Any of us could be a few missteps or misfortunes away from the kind of stories told in There Is No Place for Us, the most remarkable book I’ve read in the first half of this year. And that ought to be enough to keep us all awake, because those stories are a series of revolving nightmares – close enough to our own realities that they ought to kick home hard.
The subtitle for the book, by journalist Brian Goldstone, is Working and Homeless in America, which is accurate enough but, like the title, needs some definition and clarification. That in fact is part of what the book does.
In the epilogue, Goldstone talks about joining in a Point in Time study, a periodic effort to count the numbers of homeless people in America, accomplished by enumerating people living on the street or other public or uninhabited places, plus designated homeless shelters. The real definition of homeless, he (persuasively) argues, ought to be expanded far beyond that, to include the many people living in extended stay motels, or in their cars, or couch surfing, or otherwise living in a place without stability, and often without decent conditions. The numbers of those people nationally is many times the number found in tents on the street.
The book follows the lives, over about a five year time period (up to about 2022) of five families in Atlanta, Georgia, describing in detail what they’re going through as they try to find an affordable place to live. Here’s one of the twists: All of them (or at least the head of household in each case, and sometimes others in the family as well) work full time. With one exception, they are not substance abusers (the significant exception is an alcoholic, driven to it in part because of the housing nightmare). Nor are they (again, with one debatable exception) contending with mental issues. These are people struggling with a web of bad options and no clear way out.
The more recurring theme is the lack of affordable housing – or put another way, the astounding high cost of rent and real estate in recent years. These people are working for minimum wage or not much more, but they are consistently working, and they cannot find a place to live that fits anywhere close to their budget. That is a situation many of us should be able to identify with.
A case from my personal observation: A house near mine, which was occupied for years by a family of four with stable income – until the father fell ill and missed two months of pay. He endeavored to make good on the back house payments, was able to do so, but his lender rejected his entreaties and kicked the family out. The house later fell into the hands a new owner who bought it cheap and over a few years trashed it and made it a hazard. After that it was flipped and rehabbed, and finally sold to a non-resident who fashioned it into a vacation rental, which it still is. Better than its immediate prior use, but not nearly as good as having a family of neighbors. In my town and elsewhere, the neighbors are going away.
On the rental side, Goldstone writes the nation now has a deficit of 7.3 million low-income apartments – a vastly higher deficit than in decades earlier. “Giant private equity firms, institutional investors and corporate landlords have been buying up properties en masse and then jacking up rents beyond the rate of inflation, ‘re-tenanting’ buildings (replacing poorer tenants with wealthier ones), and neglecting basic maintenance because they know that if one household moves out, another will quickly take its place.”
In Atlanta, he writes, a few mega-firms have swept up tens of thousands of residences, raising rates and making them all but unaffordable to most people – in fact, nationally, only about 15% of people can afford the standard basic apartment rates. This sounds like a broken business model, but it yields massive income at least in the short time, as Goldstone explains.
He also points out that in a one-year period in 2021-22, “investors bought one out of every three homes for sale in Atlanta.” How is an average-level wage earner going to compete with that?
The book is not an economic or political or legal study, though. It is a careful, granular look at how these sickly trends are playing out in the real lives of our fellow citizens.
That alone should be enough to give us pause. And if not, remember: However secure you may think you are, you’re not all that far away from joining their ranks. May you have better luck than these people have had.
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