There Is No Place for Us : Working and Homeless in America

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) Through the revelatory and gut-wrenching (Associated Press) 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

An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc s Random Family and Matthew Desmond s Evicted. The New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice)

LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

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 readers 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 ro