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Episode Summary
This week: journalist Brian Goldstone joins us to talk about his powerful new book, There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America. It’s an eye-opening, deeply reported portrait of families who work full-time yet are unhoused, navigating a system that often punishes them for being poor.
It’s a conversation that will challenge how you see housing, inequality, and what it means to live on the edge in one of the richest countries in the world.
“We have allowed housing in America to basically become a luxury, to become a commodity that can just be hoarded by the few at the expense of the many.” — Brian Goldstone
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Key Words: Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place For Us, working homeless, housing crisis, homelessness in America, racial housing inequality, housing policy reform, affordable housing crisis, tenant rights,
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Brian Goldstone
Journalist Brian Goldstone tells us about his searing nonfiction book There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America.
Goldstone follows five families in Atlanta who work full-time jobs yet face chronic housing instability—often living in extended-stay motels, losing Section 8 housing, or being denied shelter entirely.
He explains how homelessness has become a widespread, invisible crisis in the U.S.—with nearly 4 million people unhoused, the majority of them working families. He also explores the failures of programs like Section 8, the profiteering of private equity in extended-stay motels, and how booming urban development displaces the very people who power those economies. By focusing on Black working families in Atlanta, Goldstone unpacks the racialized legacy of housing injustice and the growing commodification of shelter in America.
Through powerful storytelling and rigorous reporting, he shows how homelessness in the U.S. is no longer just a crisis of poverty—but a crisis of prosperity. In this conversation, he confronts systemic housing injustice and calls for a fundamental paradigm shift in how we understand the human right to a home.
“The housing hunger games has become the status quo.”
Key Topics
- The working homeless and the hidden face of housing insecurity
- Extended-stay motels as de facto homeless shelters
- Section 8 vouchers and the “housing hunger games”
- Racialized displacement and gentrification in Atlanta
- Private equity and profit-driven homelessness
- Barriers to accessing shelters and services
- Housing as a human right, not a commodity
- The policy failures behind the housing crisis
Read more from Brian Goldstone about the working homeless crisis