There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
by Brian Goldstone
Summary
Brian Goldstone's subject is the working homeless: people with jobs, often full time jobs, who cannot keep a roof over their families. He follows five Atlanta families, four single mothers and a married couple, through a city that is booming and gentrifying at the same time. Maurice and Natalia arrive from Washington, DC after being priced out there. Kara mops floors at a public hospital and dreams of her own cleaning business. Britt wins a housing voucher and finds it is not the end of her troubles. Michelle is studying to become a social worker. Celeste keeps her warehouse job while being treated for ovarian cancer. One by one each of them loses their housing, and the book follows them down through a relative's crowded apartment, squalid and expensive extended stay hotels, a Salvation Army shelter, a car, and the chairs of an all night laundromat, from which the children still leave for school in the morning.
Goldstone's argument is that these families are not falling into homelessness but being pushed: by rents rising faster than wages, by application fees and credit screens and waiting lists, by a real estate industry he names as the main culprit, and by an official definition of homelessness that leaves people in motels and cars out of the count. They are being made homeless, he writes, by a thriving economy rather than a failing one. The reporting is the book's strength. Goldstone, a journalist with a doctorate in anthropology, spent years alongside his subjects, uses pseudonyms, and paid no one for access, and he writes the results as close third person narrative, so the book reads like a novel with footnotes. Publishers Weekly called it a gripping, high stakes account of the housing emergency; the New York Times Book Review compared it to Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family; Kirkus set it beside Jane Jacobs.
It suits readers of Evicted and of Poverty, by America, anyone working in housing or social services, and anyone who wants to understand why a city can have record growth and families sleeping in cars at the same time. At roughly 450 pages it is long, and it is hard going in places, but the people in it carry you through.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave There Is No Place for Us the 2026 Prize for General Nonfiction on May 4, 2026. The finalists were Haley Cohen Gilliland's A Flower Traveled in My Blood, about the Argentine grandmothers who searched for children stolen under the dictatorship, and Kevin Sack's Mother Emanuel, a history of the Charleston church. Crown had published the book in March 2025, and it had already won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and been a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Bernstein Award before the Pulitzer.
The New York Times and the Atlantic both placed it among the ten best books of 2025, NPR, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal Constitution named it a best book of the year, and Barack Obama included it in his annual list of favorites. The book belongs to the line of immersive reporting on American poverty that runs through LeBlanc and Desmond, and its phrase for its subject, the working homeless, gives a name to a group the official count leaves out. A paperback followed in March 2026.