Brian Goldstone, Ph.D.
Journalist
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ph.D.
Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
BONUS BOOK GIVEAWAY! FAN is giving away copies of There Is No Place for Us to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
In a gripping and deeply reported book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone, Ph.D. plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.
Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless, omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.
Goldstone is a journalist and anthropologist, whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America.
Goldstone will be in conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ph.D., the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.
This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
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