Working and Homeless: The Invisible Population Growing Every Year

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, the economic pain at home and abroad from this war risks driving millions of Americans to financial breaking point. Not only the massive spike in gas prices and food prices, but this follows years of housing scarcity and employment volatility. In his new book, “There is No Place for Us,” Brian Goldstone follows five working families in Atlanta. Together they tell the story of the changing face of homelessness. And he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss why working hard no longer buys you the American dream.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Brian Goldstone, thanks so much for joining us. Your book is titled, “There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.” You write in there that “the working homeless: the term seems counterintuitive, an oxymoron. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success or at least stability there is something scandalous about the very concept.” What kind of myth does this phrase kind of break apart?

BRIAN GOLDSTONE: Yeah. I think when we hear the term “working homeless” the myth of first of all, the American dream, that if you just work hard enough, if you just clock enough hours, okay, you might not make it rich. You might not be able to buy a mansion, but you’ll at least have your most basic material needs met. The term working homeless says that that myth or that promise has just spectacularly failed. It’s been devastating to see how it’s failed. It also tells us that the line separating housed from unhoused is much more porous than many of us would like to acknowledge. What it says is that, you know many, many people, many workers in this country are one missed paycheck, one lapsed month of childcare, one rent hike away from losing their home. So I think the term working homeless – that’s part of why it is so scandalous – not just oxymoronic or contradictive – but really scandalous, because it says that, that so much of what we take for granted as Americans, this idea that that hard work is the key to success, really no longer holds.

SREENIVASAN: You know, according to HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the US homeless population in 2024 was 771,480 people. That’s the ones who are counted. And that is up from 2023, up 18%. That’s the largest single year increase. What percentage of unhoused people have some kind of employment?

GOLDSTONE: Well, a lot of the data that we have on this comes only on homeless individuals who are counted as officially homeless according to HUD’s definition, so people who are in shelters or on the street. And a study from the University of Chicago together with Yale and other researchers showed that the number of people just in those situations who have formal employment, I believe was about 40%. So already a really striking number of people who are just officially counted. We don’t have data on the invisible homeless in America who are employed, but I can tell you that, you know, these extended stay hotels, these – that families who are doubled up, they are by necessity, they are overwhelmingly part of the labor force.

SREENIVASAN: You chose to focus in on Atlanta and you introduced us to different characters and kind of different plights of their life. And one of the things that was interesting to me when I said, well, Atlanta’s kind of a thriving city, I don’t know why he would pick this. Right. And you actually go out of your way to say that this is a product of thriving cities, not necessarily just failing ones. Explain that.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. Well, first of all, I base the book in Atlanta because so much of the coverage and reporting on the housing and homelessness crisis tends to be centered in kind of the predictable coastal areas like New York City, LA, San Francisco. So it was important to show that this crisis is by no means confined or reducible to those areas – that it truly is a national disaster, a national crisis.

I argue that this is a crisis not of poverty, but a crisis of a very particular kind of prosperity. One that has seen the wealthy get richer and richer and richer. And not just the poor and working class, but vast swaths of the middle class as well, struggling, not only to remain in the neighborhoods they grew up in as our cities revitalize, as they undergo this transformation where what used to be the inner city becomes a kind of playground for those wealthy enough to enjoy all the new green space and amenities. It’s not just that poor and working class, and as I say, middle class people are being priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in and forced to go elsewhere. They’re increasingly being pushed out of housing altogether.

SREENIVASAN: You know, to that point you said that there is not, right now, a single state metropolitan area or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning a local minimum wage can afford a two bedroom apartment. So is this a problem about wages because we have different high minimum wages in different cities, right? Or is this a problem with housing availability?

GOLDSTONE: The single greatest predictor in whether a particular region or city will see a spike in homelessness, the single greatest predictor is the growing chasm between what people are bringing in and their incomes – not just in their wages, but also fixed income like social security or disability payments – on the one hand, and what it costs to have a place to live on the other. The bigger that gap grows, the more homelessness goes up. It’s very, it’s very simple.

It’s also important to say that it’s not just wages, it’s the nature of work itself. Work itself has become ever more volatile and insecure where, you know, you might get a raise where you’re now making $12 an hour instead of $8 an hour, but you’re only given 29 hours a week at your job, because at 30 you would be eligible for basic benefits like sick leave or health insurance. And that’s exactly what Cass, a mother in my book, experiences. She works at the Atlanta Airport, the pride and joy of Atlanta’s economy, and she’s given 29 hours a week. 

And, you know, for many workers today, the greatest fear isn’t that they will lose their job. It’s that their job will never pay enough, never provide enough security and stability to keep them and their and their children housed.

 SREENIVASAN: Most people when they think about homeless, they literally think of this sort of end case where somebody is on the street and they’re begging for money. And just this very notion of what this book is providing to people is that, look, that’s not the case. But give me an idea of some of the people that you talk to who aren’t in the census numbers officially as homeless.

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. You know, I was astonished to find in the course of reporting this book that what we see on the street, you know, the tents, the encampments people asking for money on the street, is really just the tip of the iceberg. So all the five families in my book, and not the hundreds of thousands, but I argue millions of men, women, and children like them, they literally don’t count. They are in hotels and motels. They are in their cars. They are living in the overcrowded apartments of others, doubled up, tripled up in these apartments. All of these people, they’re not just written out of the statistics in the newspaper headlines saying, this is what homelessness, you know, is at this year. They are also, I argue, written out of the very story we tell about homelessness in this country. 

And, you know, one person in the book, Celeste, she experiences this firsthand when she goes to Gateway Center, which is every city in America has its own version of Gateway, which is where people go to sort of receive homeless services, where they try to get assistance into housing. And Celeste, because she and her children are living in an extended stay hotel, paying you know, more than double for this squalid studio sized room than they were paying for the apartment that they were formerly living in. But because her credit score has fallen below a certain threshold, she’s effectively locked out of the formal housing market. She can’t rent a place. And, and she, like scores of other families are forced to pay these exorbitant fees at these hotels. When she goes to get help, she is told that basically she’s not homeless in the right way. She doesn’t qualify for assistance. And she’s told that, you know, if she was on the street or in a shelter, she could get help. She leaves Gateway Center empty handed because she doesn’t fit this, this kind of cruel and arbitrary definition of homelessness.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you also profile a, a different woman, Britt, who takes the path that most of us assume people who are struggling take, which is apply for, you know, section eight housing or vouchers, where you pay a smaller fraction of what the rent is owed. What happened in Britt’s case?

GOLDSTONE: Yeah, Britt, you know, her roots in Atlanta go back five generations. And Britt was actually born in public housing. She was born at a place called East Lake Meadows, which eventually was demolished to make way for new development. She and her mother were displaced, and by the time she was an adult with her own children she realized that the key to remaining housed, the key to having a future in the city of her birth, was really to win a voucher lottery, to win the Section eight voucher lottery. 

And the fact that we even use the word lottery in relation to this essential public good, this essential thing, housing, I think is itself damning. That we’ve allowed such scarcity to proliferate in that way. But she applies for the voucher lottery, she wins, and two years later, when the book opens, she’s finally gotten off the waiting list and is given a voucher. Fast forward after receiving the voucher, she ends up losing it because she can’t find a single landlord who will accept it. The voucher expires even after she gets an extension to get more time for her search. 

And you know, when I first, when I first saw that, I thought, surely this is some kind of bizarre anomaly. But come to find out that the year that Britt received her voucher, about 1,800 families in Atlanta received a housing voucher that year, and more than 1,100 expired before they could be used. Because the fact is, in gentrifying cities like Atlanta, where the rental market is quote unquote hot, landlords have very little financial incentive to accept these vouchers. And again, that is by no means unique to Atlanta. That is a trend we are seeing in cities across the country. And that again proves the argument about this being a crisis, not of poverty, but of prosperity, that it’s a thriving economy that is leading all of these families to experience this kind of precarity.

SREENIVASAN: Give me an idea of what happens in a hot rental market like Atlanta. When prices go up, what happens to the population that had been there? Because now there, I’m assuming, are more developers that want to come in and say, hey, this is a hot property. I should build housing here because I can charge a lot for rent.

GOLDSTONE: There’s a phrase that a case manager in the book, her name is Carla Wells, that she uses to describe what her clients, the family she works with, are experiencing. She calls it the Housing Hunger Games. This is a, a situation where in these hot rental markets like Atlanta’s – like New York, like Seattle, like Nashville, Charlotte, and again, the list just goes on and on – where these families and individuals are really, they’re, they’re forced to compete for this relatively scarce number of, of units, especially ones that are affordable for poor and working class residents. And it’s not just that the rents are unaffordable, it’s also that new forms of predation and exploitation have really flourished. 

So in Atlanta, for instance there is this practice of charging application fees just to apply for an apartment. Now that may not seem very strange. But what we have, this is very typical, where if you go to apply for an apartment in Atlanta you are told that you have to pay not only say, a $90 application fee per adult, but you also have to pay a $200, $250 administrative fee. All of this money is non-refundable, and you have to pay it upfront. It’s all non-refundable, even if you’re rejected for the apartment. 

SREENIVASAN: Is there a disparate impact by race?

GOLDSTONE: Yeah. You know, one of the cliches, many of us like to indulge about homelessness or poverty even, is that it’s colorblind. That it can – and it can happen to anyone. And there is some truth to that. There is some truth to the fact, that just being, just having a low wage job in America today really is homelessness waiting to happen. 

Here in Atlanta – a city that is no longer majority black – a stunning 93% of families who are homeless right now in the city are black. And there’s an entire history behind that statistic, an entire history of, of dispossession, of displacement, of discrimination you know, going back to reconstruction and the failed promise of reconstruct– the failed promise of 40 acres and a mule, and having property. When that didn’t happen, people were forced into a labor economy of low wages, rent and debt. And that just continued on through the history of redlining and restrictive covenants and exclusionary zoning laws… 

SREENIVASAN: You know, there has been a political dimension – I don’t know if it’s always been there, but it certainly has been injected into the conversation recently – the president has called affordability a, you know, a hoax, a Democrat con job. Is there any evidence to say that this is something that has a political nature to it?

GOLDSTONE: The official statistics say about 700,000 people are homeless, and by cobbling together different data sources, I show it’s closer to 4 million, so roughly six times greater than the official figure. When we look at those numbers, we have to remind ourselves that this did not always exist in America. That this is a relatively recent emergence, a relatively recent phenomenon.

Mass homelessness erupted in the 1980s, and it was the result of very specific policy choices. It was the result of the decimation of the social safety net. It was the result of the withdrawal of the government, the federal government from low income housing and housing assistance. And as more and more people were pushed out of their homes onto the street, or as was often the case out of sight in these other spaces, a narrative emerged. The narrative emerged that said that if you are homeless, it’s your own fault. It’s the result of some pathology like addiction or mental illness, or you’re just lazy. You’re not working hard enough. And that narrative was very much part of a concerted effort on the part of the administration at that time to shape public perception, because there was a, I think, justified fear that if people connected the dots between policy and the suffering that people were experiencing, they would be outraged about those policies.And they might vote differently. But homelessness was detached from policy. It became the object of charity at best, or vilification and criminalization at worst.

SREENIVASAN: You know, the Senate recently passed this bipartisan effort. It’s called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. It is supposed to expand rental assistance. It’s supposed to, you know, promise zoning reforms, and curb big investors. Did it go far enough?

GOLDSTONE: It’s important to say, I think that we need everything on the table. This legislation – if it goes through the house, and if President Trump signs this legislation – would be the most significant housing bill in decades, and, and I don’t want to diminish its importance. It is important. We need more supply. This is largely a supply side bill. It cuts a lot of, as you mentioned, a lot of red tape around building more housing. It allows for more manufactured housing. It allows for more innovation. And these things are all important. But, you know, I was, it occurred to me that this is only as significant as it’s being billed as because of our diminished expectations for, you know, what our government, what the federal government will do where housing is concerned.

Right now, there are between four and 7 million affordable housing units that we lack as a country. And this bill will not come close to meeting that scale anytime soon. It won’t do anything to address the immediate needs of the 12.1 million renter households right now who are categorized as severely cost burdened, meaning they’re paying more than 50% of their monthly income on rental alone. It won’t do anything immediately to prevent rents from going higher and higher and higher. It won’t provide direct rental assistance. So I think we need to just be clear about the fact that while this is important bipartisan legislation, the true scale and severity of this crisis demands a much more, not only comprehensive, but visionary and courageous approach. 

SREENIVASAN: Brian Goldstone, thanks so much for your time.

GOLDSTONE: Thank you for having me.