Brian Goldstone: My background is in cultural anthropology, and my research for many years was in West Africa, but there was so much more I wanted to explore in my writing. I had long been drawn to long-form journalism and narrative nonfiction, and I was always trying to infuse my academic writing with its tone and spirit. Eventually, for many other reasons, I decided to throw myself into doing that kind of long-form journalism. I wanted to do something closer to home here in Atlanta, and there was a study that came out just when I started about this being one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country. I began to wonder about the link between gentrification and the revitalization of urban space and the renaissance of our cities, on the one hand, and mounting housing inequalities, on the other. 

I was reporting this story in 2018, still looking for a protagonist to guide the narrative, and I ended up meeting a woman named Cokethia Goodman, whose family had been renting in a historically Black and working-class neighborhood called Peoplestown. Their lease had been terminated so that the owner of their rental home could sell it and make a profit, and when I met them, they’d been homeless for a few months already. This was the moment when I knew I was interested in the working homeless, because Ms. Goodman still seemed to be in a state of shock that she was working full-time as a home health aide and she and her kids were homeless. She was still trying to wrap her head around that, and I joined in the bewilderment that those two words—working and homeless—could go together. Over the next few years, I was reporting a story for The California Sunday Magazine about a working family in Northern California living in their van with their kids, and I saw safe parking lots full of families who were sleeping in their cars and heading to their jobs and schools the next morning. At that point, I knew I wanted to write a book to understand more fully all the intersecting systems and socioeconomic structures that produced this crisis.

DE: How did you find the families you followed for this book, and how did you convince them to allow you into their lives?

BG: One of my peculiarities—or vices—when it comes to my reporting method is that I spend an excessive amount of time with people. When I was working on the story about Ms. Goodman and her family, I started accompanying them to food pantries and all the other places where she and her family  were going for help, and I met a lot of people who were in a similar predicament. So when I started working on this book, I already had a lot of contacts with churches, nonprofits, caseworkers, food banks, and pantries, and I began to draw on that network. I knew that I wanted the reporting to be immersive, to give readers a visceral sense of what it looks and feels like for parents and for their children when this basic human necessity—a roof overhead—is always just out of reach. In order to capture that sense of immersion, I knew I’d need to be with the people themselves as much as humanly possible. I looked for families and individuals who had been in the labor force and were experiencing housing precarity—and I think it speaks to the pervasiveness of this crisis that there was no shortage of people who fit that description. 

DE: You do a great job of illustrating this contradiction between what we see and what we’re told—namely that the economy is doing well, unemployment is down, and yet we can see that the tents under the overpass are proliferating. How important is official data when it comes to influencing perception and creating change?

BG: Official data—and I would emphasize official or sanctioned data—is important insofar as it shapes our headlines and political talking points. Certain economic metrics become officially sanctioned and then form an official narrative: We take, for instance, a low unemployment rate and turn that into the idea that the economy is booming, and that becomes the headline. It’s not that those unemployment numbers are wrong, necessarily, but there’s an entire world of experience that is not revealed in that data point.

It’s important to look at other kinds of data, and that’s especially true when it comes to homelessness. As I show in the book, every year the federal government conducts the one-day Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, and in the world of homeless services, among scholars and advocates, it is widely known to be flawed because it excludes vast portions of the population. Yet, year after year, the results often make it into headlines that uncritically and credulously proclaim, for instance, that homelessness is down in Georgia and Atlanta, that the city and the state are making real progress—even as, during that same period, the Department of Education tracks student homelessness, and those numbers keep going up and up, while PIT Count numbers are going down. Yet the DOE’s numbers barely register in the media or among policymakers or journalists. 

Historically, since mass homelessness emerged in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, there has been a so-called “numbers controversy” around homelessness. From the very beginning, there was a fight to put a figure on the number of people experiencing homelessness. The government was determined to make that number as low as possible, while homeless advocates pushed back, saying, “No, it’s a much, much bigger population that we’re talking about. You’re leaving out all the families; you’re leaving out all the children.” We can’t just count those on the street or in shelters, because many cities don’t even have shelters. And when there are no shelters, families and kids disappear—into their cars, into other people’s apartments, into hotels. We can’t just count what we see. And yet the government was determined to make it only about this very conspicuous population. 

DE: You give a number of reasons why people continue to become unhoused, including “poverty wages, out-of-control rents, greed, racism, gentrification.” Which of these do you see as the primary cause? Bad or no regulation?

BG: I want to be absolutely clear that the reason people become unhoused is that they do not have access to housing that they can afford. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but people become homeless because they’ve lost their housing and there are no homes available that they can afford to live in. I think it’s important to say that clearly and unequivocally, because, getting back to ideological motivations, there’s a lot invested these days in portraying homelessness as “Well, who’s to say what causes it?” You know, is it mental illness? Is it drug addiction? There’s a deliberate effort these days to frame the crisis in those terms. And while it’s true that many of the people suffering most visibly on the street are struggling with mental health issues or addiction, there’s very little effort, at least among those who fixate on these conditions, to ask what actually caused the homeless people to become homeless in the first place. The answer isn’t addiction or mental illness; it’s that they didn’t have access to housing they could afford. There’s a reason why only certain regions of this country have the kind of visible street homelessness that they do, and that’s the variable—the growing chasm—between people’s incomes and what landlords are charging for a place to live… not addiction or mental illness. 

When we’re talking about work, it’s important not to focus only on wages, but also on the changing nature of work itself: the increasing volatility and precariousness, the lack of job security, not knowing how many hours you’ll get from one week to the next. It’s poverty wages, plus these labor conditions. And yes, skyrocketing rents are a huge part of this, because that’s what makes housing unaffordable. But greed, racism, gentrification—it’s a toxic combination of all of these factors together. We can’t separate skyrocketing rents from greed; they’re not two different things. Skyrocketing rents are driven by greed, by a desire to gouge tenants for as much as possible because they are desperate and have nowhere else to turn. And gentrification, the so-called revitalization of cities, is what makes those skyrocketing rents possible. All of these elements feed off of each other, but at the root of it all is a lack of housing that poor and working-class people can afford.

DE: I ask because sometimes you hear a very superficial response, even from those who are sympathetic, like YIMBYs, who say, “Oh, we just need to build more housing.” And obviously it depends on the type of housing, because if you just build luxury housing, that’s not going to solve anything, right? 

BG: I think you’re right. Just building more housing, on its own, will be insufficient because without stronger tenant protections, nothing will stop people from being pushed out of their homes whenever it becomes expedient for their landlord to do so. It won’t ensure, for instance, that the new housing being built is safe and habitable. So it has to be new housing, plus strong tenant rights and protections, plus permanently affordable rents in order to truly address this crisis.

DE: We know that housing is a major issue across the United States, but why did you choose Atlanta specifically?

BG: I chose Atlanta because the city has long been a kind of laboratory for housing policy in America. It was the first city to build public housing under FDR, the first to build a housing project in the country, Techwood Homes, and the local paper even wrote something to the effect that “Uncle Sam uses Atlanta as his laboratory.” Atlanta was at the forefront of efforts to provide housing for working-class residents, although segregation and racism were built into that experiment. Public housing was primarily for white working-class residents of the city, while Black families—many of whom were displaced by its construction—were largely excluded. More recently, Atlanta was the first city to tear down all of its public housing, in the ’90s, making it the first city to both build and destroy public housing. It was also at the leading edge of the neoliberal shift that turned housing for poor and low-income residents over to the private market, through vouchers and public-private ownership models. 

Having said that, for all that makes the city unique, I would argue that Atlanta is more representative of what cities across the country are experiencing than the places where housing and homelessness stories tend to be covered—cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Those places aren’t necessarily aberrations but more extreme versions of what cities like Atlanta are on their way to becoming. The lack of tenant protections in Georgia is actually the norm in much of the country. Widespread displacement and the wholesale remaking of former working-class neighborhoods is occurring everywhere, not just in Atlanta but in cities like Austin and Charlotte, Nashville and Seattle. It’s happening throughout the US.

DE: What kinds of effects did Covid have on this? You mention, for example, that residents of extended-stay hotels—which offer cheap rooms at nightly and weekly rates but provide no protections for semi-permanent residents—were not covered by the federal eviction moratorium.

BG: I had no idea that the pandemic was going to break out, but in retrospect it was important that I started reporting this story before Covid. It’s necessary to show that this crisis was already unfolding well before the pandemic—it only pushed people who were already hanging on by a thread over the edge. What we saw in the early months of Covid was how catastrophic it is when the working homeless become out-of-work homeless. The pandemic intensified a disaster already in the making and in some ways brought public attention to these workers, whose living conditions did not reflect their importance to the economy—they were treated as expendable. The thousands of families living in extended-stay hotels became, in effect, the most vulnerable renters in America, lacking even the minimal protections other tenants had. Much of the strengthening of the safety net during Covid—like the expansion of the child tax credit, rental assistance, and unemployment benefits—marginally improved the lives of those I wrote about. But it was temporary. Now that it’s been stripped away, we’re back to a situation in which an already threadbare safety net is being shredded even further.

DE: Can you describe the world of extended-stay motels and how they function essentially as private homeless shelters?

BG: These extended-stay motels and hotels, which are proliferating across the country, are a new frontier as the shelter of last resort—I think it’s wrong to even call it “housing”—for the casualties of America’s housing crisis. I think of them almost as refugee camps, where those displaced by the housing crisis increasingly find themselves. When most people think of extended-stays, they imagine hotels like Residence Inn or Homewood Suites, with amenities for business travelers or traveling healthcare workers. But the kinds of hotels I discuss in the book are almost invariably abysmal: no amenities, no laundry facilities, and often squalid, dangerous conditions. They tend to nickel-and-dime residents for everything—toilet paper, bedding, towels, anything you’d associate with a normal hotel. On top of that, they’re incredibly expensive, often double or more what someone would pay for an apartment larger than their hotel room. But since they’ve been pushed out of the formal housing market, they’re forced into a situation where they pay what I would describe as extortionate rates. And then they become trapped in what one person in the book calls an “expensive prison,” unable to leave because they’re spending the entirety of their paychecks on the weekly hotel rent. 

These hotels prey on people’s desperation, and they’re enormously profitable. The same Wall Street investors and private equity firms buying up vast swaths of America’s rental housing stock are also buying up these hotels. In 2021, Blackstone and Starwood Capital Group purchased Extended Stay America for several billion dollars. The same private equity firms pushing people out of their rental housing are also cornering the market on the very places the evicted are forced to go when they lose their stable housing—and profiting off of that.

DE: You write that “a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen.” And the book is full of examples of how being a few days late on your rent can lead to an eviction notice and the beginning of a cycle of poverty. And you also mention that we already have the solutions and the resources—we just lack the will to act. What do you see as the solutions?

BG: I love that James Baldwin quote “Not  everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In other words, we will not meaningfully address this crisis until we confront it in all of its reality. And once we do, we will see that a few tiny homes here or a handful of supportive housing units there, while necessary and good, aren’t even able to scratch the surface. Recent research shows that the actual number of people experiencing homelessness in America is at least six times higher than the reported figure. To address this catastrophe at scale, we need solutions that fall into two broad categories. The first is preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place, interrupting the relentless churn that in some cities, like Los Angeles, sees four people become unhoused for every one person who is able to secure housing. That’s an astonishing statistic! And the way to stop it is by making it harder for people to lose their homes: implementing immediate measures like rent stabilization, ensuring a right to counsel in eviction cases so tenants have a lawyer on their side, and strengthening habitability requirements. There are all sorts of immediate steps we can take to keep people in the homes they already have. Higher wages, job security—all of that has to be part of the solution, because we can’t just focus on the “homeless” part of the “working homeless.” 

The second category is not just preventing homelessness but also getting people who don’t currently have them into homes. You mentioned the perspective that simply building more market-rate housing will solve this crisis. I’m not convinced that it will. What we need is public housing done right—public housing that hasn’t been allowed to deteriorate. If not for decades of disinvestment, I don’t believe that we would be in the housing crisis we are experiencing today. That’s why I ultimately propose social housing, looking to places like Vienna, Austria; Finland; and other countries where people have access to safe, permanently affordable homes across the income scale, and where the kind of housing insecurity that we have in America simply doesn’t exist.

DE: We know that the housing laws are written by landlords and that Georgia is among the states friendliest to landlords in the country, so how do we change that? What do you make of the latest housing bills before the state House of Representatives—House Bills 305, 399, and 374, as well as an amendment to HB 404, the so-called “Safe at Home Act”—which seek to limit the influence of investors, especially out-of-state investment funds, from monopolizing the market?

BG: In a state like Georgia, landlords and the real estate lobby wield tremendous power, so our lawmakers will not come to these policies and decide to make life easier for renters on their own. Change will come from people looking around and saying, “This is intolerable—we won’t stand for it anymore.” And it will come from a broad-based coalition of residents saying that enough is enough. It’s great that there is now a bill to curb the influence of investors buying up housing in Georgia, but the only reason it’s even on the table is that it has riled up enough people, affecting Georgians across the income spectrum. Would-be homeowners are now up against Wall Street investors paying cash for the single-family home they would have purchased. 

Harnessing this sense of dissatisfaction is absolutely necessary to getting investors out of the housing market, but let’s not kid ourselves that this alone will meaningfully halt the crisis. It can seem hopelessly utopian or out of touch to talk about building millions of social housing units in America, which would really require a political and economic commitment to providing for people’s housing needs that simply does not exist, while states like Georgia can barely pass basic habitability requirements. It’s important to recognize the reality of what tenants are facing today, but also to insist that our vision of a just society isn’t dictated by those who happen to hold power at a particular moment. We’re already in a situation where only one in four people who qualify for housing assistance in America actually receives it, and the current administration seems determined to make things even worse. The way we fight back is to say that housing is a basic human need, that people need homes. Just as we’ve made public education, clean water, roads and highways essential public goods, we have to treat housing the same way and shape policy in response to that reality. Nothing will change until we have a paradigm shift: away from landlords squeezing renters for as much as possible, because housing is treated as a commodity and asset class, and toward recognizing housing as a basic human necessity. 

DE: You show how important vouchers and even minimal rental assistance can be for vulnerable families. While housing prices are on the rise, the US House of Representatives is proposing to cut funding to the Department of Housing and Urban Development by $2.3 billion. If this budget cut goes through, what will happen to families with children like the ones you profile, who depend on HUD for vouchers and other forms of rental assistance?

BG: It’s just going to make a catastrophic situation even worse. If HUD’s budget continues to be gutted, even the modest advances we’ve made as a country in recent years will disappear, and the number of Americans able to access housing vouchers will shrink even further. On its own, distributing more vouchers isn’t a meaningful solution, because it still relies on the market to solve a problem the market created. That’s why I believe we need social housing to truly address this issue at scale. But housing vouchers, rental assistance, and rapid rehousing programs are doing something important, and stripping away even those minimal forms of assistance would be… it’s hard to find words to describe how devastating that would be.

DE: What can the average person do to make a difference in their city or neighborhood?

BG: The housing discussion will only change when people connect with the visceral, lived reality of homelessness—that’s why I wrote this book. I’m hoping the stories of the families in it aren’t just dramatic but that they shock people enough to ask, “What do I have to do to prevent this from happening to my neighbors?” Once you connect with the human suffering involved, my hope is that people will get involved at every level. They’ll pay more attention to what’s happening around them and start making connections, like “What happened to the low-income apartment complex that used to be on the corner? Where did all those residents go?” Asking those questions can lead to thinking about what kinds of measures or policies need to be in place to address the power asymmetry between landlords and tenants, between real estate capital and ordinary residents. Once we connect to the reality of what people are dealing with, we can act on it. My hope isn’t in our policymakers or philanthropic organizations, but in tenants themselves coming together and forming tenant unions, just as America’s labor landscape was transformed for the better through the rise of labor unions. As journalists and scholars, we need to pay attention to the tenant organizing already happening  and not ignore it, because it’s absolutely essential.

DE: I would be a bad journalist if I didn’t ask you about the Carter library canceling your book event. How are you dealing with the cancellation? Do you feel like it’s confirmation that you’re on the money here? 

BG: I was totally shocked by the cancellation. We weren’t given a reason, other than being told that the National Archives now has to approve all programs at the Carter library, even those that had already been scheduled. Beyond that, we haven’t been told anything. So I’m left wondering: Did the Carter library get a direct order from Washington to cancel this event, or did the library act preemptively to avoid rocking the boat? Either scenario is deeply disturbing, because if they acted preemptively, it suggests that topics like homelessness, climate change, and civil rights—the focus of the three canceled book events—are now considered off-limits. That said, the outpouring of support has been incredible, and I’ve been really moved by it. I would end by saying that if books about homelessness, civil rights, or climate change are now seen as threatening to this administration, it only underscores how urgent and necessary these conversations are and why they must continue in other venues and other forms.