department of Education data exists because it shows how misleading like HUD's numbers are. But you know, as we're speaking right now, the Department of Education is in the process of being defunded, defunded and dismantled, and it's so crucial that that not happen, because if it does, we'll lose even this kind of minimal data that exists on children and students who are homeless in America?

Traci Thomas 16:02

Yeah, I want to shift a little and talk about how you came to putting together this specific book that we have here. I know you live in Atlanta. Is that the reason you picked Atlanta is Atlanta representative of something as a whole for the United States? Is it unique in certain ways, like why Atlanta?

Brian Goldstone 16:21

Part of the answer to why Atlanta is that so much of the reporting on America's housing crisis and homelessness crisis tends to center on like a predictable set of like coastal cities, la San Francisco, New York and I think a lot of people living in the rest of the country know that this crisis is way more pervasive and,

yeah, extensive, like in where they live, but it's just not in the coverage. So like the first reason to focus it in Atlanta is just that I think Atlanta actually is representative, in many ways, of what any number of other cities in America, Austin, Nashville, Charlotte, Phoenix, San Jose. There's a whole range of cities that aren't typically in that discussion, that are, I would argue, trending in the direction of what LA is seeing or what New York is seeing with these astronomical rates of unsheltered homelessness. But Atlanta is also unique in a lot of ways. Like Atlanta, for over 100 years, has been kind of a laboratory for housing policy in America. So like Atlanta was the first city in the nation to build public housing during the New Deal, kind of progressive era. And Atlanta was then, during the 1990s and early 2000s the first city in America to destroy all of its public housing intentionally in favor of, kind of leaving low income tenants,

letting them fend for themselves, on on the private market, and and giving, you know, subsidizing, basically, landlords to take care of the housing needs of the most vulnerable, vulnerable people in the city. So Atlanta has also kind of been in the vanguard of of housing policy. I think, most importantly, though, it is representative. Like the trends that I'm documenting are not in any way unique to Atlanta.

Traci Thomas 18:27

You mentioned that some of those other cities are sort of trending, trending to have more homelessness or, like, ramping up this, this group of people. What? What are the predictors of that? What are you looking at to see that a city is headed in that direction, or a city is maybe, like, headed in a more housing direction. Is that even a thing that's happening right now, like, is there any positive cities doing good things? Maybe we can return to the question of hope, because we will return to that. Because I have, I have some questions about that at the end. We will stick with the dark injury for now. Yeah, I'll let you kind of make us feel a little better, maybe at the end. But yeah, what are the predictors? I know you talk about rent gap as something in the book?

Brian Goldstone 19:10

Yeah, I I mean the chasm between what people are earning and what it costs to have a place to live. Um, is, is by no means unique to New York and LA and San Francisco. So like the rents in New York are notoriously wild, but the wages also are relatively higher in those cities or area in that city or in LA, where the minimum wage is higher. In Atlanta, the minimum wage is still 725, which is the federal minimum wage. And as the National Low Income Housing Coalition points out in a report, there is no city or county

in the entire United States of America where someone earn.

The local minimum wage, so which, again, is like sometimes higher than the federal minimum wage, where they can afford a modest two bedroom apartment. So like that phenomenon is it's a nationwide phenomenon. This is not specific to a handful of cities, and I argue that the sprawling in tent encampments that we see driving around LA or San Francisco are only the tip of the iceberg, that it's only the most kind of conspicuous edge of this of this far deeper catastrophe, and it's everything below the water surface, so to speak, that like that's happening everywhere in the country, that that's what we don't see it because they're in these hotels and they are doubled or tripled up with other people, but, but that is what's under the water surface. And the more like, the more it comes out, the more it becomes conspicuous, the more people become aware of it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, right, right?

Traci Thomas 21:09

How did you pick the families you were gonna follow? How did you start with one and kind of build from there? Did you start with 20 and whittle your way down? Just like, how does that book like, like, how do you decide who's who's worth your time and focus?

Brian Goldstone 21:29

Yeah, I mean, it was a very, it was a very hard and complicated process, because, I mean, it was less a question, I think, of like, who is worthy of my time and focus, and who, who is going to allow me into their lives in such a way that like the depth and texture of what it's like to be deprived of this most basic need is felt by readers. I knew that would require a kind of engagement that is not it's not easy to come by and and so for some of the families like I met them, I kind of immersed myself at this extended stay hotel called efficiency Lodge. And I was just there a lot. I was just hanging out there a lot. I met dozens of families there, and there were a few who both kind of gravitated toward me, or I gravitated toward them, and some of them ended up being in the book. They ended up being kind of prominent in the book, there were others who I tracked with for weeks or even months, and then it just became clear, for different reasons, that that they weren't going to be featured as prominently, even if their stories, there were definitely cases where, like, people's stories Were really dramatic, and on paper, like their story exemplified a trend or made a certain argument that seemed important, but like, there's so much more that is necessary to do this kind of reporting over you know, where you're not just dropping in and getting getting the story, but it's, it's A long process of cultivating a relationship in both directions. So even though the superficial aspects were important, like, we ended up just either tacitly or explicitly saying, like, Yeah, we're gonna stay in each other's lives, but, but it's not gonna be in the book.

Traci Thomas 23:41

Can you give an example of like, without like, getting anyone in trouble or anything, of like, what? What would cause you to to decide against someone being a good fit, or them to decide you're a good fit, or whatever?

Brian Goldstone 23:55

I think the most common, because it happened several times. I mean, I It's kind of mind blowing to look back at these you know, past five, six years and realize like, how many people I have hours and hours and hours of recordings with them, hours and hours like going around with them to food pantries or to various places and and they make no appearance at all in the book and um, and in most of those situations, it was because their what they were going through was so intense and so acute that they simply did not have space in their life. I see for anything else. And as much as I would like tobelieve that I was just kind of there in this kind of unobtrusive way, I know that wasn't the case. And like I was asking a zillion questions, and what did you mean by that? And and they just didn't have space for that in their life, right? And.

That's absolutely understandable.

Traci Thomas 25:02

Yeah, yeah. And then this might be a stupid question. I do believe there are such thing as stupid questions, but this is really just a nosy question. You Brian, you walk up to the efficiency Lodge and you go, Hi, I'm Brian Goldstone. I'm going to write a book about you people?

Anyone want to talk to me like? What is the initial you don't know anybody. What is it? A handshake? Is it? I'm a journalist. Is it, Hey? Want to talk like it just feels so hard.

Brian Goldstone 25:37

So with efficiency Lodge, I showed up with Little Caesars. That was my pizza. That was my entree. And I came with pizzas. I actually live not that far from this road, Candler Road, where there's, I think, you know, over 10 extended stay hotels just lining this road. I live not too far from there, and one night, this was before the pandemic, um, I got a call from a woman who runs like a homeless outreach at at her church in southwest Atlanta. And she is, she was one of many people who I had, kind of, like cultivated a relationship with you know, like, what are you seeing out there? If you know of people who might be willing to share their stories, let me know this was right at, like, the very, very early stages of reporting the book. And she called me one night and said, there's a family who just ended up at this hotel, I was supposed to bring them food, because they don't have any money. They don't have any food. Would you mind bringing them something? I'm not able to get over there, and this was at like, 11 o'clock one night, and I was like, Okay, sure. And I stopped at Little Caesars and got, I don't know, like, four pizzas, because it was a mom and her her three children, and she, her name is Michelle. She ends up being a central person in the book. I called Michelle when I parked outside and like in the parking lot, and she ran down to meet me, and she said, I didn't want you to come up to the room, because it's like too scary here at night. And so that was my first encounter with this hotel. And after, I think it was actually the next day, she she said, Can you bring me? I need these, like personal items and

toothpaste. Would you mind? Is there any way you could bring that stuff tomorrow. And so I did, and it was daytime, and I met the manager of the hotel. I just introduced myself and and then I went back the next day and the next day, and I don't know, it just kind of happened that way.

Traci Thomas 27:53

Got it so you didn't just, like, roll up, just like, hello, like, you had, like, a reason to go there that first day.

Brian Goldstone 28:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Traci Thomas 28:02

Okay. This brings me to the question that you listen to. You've listened to the show. You've probably heard me ask this question of journalists who do this kind of work. It's, it's the, you know, question of ethics. It's the ethical question about following people. In this case, I mean, in your acknowledgements or in your notes at the end, you mentioned that you did buy meals for people throughout the process of like, the research and the gathering information. And then it wasn't until after you had finished that that you sort of had a more financial

relationship with these, with the people that you followed, like while you were reporting. You know, you might take them out for coffee, you might grab a bite to eat, but you weren't paying bills or anything like that. And then, and then, after you you said that you were more financially involved.

I'm wondering about, like, not even the ethics of it, like for a journalist, but like, what does it feel like for you, Brian, to be standing next to a woman and her three kids and being like, all I can do is buy you a coffee when you could conceivably do more like, how is that? How does that work? Because I just it feels like it would be hard.

Brian Goldstone 29:17

It's incredibly hard.

Any reporter, researcher, journalist, who is writing about people who are struggling in this way, in very basic material ways, and they're not kept up at night by this question, I think is really suspect, and so it's very, very hard.

I did try to have ground rules going into this that I that I adhere to. I'm not. I can't give you, like, large sums of money if you're facing the possibility of being evicted from this hotel room. I can't give you $300, $400 to you know, to prevent that from happening,

One way that this tension, that I navigated this tension was there's a woman in the book la pink, who, I think when readers encounter her in the book, there's kind of a sigh of relief. It's like, yes, she's she's a of really powerful presence, and whatever readers feel when they encounter her in the narrative, like I certainly felt in real life, because she was someone who I was able to, sort of like be with her, as I was with many of these families. And when situations arose that were more, I don't know, like when there was a very obvious, pointed Mead, she was often the one who was able to draw on the resources that she had and, like, help them out in that way. And and she was also able to exercise, like, the judgment of, what do I do in this moment? It's often hard to know,

do you give the money? How much money do you give? Etc, so she was the one sort of struggling with some of that. It's not to say that I was like, offloading all of this,

all of this tension and all of this responsibility onto her, but, but it definitely helped to have someone who was just there with me most of the time, and was, like, willing to intervene actively. But having said that, yeah, it's

I think Andre Elliot, when she was on the show, she spoke really eloquently about the arbitrariness of a lot of the rules that we come in with. And yeah, the idea that you can take someone out to eat,

but you can't give them money for someone who's hungry like taking them out to eat is just as transactional. So yeah, and often, that's not even money or food. It's like knowledge. It's It's knowing how to navigate systems, things that, as a journalist or a scholar or someone who has spent time understanding how these systems work, that knowledge becomes very valuable, or it could be very valuable to people. And knowing how much like as someone is trying to get assistance to avoid being on the street with their kids, how much of that information do you give them as someone who has, like, acquired it?

Traci Thomas 32:37

Um, that was how much can you how much could you give of that information?

Brian Goldstone 32:43

I mostly erred on the side of like, sharing what I knew. And there were a couple of situations, those families I was alluding to earlier in our conversation, who I ended up not including in the book, who were like, I was instrumental in connecting them with an organization or a case manager who was able to get them the help they needed, and they were able to find a degree of stability as a result. And I just realized that my action had become so decisive that couldn't, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was, and that was a conscious decision on my part, like, I Yeah. I mean, that was pretty clear cut. And there really weren't that many moments with those who, and I ended up following in the book, who, where that came up is explicitly.

Traci Thomas 33:39

Yeah, okay, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back.

Okay, we're back. As far as, like, the rules that you put in place for yourself. Were they, like, very specific, like, no more than $100 or was it, like, I guess, how did you know what was too much and to help? And how did you communicate that those rules to the families, if they were asking for help, did they ask for help

Brian Goldstone 34:15

With everyone who I ended up writing about, and even those who I didn't, who I just spent a lot of time with thinking I might write about them,

I was constantly trying to remind them that, like, why I was there, that I was there to ultimately write a book about their experience. It felt important to do that for reasons of consent, that just because they told me at the very beginning of this process, you know, two years ago, that they were okay with me tracking with them like I wanted them to remember that, even though in their eyes, I think I was often just like their support. Yeah.

System, like I was the guy who they called it one in the morning to just unload their feelings, and so I was constantly reminding them, and part of that was also say, like, here is why I am tracking with you, because people need to see what it's like to go through what you're going through. And they felt that too. Nobody in the book didn't want their story told, or didn't feel very strongly, like, I want the world to know what this feels like. And so it was kind of just together. It wasn't this authoritarian kind of rule, like, I won't do this for you. I'm not going to help you. It was like, how can we make this as real as possible? We can't. We're not acting here. We're not like, doing some kind of performance where I'm going to be manipulating things behind the scenes and then I'm going going to pretend that's not the case. I just have to be showing what it's like and, and I think they got that in an intuitive way.

If I could just speak to that a little more like the question of helping them and or intervening. I think it ultimately the hardest thing for me was not, do I give $100 right now, or do I spend the money on this food right now? Or whatever? The hardest thing for me in this whole process was I really tried to cultivate from the very beginning what I would describe as kind of like this radical availability to them that this, this comes out of my training as an anthropologist, my background as enough.

Traci Thomas 36:46

I was gonna ask about this, because, as you know, we had Jason de Leon on the podcast, and in his book, he's radically available.

Brian Goldstone 36:54

Yes, yeah. And a lot of what ethnography is about is you go in with as few boundaries as you possibly can have, about not necessarily ethical boundaries, but boundaries in terms like when the reporting begins and when it ends. And ideally, you don't know necessarily what the story is until you discover it, and you don't have an argument until you discover it. And so I needed to let the people I was writing about know that I was just there as much as humanly possible for whatever they needed. In terms of, like, you need a ride somewhere, you need to talk to someone in the middle of the night. You need me to take you to the ER, as I did in one case, like, whatever it is, I'm going to be there. And mostly that was emotional, because the very nature of being without housing in this way has a lot to do with not having much of a network to rely on, right? And I was able to provide some of that support for them, just emotionally, like I'm going to walk with you through this. And there came a point where I had to start writing, and I had to step away from the sort of day to day just being with and had to put words on the page, or else this never would have gotten to and I think that was the hardest thing was having to navigate. Do I take this call? Do I drop everything and run to the courthouse?

Do I and ethically, morally, that's what troubled me the most. Because I think even even though I was constantly reminding them of my role and what I was there for, they didn't see me as a journalist. I think it's shocking to them, even now, with the book coming out, that like, Wait, you're a writer, because they see me as just the guy who they were talking to and the friend and the so that was the hardest thing was like, how to how to create that kind of boundary in order to, like, put this thing out into the world.

Traci Thomas 39:06

At what point, Brian, like, did you? Did you decide, okay, I ethnographed Enough. Like, it's time to get to the writing. How do you, how do you make that call? Is that just like, deadline stuff, or did you come to a point where you felt okay? I think I have enough to write a book.

Brian Goldstone 39:28

I am extremely fortunate in having an absolutely incredible editor. And you know most who is your editor. Her name is Amanda Cook, and she was with me through this whole process. You know, most of the reporting for the book took place during the pandemic. There were a lot of uncertainties when, when the pandemic struck, like, how is this going to work? Logistically? Um.

Yeah, and a lot of what's in the book wasn't there originally. You know, some people write a book proposal and they know kind of what is going to be in the book. In my case, I had kind of a skeletal frame, conceptually, argumentatively, you know, for the book about the working homeless, and about the ways that gentrification and kind of the revitalization of our cities is fueling a lot of this insecurity, but in terms of the actual people and the stories that wasn't there when I began, when I began this process. So my editor, Amanda, we were just constantly on the phone. We talked, I think, like at least once a month during the reporting process, and the question of, when do I have enough? When? When is the time to start writing that for her credit was really left open ended, and it was just like, we're going to know when we know. And I think there were definitely moments like some of the more climactic moments in the book, like the mass eviction of a dozen families at gunpoint from efficiency Lodge, from this extended stay that I had already been spending months and months at when that happened, it felt both in terms of narrative, but also practically, because I wasn't allowed back on the property for a while after that, they hired these guards, and I just wasn't allowed on the property. So, like, that was kind of a natural conclusion. And yeah, it's sort of case by case, but, but it was all done in collaboration consultation with my editor, and because I just didn't see the forest for the trees, I was so so so deep in the weeds, with what people were going through, and just trying to capture it that I needed someone who had more perspective to tell me when it was time to start writing.

Traci Thomas 41:59

Yeah, that makes sense. Speaking of seeing the forest for the trees, the title of this book is the last line of chapter, I think, 29 and someone says it to you, one of one of the mother says it to you. Did you know when she said it? Were you like, boom, title of my book, or did someone else pick it out from a draft or something?

Brian Goldstone 42:20

I could not come up with a title for this book. The working title for most of the time I was working on this book was the new American homeless. That was the name of the magazine story that I wrote and got it. But we always knew that wasn't going to be the title that ended up and and so the whole time I was working, like, in the back of my head, I was thinking, what is this thing going to be called? And it was only when I was actually writing that chapter. So at the very end of like, the writing process got it that I was actually, like, brainstorming the ideas for the chapter with my wife, and I had that quote in my notes, and I said it out loud, and I was like, I wonder if that could work. That's the title of the book, and it seemed to capture so much of what the book is doing, and the fact that it's in the voice of one of the people in the book is really important because, like, it's not me imposing something on the story. This is just her say, there's no place for us and and I think that works existentially as well as in just kind of material terms.

Traci Thomas 43:33

Yeah, one of the things I wanted to just point out for listeners and ask you about is that in the five families you follow, first of all, they're all families, so there's children involved in every single case. And also, they're all black. And I'm wondering if you thought at all about including people who didn't have children, including people who weren't black, like, how important of sort of, like, a quote, unquote diversity of representation. Were you thinking about that at all, or were you focused on it in a different way?

Brian Goldstone 44:07

Yeah, I think initially, when I first began this project, I did have this ideal of having, you know, the white working class family or individual alongside, you know, some people of color and just Yeah, to get at some of that diversity, single people. Here in Atlanta, there are a lot of trans youth and individuals who are experiencing homelessness, LGBT, you know. So getting some of that diversity in terms of race, it also happens to be the case that in Atlanta, which is no longer majority black, 93% of the families experiencing homelessness in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement, are black. So in one way, it would have been forced to like find the one.

White family somewhere in the suburbs somewhere, and just latch onto them because they're white and because I need that kind of diverse I mean, the fact that all five families are black is actually true to the reality of homelessness in Atlanta, but also the desire for to like, check these different demographic boxes ran up against the much more important need to have people again who there is a rapport with, who like they're willing to allow me in and and there were people throughout this process. There was a white woman who I followed for several weeks, like, we went out for lunch many times, and she told me her story, and she was a gig worker living in her car. And again, she was one of those people, like, she just had so much she was dealing with that it didn't, it didn't work out for us to continue. But yeah, that I, I think it's really important, though, this isn't just a question of demographics. It's also so often the history and the story of homelessness in America is told in this kind of colorblind way, or, like the Wikipedia version of homelessness in America is really a white story. It's a story that begins in the colonial period and runs through the Depression and Jacob Reese's, you know, great army of tramps going throughout the country, and these are mostly white men. And there's a really important moment in the book where Natalia she starts reading some of the history of housing and displacement and dispossession in America, beginning with reconstruction and sort of the post emancipation period, and I began to wonder like and I hope readers will latch on to that too, that what if we told a story about housing insecurity and homelessness in America that began not with that great army of tramps during The depression, but that began with 4 million recently emancipated formerly enslaved human beings who were systematically deprived of land and forced into an economy of rent and debt and precarity. What? How would that change our very idea of homelessness and housing insecurity? Because this didn't just emerge over the last few years. So, like the racialized dimension of this is actually super important, I think, to what the book is trying to do.

Traci Thomas 47:31

Brian, how open are you to me telling you what your next book should be?

Brian Goldstone 47:36

I am very open to that, because I have no idea what my next book was.

Traci Thomas 47:42

Okay, I have your next book for y'all. I need you to write the expose on Blackstone, because they're my enemies, and they show up in this book for people who don't know, Blackstone is like a big what are they? Like a hedge fund or something? I don't know. They're like, a big private equity company, yes, private equity giant, yes, but they show up in this book like surprise. We've bought up all the efficiency lodges, and we're making them even worse. And I feel like they do that for everything. And so I need you to dig in there and write all about it because I haven't read that book, and I need it.

Brian Goldstone 48:22

So as much as I would love to get a book deal, based on this suggestion, I actually just read, in galley form, an incredible book by a reporter named Megan Greenwell called Bad Company, and it's about the rise of private equity. It's not just Blackstone. I think it's important that it isn't just like it's all these other private equity firms, but it's, it's about how private equity is. Equity has just taken over our lives in this country, and it's an incredible book. And so now you have to give me a different idea for a book.

Traci Thomas 48:58

Okay, well, I'll think about it. I only come up with these brilliant ideas every once in a while, but also you could do it different, because you could do, like, a deep dive, like, into, you know, like, it could be, like, just the black stone, and, you know, you could expand out, like, this is how other companies are doing it, but, like, you know, the Empire of Pain, but of Blackstone anyways, yeah, you know, yes, yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, I have to ask you about how you write, because we're definitely running out of time. But how do you write? How many hours a day, how often music or No, snacks and beverages rituals set the scene?

Brian Goldstone 49:35

I have two kids, two, two boys, two. And you know, when I began the book Elliot, my youngest son was two years old, and yeah, so having young kids in the house definitely creates certain limitations for writing. So I.

But the only way I was able to get this book done was I started I had always told myself that I wasn't the type of person who could wake up really early. I needed a certain number of hours of sleep every night. Stay up really late, but I ended up waking up every morning at like four o'clock, 415 430 for well, months and months and months, and it ended up being this really magical time where for, you know, three hours before the kids wake up, and I just have this kind of quiet. And so it became a really beautiful and kind of magical space for me, and definitely, like the most productive space, lots of coffee, just the boring, predictable stuff that all writers, I guess, need.

Yes, snacks and yeah, which ones, which snacks. It's funny, because I don't know if other parents do this, but I would never, like buy snacks for myself, because that was too explicit and indulgent. Yeah? So it was always like the Annie's Cheddar Bunnies that I end up just like ravaging.

Yeah? And it's always in the afternoon, yeah, yeah, okay.

Traci Thomas 51:24

We love a chat. I am a goldfish person myself, but, you know, I respect the cheddar bunny. It's fine. It's fine. Second place. There's two things we have to talk about that we said we would. One is solutions, or like, hope. I don't know if you've got a lot on that, but if you've got anything on that. I think we'll take it now.

Brian Goldstone 51:42

I think one of the most frustrating things in reading about homelessness going into this was so often the writer leaves you with this kind of like, well, who's to say both what caused this and who's to say? What can end it this kind of like vague sense of, Well, you know, getting people into homes, but they also need rehab, they also need mental health services. And you know that that's true, like people do have needs, and those needs do need to be met, but I want to be super clear that the reason this catastrophe is spiraling in this country, and continues to spiral, is because housing has been treated as a as an asset class, A vehicle, an investment vehicle, a commodity that the few people who are lucky enough to own property are going to profit from the many, many, many more who are in desperate need of a place to live like fundamentally, that is why we have a homelessness crisis in this country. And there are other places, other countries where housing is treated as just a basic human necessity, like healthcare or education and it's funded--

Traci Thomas 53:09

Two other things we don't really have.

I mean, we do have private we do have public schools because we said we're not going to leave K through 12 education to the whims of profiteers like and private and private schools like we're going to make sure that every kid has access to education, and for some reason, we haven't done that with having a home which is so basic to people's stability and survival, so fundamentally that's there has to be An expansion, a radical expansion in our moral and political imagination that is not content any longer with just nibbling around the edges. And you know, going back to that drastic kind of narrowing of the problem the population experiencing homelessness that we were talking about with regard to Reagan, and has continued into the present. We've narrowed the problem, and then we come up with solutions and convince ourselves that the solutions will be adequate, because the problem itself has been so drastically limited and narrowed. But when you widen the scope and you confront the true reality and the magnitude and severity of this precarity, we then have to come up with, like, a much more imaginative approach. And ultimately, you know, my hope lies in social housing. Yeah, and I don't know if there's time to say, go ahead and just say what that is so social housing is basically if public housing in America hadn't been allowed to fail, has it hadn't been set up to fail, if there hadn't been this engineered neglect that turned public housing into the stigmatized data?

Brian Goldstone 55:00

Deteriorated place to live. That's what social housing is. Social Housing, it exists in other countries like Vienna in Austria. Vienna is kind of the paradigmatic site of social housing where it's been really, really successful, but Finland was, in effect able to end homelessness by building social housing, which is like housing for people across the income scale. It's not just for the poorest of the poor, it's where middle class people can live as well without a fear that from one year to the next year, rent is going to skyrocket and you're not going to have a place to live anymore, or where your landlord's going to terminate your lease because it's no longer profitable for them to have you as a tenant, and they want to get someone else in, or they want to sell the property where you can live with that kind of safety and stability and knowledge that you're going to have a place to live from one year to the next. That's what social housing is, and that's what public housing was at one point, and that's what it could be again, but it will require a truly massive public investment in people having homes in this country.

Traci Thomas 56:14

What's the difference between social housing and public housing?

Brian Goldstone 56:19

I mean, in some ways, it's public housing rebranded. I mean, public housing has become so stigmatized that a lot of people just stop listening when you say public housing so but social housing is also what it's called in other countries where it has taken off.

Traci Thomas 56:37

Got it Okay? The other thing I wanted to get to, which is about you, actually, and about the Trump administration and dei you had a book event canceled because of dei related issues, I guess, right. And I guess, first of all, what the fuck? And second of all, did you ever think as a white guy you were gonna be dei target. I mean, it feels like dei means anything now, so I'm just really curious about what happened. Tell people what happened to your book event. And I mean, Whoa, yeah.

Brian Goldstone 57:16

So I was scheduled to launch the book at the Carter Library, the Jimmy Carter presidential library, here in Atlanta, where it's the place in Atlanta, where many, many, many book events have happened over the years. It's kind of, yeah, it's a wonderful place. And the bookstore, a capella books, that was facilitating that event. They've worked with them for years and years, and it's been on the books for months. And in February, my publicist got a call that the event was canceled and we would have to find a different venue. The bookstore was shocked. We were shocked. We weren't given a lot of information. And then it was revealed that two other book events, one having to do with the civil rights movement, the other, having to do with climate change, was also canceled, and other events on ostensibly less threatening topics, more innocuous topics were allowed to continue.

And yeah, it was demoralizing. It was discouraging. And we don't know whether this was the library, the Carter Library, preemptively canceling something because they didn't want to rock the boat, or if there was a directive from the National Archives, which oversees all the presidential libraries, saying this event will not continue. But, you know, once I realized the other books that the other book events that had been canceled, I felt like I was in good company and and I guess I feel like, you know, if a book about housing insecurity and homelessness is now deemed subversive or threatening. It just underscores the urgency of having that conversation. Yeah, well, I'm sorry that happened to you. That sucks. Did you find a new place for your book event? Yeah, we did. It's gonna be my local library, which I'm really excited about. And, yeah.

Traci Thomas 59:19

Okay, good. What's a word you could never spell correctly on the first try?

Brian Goldstone 59:24

Um, bureau.

Traci Thomas 59:26

Um, like the Bureau of Investigation?

Brian Goldstone 59:28

Yeah, I, I, and I had a hard time saying it, even for a hard one, yeah.

Traci Thomas 59:35

Um, for people who love there is no place for us. What are some other books you'd recommend to them that are in conversation with your work.

Brian Goldstone 59:42

Ooh, I mean a book that has meant the world to me, and I was so honored that she read the book and blurbed it is Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, random family. That book has, you know, was, was crucial for.

Me behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine, Boo Andre Elliot's invisible child, Matthew Desmond's evicted. There's Roxanna as guardians. We were once a family.

Traci Thomas 1:00:12

She's the one who put your book on my radar. She's the one who's like, have you read this? Have you heard of this? I was like, no. She's like, feels like you. I immediately was like, it is me.

Brian Goldstone 1:00:21

These are all writers who and journalists researchers who have narrative ambition and writerly ambition, but who are also deeply connected to a kind of moral and political sensibility. And for me that's really important, that combination.

Traci Thomas 1:00:43

Can I also throw out Rough Sleepers? Did you read that?

Brian Goldstone 1:00:46

Traci Kidder, yes, I thought that was really good too.

Traci Thomas 1:00:48

Yes, that was that, was that, I mean, that's like, more literally in conversation, because it's about homelessness and it's about people who sleep on the street and a doctor who sort of takes care, who's sort of changed his life goals into helping take care of and giving health care to people who sleep, rough sleepers for sure.

Last one, if you could have any person dead or alive read this book, who would you want it to be?

Brian Goldstone 1:01:13

that's really hard.

This is going to sound a little trite, I think, but my initial impulse is to name someone in a position of power, not necessarily Donald Trump, because he doesn't read, but one of his lieutenants, someone who can really make a difference with these issues, you know, and who is instrumental right now, and like decimating The already shredded safety net that exists even further. But I honestly. I really believe if any of this is going to change, it's going to come not from the top, but from the bottom. And so I just want the people listening to this to read the book. I want people to get so pissed off and shocked and outraged that even people working their asses off in not just one job, but two jobs like aren't able to have this most basic thing a roof overhead in this country, the wealthiest country on earth. I want them to read it, and I want them to be so angry at that they start caring about their neighbors who are experiencing this and demanding of anyone around them who's in any position to affect policy change, to demand that they take this seriously. That's who I want to read this. And I know that maybe can sound precious, but that's the truth. I love it. It's a great answer.

Traci Thomas 1:02:41

Okay, everybody, you have your marching orders. Go get the book, and then call all the people that you need to call. I will say, since I finished this book, I live in Los Angeles, which, as you mentioned, is, you know, homelessness is a huge not only is a huge issue here, but it's a huge topic of conversation in California and in Los Angeles. And I haven't been able to drive through the city in the same way, like I just it's changed so much of how I how I'm thinking and moving through my own personal life. So I can definitely, you know, highly recommend this book to listeners. And I think, like you said it, I agree. I think any change is going to come from from the people saying, like, this is fucking ridiculous, which it is, everybody you can get your copy of there is no place for us. Wherever you get your books. I know there is an audio book. Do you read it?

Brian Goldstone 1:03:32

The incredible Dion Graham read.

Traci Thomas 1:03:35

Oh my gosh, yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. I read the book off the page. I saw the audio book, but I was like, this is the kind of book I need to, like, be alone within my bathtub, like in a dark room.

Brian Goldstone 1:03:45

I just heard a sample, and it's, is it amazing? It's amazing. I'm so grateful that he did this.

Traci Thomas 1:03:52

He's so good. I got to meet him, and I was such a fan girl, and he was sort of like, okay, weird.

Brian Goldstone 1:04:00

And he's such a good person. Yeah, yeah.

Traci Thomas 1:04:03

He's such a nice guy. Well, okay, so if you were on the fence about if you should read it off the page or audio, now you have all the information you need, probably both. Brian, thank you so much for being here. Such a pleasure. Oh, Traci, thank you so much. And everyone else, we will see you in The Stacks.

All right, y'all that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you again to Brian Goldstone for joining the podcast. I'd also like to say a big thank you to Mary Coates and Penny Simon for helping to make this conversation possible. Remember our book club pick this month is Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton, which we will discuss on Wednesday, April 30 with Tiana Clark. If you love this podcast and you want inside access to it, head to patreon.com/thestacks to join The Stacks. Pack and check out my newsletter at tracithomas.substack.com make sure you're subscribed to The Stacks wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if listening through Apple podcasts or Spotify, please leave us a rating and a review for more from the stacks. Follow us on social media @thestackspod on Instagram, Threads and Tiktok, and check out our website at thestackspodcast.com.

Today's episode of the stacks was edited by Christian Dueñas, with production assistance from Megan Caballero and Wy'Kia Frelot. Our graphic designer is Robin McCreight, and our theme music is from Tagirijus. The stacks is created and produced by me, Traci Thomas.

Megan Caballero
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