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12 GROUNDCOVER NEWS INSP JANUARY 23, 2026 Working, homeless and hidden: a conversation with Brian Goldstone ANNEMARIE CUCCIA Street Sense Media Thousands of Americans have fulltime jobs and still can’t pay rent. They live in shelters, with their families, and in extended stay hotels that profit from their instability. Many are not included in the count of people experiencing homelessness because they do not fit the official definition. But they are a significant and revealing part of America’s homelessness crisis, argues journalist Brian Goldstone in his new book, "There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America." Goldstone follows five Atlanta families, detailing their journeys through housing instability. Through intimate portraits, he argues homelessness is not a personal failing or the result of joblessness, but of high housing prices, widespread gentrification, and an unwillingness to face the reality of the “hidden homeless.” He told Street Sense more. Street Sense: Your book focuses on a form of homelessness that we often don't see in our daily lives. Tell us about how you came to see this hidden homelessness and why you decided to write a book about it. Brian Goldstone: I came to this project through my wife. She was working at a community health center in Atlanta. She started telling me about this trend where one patient after another was working at an Amazon warehouse, driving for Uber and Lyft, or working as daycare workers or home health aides. When they finished work, they weren’t going home. They were going to a shelter, if there were any shelter beds available. They were crowding into apartments with others. They were sleeping in their cars with their kids, or increasingly, they were going to these extended stay hotels. I was shocked. I had never heard about this hidden universe of homelessness she was describing, where it was largely not on the street. That was the initial spark of curiosity for me. I was stunned to discover, as I then began to report, not only that the patients my wife was seeing were not some bizarre anomaly, but that they were representative of a staggering trend across the country. Anywhere I went, it was the same: people who were working not just one job, but sometimes multiple jobs, working and working and working some more, and it wasn’t enough to secure this most basic necessity. To pour salt on the wound, they were also invisible. Not just invisible in the sense that they didn't necessarily want people to know that they were experiencing homelessness, but they were rendered invisible. They were actively written out of the story that we as a nation have told ourselves about homelessness, about who becomes homeless and why. They were also locked out of crucial housing assistance because the way that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines “literally homeless” is either those who are in a shelter or on the street. They didn’t fit that definition. So they were triply invisible, and I began to see that this was not accidental. This was not just some oversight; it was a kind of engineered neglect. When you narrow the lens on homelessness so that it’s only getting a tiny little slice of the total population, you can tell yourself this comforting narrative about homelessness, that it’s about addiction, mental health issues. But when you widen the lens, then homelessness begins to look very different. Work also begins to look very different. America begins to look very different. You follow five families in the book. Can you walk us through the story of one of them, so that we can understand some of both the structural issues and the personal issues that these people are facing? I think Celeste captures a key argument in the book, which is that many of us will sometimes say, “Oh, so and so fell into homelessness,” and a big argument in the book is that people are not falling into homelessness; they’re being pushed. For Celeste, it begins in a really traumatic way when she’s driving home from her warehouse job, and her neighbor calls and says that her rental home is on fire. By the time she gets there, her house has been completely destroyed, and the only possessions that she and her kids have are a few loads of dirty laundry that she threw in the car that morning. She thought that she would have this relatively quick housing search. But the ground had shifted under her feet in the time she was renting, and neighborhoods in Atlanta that were once affordable had become unaffordable. So it turned into this protracted nightmare of a housing search, and she was sleeping with her kids in her car. And those nights were awful for her, because not only was she having to sleep in this Walmart parking lot and get her kids ready for school in the bathroom, but she was also terrified that the police would knock on her window, because in Georgia, over a quarter of kids put into the foster system are the direct result of what is categorized as inadequate housing. Finally, finally, she found a landlord. She applied. She prayed with the leasing agent. Then a few days later, she got a call. The leasing agent was no longer friendly. They were like, “Why didn’t you tell me about the eviction on your record?” And she’s like, “What are you talking about? There is no eviction.” Come to find out, when her house burned down, the landlord’s representative said to break the lease, you will have to pay not only the current month’s rent, but an additional month, and you will lose your security deposit. Celeste hung up in disgust. She thought that was the end of it. They filed an eviction against her, which she didn’t find out about until that call with the leasing agent. When Celeste drove to that house months later, in the mailbox, she found an eviction notice. She drove to the courthouse and found out that in her absence, a default judgment had been handed down, and her credit score had been tanked. And at that point, Celeste did what countless other families in her situation are doing, especially in places where there are no family shelters. She went to an extended stay hotel where she ended up in this tiny little room, paying more than double what she had been paying for her two-bedroom rental home, and she thus became imprisoned in what people call the hotel trap. All the families end up at some point staying in these extended stay hotels, where they’re paying far more than they would if they were paying monthly rent somewhere. Talk a little bit about that industry. Before I started this, I heard “extended stay hotel” and I would imagine places where business travelers might stay. The kind of extended stay hotels we’re talking about are at the very, very bottom end of the hotel spectrum. These are what I’ve come to refer to as extremely profitable homeless shelters with slum conditions. These hotels, they’re not cheap. They’re double, sometimes triple, what an apartment would cost. But they are filled with families, with working families, who have been pushed out of the formal housing market because they belong to this credit underclass from which it’s virtually impossible to climb out. I was stunned to discover that the same Wall Street investors, the same private equity firms that are buying up growing swaths of America’s rental housing, are also buying up the very places where people go once they lose their housing. It’s sort of flipping the James Baldwin line on its head about how, in America, it’s extremely expensive to be poor. Their stories demonstrate the flip side, which is how extremely lucrative all this insecurity has become for some. Homelessness has become big business. Can you talk about the process of getting to know the families? A lot of people have these ideas about what it means for someone to be homeless. How did you ensure that the portrayals of the people you were talking to were honest, without playing into those stereotypes? My goal was to immerse myself as much as humanly possible in the dayto-day lives of the people I was writing about, instead of approaching them like, “I’m doing a story about homelessness, and I’m wondering if I can talk to you.” It was this very long process. Consent was really important, because they had never worked with a journalist before. I checked in with see WORKING page 16 

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