Reposted from Carter Moon – check out his Substack here.

Brian Goldstone published a book this year called There Is No Place for Us, and it already has the likelihood of becoming a modern classic in American investigative reporting. The book follows five Black families in Atlanta as they steadily lose their housing and fall into a cycle of extended stay motels, sleeping in their cars, and on the streets. All of these families are working; they have jobs at the time of their housing emergencies. Some have minor infractions on their leases that get them evicted, others fall behind on rent due to medical emergencies, one woman is “evicted” for failing to pay rent on a house that burned down. All struggle to find new housing in their budgets in a rapidly gentrifying Atlanta. For the most part, they would not be counted in official homeless numbers because they are technically sheltered, rendered invisible to most government statistics. Each family falls through the cracks of our threadbare social safety net in unique ways; the labyrinthine ways we have made it impossible for people in crisis to access the resources they need so that their children can remain safe and sheltered is an abomination.

The book is a remarkable exercise in collaborative reporting. Goldstone’s prose is often literary; he vividly conjures scenes from each family’s life, and he was able to do so by exhaustively interviewing each family for hours on end and then collaborating with his interview subjects to make sure they felt accurately portrayed in his writing. Goldstone went on the podcast Death Panel to talk about this process; it’s a superb example of giving unhoused people agency to tell their stories on their own terms. Parsing through the shame and the trauma of being unhoused, getting past the stigma so that people can reclaim their dignity, is one of the great blessings of the book. There’s such a tendency with unhoused people to speak in terms of statistics and stereotypes; There Is No Place for Us demonstrates how each unhoused person’s story is unique, even if they often share common themes.

The people in this book work for major corporations like State Farm and Enterprise, they work as skilled EKG technicians, and they still cannot sustain themselves on the wages provided to them. And no amount of Doordash and selling plasma can dig them out of the financial hole once they lose their permanent housing. Goldstone paints a crystal clear picture of how the dual evils of capitalist bosses who refuse to pay living wages are conjoined with corporate landlords who hoard housing and extract maximum profits.

Really what elevates the book is how Goldstone can trace his subjects’ individual struggles and link them to systematic disinvestment by our society that directly causes their misery. A woman’s struggle to find an apartment that will accept her Section 8 voucher is an opportunity to explore how that system has been engineered to allow landlords to skirt around accepting the vouchers and therefore make more money off of “safer” tenants. One family’s missed rent payments due to illness spirals into a near eviction in court, and even though they pay in full everything that they owe, they’re later evicted for being a single day late on their rent. This brutally fast eviction is dictated by a sophisticated algorithm designed by the private equity fund that somehow can’t find the resources to remove cockroaches from the apartment. Another woman’s struggle to access SNAP benefits is an opportunity for Goldstone to discuss Clinton’s monstrous welfare reform and the total gutting of access to cash assistance for families that most need it. The inability to find an apartment for a family of four with two incomes becomes an opportunity to explain how Atlanta went from being the first city to build public housing in America to becoming the first to tear down its public housing projects and build for-profit housing in its place. Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this process “organized state abandonment”; she gave narrative to it very strikingly in her book Golden Gulag, and There Is No Place for Us Here follows in that tradition.

The book reaches a crescendo when all our families are confronted with the worst realities of COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd uprisings. Here are some of the nation’s most vulnerable people laying bare what white supremacy and sharp inequality really look like in a moment of profound crisis for the entire social safety net. Here were people already clinging on by their fingernails pushed over the cliff by the abrupt closure of their jobs and the relief provided by their children being able to access meals at school. Georgia did not have an eviction moratorium in the early months of the pandemic, and people without bank accounts struggled to receive their stimulus checks. It’s a sharp reckoning of just how intensely people at the very bottom of the economic ladder got crushed by the pandemic. The patchwork of government spending that was doled out to assist people in 2020 regularly fails to be enough for the families in the book to hold on to their housing in motels, and all of them struggle even more to get into housing. It reminded me of how here in LA at the start of the pandemic, we had a massive demand for the city to place unhoused people in vacated hotels, the thinking being that if people had a stable place to live for months without harassment, they could finally get placed into permanent housing. This didn’t happen, and as a result visible homelessness in the city exploded, leading to a reactionary backlash of anger from wealthy Angelenos that we’re still grappling with to this day.

We have to start being honest that the Great Recession never ended for significant portions of the country. Some of the scenes depicted in There Is No Place for Us could be straight out of The Grapes of Wrath. The conditions of the extended stay motels in the book are functionally no different than the tenement housing of the 19th century. The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, a wage that cannot afford rent on an average apartment in any major city in the US. We deny people immediate cash assistance in a crisis; Hell, we deny people a universal basic income, and then we’re shocked when they fall into homelessness. We no longer live in a society that sustains social reproduction, that is to say one where wages can meet all the most immediate needs families need to be able to stay alive.

I think about this phenomenal 2018 article published in Current Affairs by Malaika Jabali often. She lays out the case that a significant reason Democrats lost in 2016 traces back to the abandonment of Black people in communities all around the country, stating: “In Wisconsin, the decline in black voter turnout between 2012 and 2016 was 86,830 votes. Hillary Clinton lost the state by a mere 22,748 votes. If Clinton won over more of the black Democrats who voted in 2012 in just three states—Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan—she would have won the election.” The article flips the usual downtrodden-white-coal-miner Rust Belt narrative that’s defined the Trump administration on its head, suggesting that it’s not really the reactionary working class to blame for Trump’s rise so much as the Black people left behind by the recession, mass incarceration, and police brutality. She makes the convincing case that not intervening to help the people most marginalized in this country directly leads to worse outcomes for Democrats. Organized state abandonment ultimately means some people stop wanting to participate in the process of perpetuating the state, which in turn is part of how we reached the fascist crisis we’re in.

In Malcolm Harris’ new book What’s Left, he uses the term “social metabolism” to describe the political, economic, and cultural realities we are collectively willing to accept as policy. He talks about the need to completely upend and reorganize our global society to survive the climate crisis; we have to transform people’s social metabolism to no longer tolerate all the ill effects of burning fossil fuels in exchange for diminishing returns for the majority of the planet. I kept thinking about the concept of social metabolism as I was reading There Is No Place for Us. It truly is an obscenity that we’ve been steadily conditioned to tolerate the exploitation and abuse of working people in this country to the point where families can no longer reproduce themselves. There is no way to read this book and not conclude that significant portions of the American working class are being categorically denied their ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. It’s impossible not to determine that we have to uproot the political economy that allows such conditions to continue to worsen.

What those solutions look like is difficult to conclude. I do think Los Angeles has made some initial policy steps that are in the right direction; we passed a measure a couple years ago that taxes the sale of mansions in order to fund eviction defense programs, directly using the wealth of the rich to protect poor people from the ravages of landlord cruelty. There are coalitions like Our Future LA and Keep LA Housed that are striving towards passing an array of policies to keep working families from falling into homelessness. There’s a grassroots effort to have new housing built in LA be part of community land trusts, meaning the land isn’t part of the speculative real estate market and controlled by the people living in the community. The LA Tenants Union has been fighting to keep families in their homes for over a decade. But simultaneously, we have Gavin Newsom announcing that he wants to mobilize California Highway Patrol to aggressively clear homeless encampments, to the applause of Mayor Karen Bass. Ultimately, until we get serious about decommodifying a significant portion of California’s housing supply, until we build an aggressive amount of social and public housing, we’re going to see even more working families trapped in the cycles of precarity and homelessness as depicted in There Is No Place for US.