In Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, we meet Celeste, who is dealing with a cancer diagnosis and moves into an extended-stay hotel after a fire burns down her rental. But Celeste didn’t score high enough on a “vulnerability index (a “mechanism for determining who would—and would not—be eligible for support” developed by a consulting firm) to get housing aid. She and her children didn’t meet the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of being considered “literally homeless.”

Celeste’s is one of the stories of five Atlanta families at the center of Goldstone’s extraordinary work of journalism. They work—constantly—yet struggle to remain housed amid rising rent, low wages, lack of tenants rights, predatory corporations and landlords, and gentrification. As Goldstone details in his introduction, the individuals at the heart of this book are Black (as are 93% of homeless families in Atlanta) and are part of the country’s low-wage labor force. America’s richest cities are sustained by people who are systemically priced out of housing: “Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” Goldstone writes. “They’re being pushed.”

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I discovered that that has roots in the emergence of mass homelessness in the 1980s. There was a concerted attempt on the part of the Reagan administration to control the public narrative and perception of this mounting catastrophe. They systematically limited research on homelessness to studies that focused on mental illness, alcoholism, addiction. Researchers who wanted to study what, at that time, was the process of the administration’s shredding of the social safety net, of funding for public housing and housing assistance for low-income families, were not funded.



This effort to shape public perception really was successful. As I point out in the book, surveys showed that most Americans, by the end of the 1980s, attributed homelessness to laziness, addiction, or mental illness. Nobody mentioned housing in the surveys, and nobody seemed to realize that the fastest growing segment of the homeless population was children under the age of six. If you can drastically limit the magnitude and scope of a crisis, or even deny the existence of a crisis, you can more easily claim that you’re tackling it. This has profound effects on who’s able to access resources and assistance. [According to Goldstone’s reporting, the true estimated number of people deprived of housing in America would be well over 4 million, roughly six times the “official” number.]

https://www.jezebel.com/there-is-no-place-for-us-working-homeless-in-america-book-interview