The man with the scraggly beard holding a WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign. The woman in tattered clothes muttering to herself as she pushes a supermarket cart of her belongings across the street. People covered by strips of cardboard sleeping under freeway overpasses.
These are the images that often come to mind when someone evokes the term “homeless.” They are the familiar characters that many of us rush by every day. We may think we’re not like them — we work hard, don’t abuse drugs or alcohol and make smarter personal choices.
But the traditional story about those experiencing homelessness is a myth, according to Brian Goldstone, author of the acclaimed recent book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.” Goldstone says the people on the streets are only the tip of the iceberg, because most of the nation’s homeless live in a “shadow realm” invisible to most Americans. They work at Amazon warehouses, in the meat section of their local supermarket, watch kids at daycare centers and drive for DoorDash. But they don’t have stable places to live.
He says most people don’t fall into homelessness. They are pushed into it by the same challenges that many housed people face: affordability. Surging housing prices nationwide have outpaced income gains, he says. The social safety net is being shredded. Workers and renters have little bargaining power. There is not a single state, city or county in the US where a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or the prevailing local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom home at fair market rent.
Homelessness is not just people living on the streets and in shelters, Goldstone says. It’s a “spectrum of insecurity” that includes people living in their cars or in filthy, extended-stay motels, or sleeping on the floors of relatives’ overcrowded apartments. The official statistics don’t count these people as homeless, but Goldstone says a conservative estimate of those deprived of housing in the US is “well over four million” people.
“Once you factor in the hidden population, the data suggests that families with children likely make up the majority of people experiencing homelessness,” Goldstone tells CNN. “The tents, the people in the subways asking for money — that’s the most extreme edge. When you widen the lens and adjust the focus, we can no longer convince ourselves that homelessness is an affliction that besets a certain type of person.”
In his book, Goldstone trains his lens on five working-class families in Atlanta. They are led by resilient people with strong work ethics. Yet they can’t avoid being sucked into what one nonprofit case manager calls the “housing hunger games.” They are placed on endless housing waiting lists, preyed upon by scammers and greedy landlords and forced to stay in roach-infested budget motels that function almost as homeless shelters.
They are people like “Celeste” (Goldstone uses pseudonyms to protect the family’s identities), a buoyant and devout single mom who was caring for three children when Goldstone met her. Celeste worked up to three jobs at a time and launched a food business from her home. But a staggering series of misfortunes – an arsonist destroyed her rental house; the private equity firm that owned the house still demanded two months’ rent and kept her security deposit; she was diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer – forced her into tenuous housing situations.
What’s happened to Celeste in Atlanta is quietly happening all across America, Goldstone writes. She lives in a rapidly gentrifying city where affordable housing is being replaced by luxury apartments and expensive homes.
“In these places, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen,” Goldstone writes. “The lightest setback or unanticipated expense — minor car trouble, disrupted childcare, a brief illness — can be disastrous.”
Goldstone spent nearly six years reporting and writing his book, which was praised by former President Barack Obama and named one of the 10 Best Books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic. One reviewer said Goldstone “has the clear eye and deft touch of a master storyteller.”
Goldstone met with CNN in Atlanta, where he lives with his wife and their two children. We rode together in his gray 2022 Subaru Outback along a busy road lined with liquor stores, storefront churches and plasma donation centers and pulled into the parking lot of a grimy budget motel. One of the families Goldstone profiled lived for a time at the motel, which they said was plagued by roaches, rodents and leaky ceilings.
“This place is actually more expensive than the (gated) apartment complex right across the road,” he says. “Because once you are forced to go to a place like this, the owners and the management, they know that people don’t have any other options, so the rates keep going higher and higher.”
This interview with Goldstone was edited for clarity and brevity.
There are people who say I do everything right — I work hard and pay my bills. Why should I care about people like Celeste and others who are homeless?
What is so striking about the term, “the working homeless,” is the ways it explodes myths about the American dream: The idea that if you just work hard enough, if you just clock enough hours, you … might not make it rich, but you’ll at least have a modicum of stability. You’ll at least be able to meet your most basic material needs. The term “working homeless” immediately explodes that myth. What it says is the line separating the housed from the unhoused has become devastatingly porous in this country. The line between us and them is much thinner than we would like to believe.
And yet when I read your book, I found myself asking about some of the personal choices made by the women you profiled. Why would a woman struggling with finding housing have four kids out of wedlock? Why not be on birth control? How do you explain that behavior to someone who has not been in their world?
I hesitate to generalize about single parents who have multiple children out of wedlock or aren’t married, because everyone’s situation is particular. You can have a single parent who was married for 20 years and is now a single parent because they’re divorced.
To take one example: Kara in the book. She has four children with three different men, and she hates herself for that. She hates herself for craving intimacy and going into the arms of men thinking, maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time I can believe him when he says he will stick around. Kara, as I recount in the book, was forced by her parents to undergo an abortion when she was a teenager. She’s lived with that. She came close to terminating pregnancies again more recently but decided, no, I’m going to receive this a gift from God even if it’s not a gift I asked for.
All the families you profile in your book are Black. Some White Americans may conclude that if something is a Black problem, it’s not their problem. You had chances to include a poor White family, but you didn’t. Did you unintentionally reinforce any stereotypes about homelessness and poverty being a Black issue?
I really struggled with that. Going into this project, it was very much my hope to present a diversity of backgrounds — not just urban, but a working-class White family living in a more suburban or rural area.
What I was eventually confronted with was the fact — with the book being based here in Atlanta and because I live in Atlanta — I wanted to immerse myself in this reporting in a total way. And that would only be possible (to do that) where I live with my own family … to find families who were willing to let me into their lives in this way (and) that were proximate to where I live.
Although Atlanta is no longer a majority Black city, 93% of families experiencing homelessness in Atlanta are Black. Every Saturday, when I was showing up to food pantry lines, every person in line was Black. When I was going to eviction court, the courtroom was almost entirely Black. To deny that reality would be an imposition. It would be me wanting to avoid that impression because Atlanta has held itself up as a Black Mecca.
One man in the book says that the biggest reason for homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. That sounds so simple. Why is that not commonly understood?
Housing has been left out of the story we’ve told about homelessness now for decades. At the end of the 1980s, CBS News and The New York Times conducted this poll asking New Yorkers at random, what causes homelessness. People said psychological problems, alcoholism, drug addiction and a refusal to work. Not a single person mentioned housing. I wonder how different that poll would look today.
What do you think? Have perceptions about what causes homelessness changed?
They have changed a bit, with all sorts of things from health care to wages to affordability becoming politicized. More people are making that connection, but there’s still something intentionally out of touch about how we engage with homelessness and engage with these issues in general.
The absence of housing from that narrative was not accidental. It was a result of a very concerted effort, beginning with the eruption of mass homelessness in the early 1980s. The Reagan Administration very intentionally said we need to ensure that the American public explains the growing ranks of people on the streets of our cities as a result of … (those people’s) own choices rather than connecting it back to the decimation of the safety net.
How did homelessness become so acute in this country, and how did that relate to President Reagan?
There are several points in the social safety net that came under attack in the early 1980s with the Reagan Administration. The federal government got out of the housing business – through cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development – and left people’s housing needs to be met by what another Reagan official called the genius of the private market.
But that same logic was applied to other things like weakening labor protections, with factories shutting down and the country beginning to see the demise of labor unions. The Reagan Administration, much like we see today, just chipped away at labor protections in general. Work itself became less secure. The myth of the welfare queen emerged around this time, and it was used to propel a public disdain for those who were dependent on public assistance. Housing assistance was a huge piece of that. There was a huge reduction of amount of money that was invested in low-income housing. They really defunded public housing and rental assistance.
Didn’t President Clinton and the Democratic Party also play a part in the eruption of homelessness, with Clinton’s pledge to end welfare as we know it?
It had a very direct influence on the lives of the families who I’m writing about in the sense that, a generation ago, they would have been eligible for welfare benefits that could have gotten them through these times of crisis, or an emergency that popped up in their life. It was the manifestation of a bipartisan contempt for not just poor people in this country, but specifically poor women in this country. Poor mothers in this country.
Did those women tend to be Black?
Absolutely.
How do you explain the resilience of someone like Celeste, the woman you profile in the book? She faced one cruel misfortune after another, yet she worked her tail off, taking on multiple jobs and starting a business.
I think Celeste, and … others in the book, have an almost supernatural ability to believe that things will get better. They believe that they are right on the verge of turning a corner, and that if they just continue to work and work some more, things will finally open to them. There’s an element of faith in that. They would say that God promises, as Kara says in the book, to never abandon His people.
Some of the most crushing moments for me during the reporting were times when I could see on their faces the realization that maybe that wasn’t true after all. Maybe she was doomed, and her children doomed, to be held captive to this fate forever.
Homeless is viewed as an intractable problem. But aren’t there solutions?
The solutions to this crisis are not unattainable. They’re not even complicated. They require only that we place human dignity above investor profits, and people’s stability above speculation. What’s been missing is the political will to act at the scale the crisis demands.
The response has to work on two fronts: getting people into housing they don’t yet have, and keeping people in the homes they already have. That means making a major public investment in permanently affordable housing and removing the barriers that prevent it from being built. But it also means stopping homelessness before it starts — by strengthening tenant protections, guaranteeing the right to counsel in eviction court, enacting just-cause eviction laws, banning predatory rental fees and screening practices, and providing direct assistance to families on the brink.
Ultimately, though, addressing this preventable catastrophe requires a paradigm shift in how we think about housing itself. In the United States we’ve come to treat housing primarily as a commodity, a vehicle for profit and wealth accumulation. But a safe, stable place to live is not a luxury item. It’s a fundamental human necessity. And until we begin to treat housing as something closer to an essential public good — in other words, as a basic human right — we will keep reproducing the very conditions that create homelessness in the first place.
Have any of the families you profile escaped their precarious housing situation?
Each of the five families has managed to secure an apartment. But the underlying insecurity hasn’t disappeared. Even with additional support along the way, the families remain acutely aware that the boundary between stability and homelessness is incredibly thin. They remain one medical emergency, one rent hike, one missed paycheck away from being plunged back into the same desperate circumstances. And they could easily find themselves right back where they started.
John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”