Brian Lee-Mounger Hendershot is the managing editor for Western City magazine; he can be reached at bhendershot@calcities.org.

Being poor in America is expensive. And for the millions of Americans that journalist Brian Goldstone calls the “working homeless,” it’s downright exploitative.

Goldstone’s new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, follows five Black families in Atlanta pushed into homelessness by minor setbacks, predatory corporate practices, and a byzantine set of rules that determine who gets help. Each family becomes stuck in a vicious cycle of low wages, precarious living arrangements, and inadequate tenant protections, even as Atlanta experiences massive economic growth.

We sat down with Goldstone to talk about his critically acclaimed book and what city officials can learn from it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Hendershot: Most people don’t think of Atlanta when they think of the housing crisis. But you argue that it’s more representative of what housing and homelessness looks like outside of major cities. How so?

Brian Goldstone: Part of why I based the book in Atlanta is because of how unique Atlanta is. It was the first city to build public housing, and during the ‘90s, it became the first city to demolish all of its public housing in favor of handing over the housing needs of its most vulnerable residents to the private market.

But a big reason is how not special it is. Atlanta is another example of how the revitalization of urban space has perversely and paradoxically fueled massive insecurity among the very people who are making that growth possible. People are being pushed out of housing altogether. The title of the book comes from a mother realizing that the city of her birth is no longer a place where she can afford to keep her children housed.

It’s not even just the cities that are unaffordable. It’s the surrounding suburbs and even rural areas. Increasingly, there truly is no place for a growing number of people across the country.

One of the things that you lay out in your book is this contradiction between the data that the economy is doing well and the fact that millions of people are experiencing great economic indignity and precarity.

As I investigated the ways that the words “working” and “homeless” have come together in this country, I realized that it’s something baked into the economy itself. Large corporations are getting away with not only not paying their employees a living wage, but making the work itself more volatile, more precarious, with workers never knowing how many hours they’ll get.

Even the indices we use to come to statements like “The economy is doing well” often don’t tell us how ordinary people are faring. How many of those jobs allow people to live on what they earn? The painful truth is that it’s less of a contradiction than just the system functioning the way it’s been designed. That sounds bleak, but in fact, it points to the possibility of different choices: If systems are designed, they can be redesigned.

You argue that the current way of responding to homelessness, especially at the national level, is flawed. What do you hope elected officials will change about their approach?

We need to stop blaming people for being homeless. Since the ‘80s, that has been the dominant way that we as a society have shielded ourselves from interrogating how policies and systems have pushed people into homelessness. This is not a Greek tragedy where someone is just struck by this condition. It is the predictable outcome of deliberate policy and systemic failure.

The tents are just the tip of the iceberg. We need to confront the reality that there’s this entire world that doesn’t make it into the official homeless census. The families in this book comprise a much bigger population of homeless Americans who are under the surface. Nearly 90% of them are working — not just one job, but often multiple jobs. We need to rethink our ideas about homelessness and work alike.

In California, there’s a huge focus on unsheltered homelessness or visible homelessness. Do you feel like that’s the right focus?

It’s understandable that we talk about those people because of how conspicuous and miserable living on the streets is. But it’s as urgent for us to focus on those who have been actively rendered invisible by literally not counting them during the census that’s conducted every year. People can be in their car one day, a motel room the next, and then a tent the day after when the money runs out. Homelessness is fluid, not fixed — and the street is usually the last resort.

The solution seems simple: Build more housing. But you argue that building more market- rate housing itself will not solve the problem.

One of the most shocking things I discovered was how, at every single turn in these families’ journeys, there were entire business models profiting off their precarity and exacerbating their insecurity — from private equity giants making hundreds of millions of dollars off extended stay hotels and rental housing, to cosigning companies making money off people’s low credit scores.

The reason we are in this crisis now is not simply because of a mismatch between supply and demand. The power asymmetry that exists between landlords and tenants is a big part of why we’re here. Fundamentally, the private market will never be incentivized to provide safe, dignified, affordable housing for those who are in the most desperate need of it.

This isn’t about hundreds or even thousands of people, but tens of millions of low-income workers who rent their homes. That’s why I think that social housing, which is public housing done right, is the only solution at scale that will truly and meaningfully address this crisis.

One of the questions that your book asks is, “Who are our cities for?” Toward the end of the book, Britt ends up in an affordable housing complex that’s in the middle of a revitalization project. Eventually, it gets knocked down, and she has nowhere else to go.

I think that even the question itself is already a kind of intervention. There was a mindset among many city leaders that investment capital needed to be drawn to the city again. That was fine in and of itself, but it became a zero-sum game. Millions of people have become casualties of their own cities’ success. When Britt and her neighbors were evicted en masse from Gladstone, no one in the community protested. They were not considered part of the “community” because they weren’t homeowners and weren’t middle class.

I’ve been very encouraged by housing justice initiatives and tenant organizers who have insisted that even unhoused people are tenants. They’re making a conceptual link between tenants who are housed and tenants who are unhoused. Both depend on a landlord for a place to live, and increasingly, cannot afford a place to live.

In California, there is a lot of focus on zoning reform at the local and state levels. We also have stronger tenant rights than places like Georgia. What are some other steps that you think city officials should take when it comes to the housing and homelessness crisis?

There are two big buckets that solutions fall into. The first is getting people into homes they don’t yet have, getting people out of homelessness, and zoning reform — the ability to build more housing. Capping security deposits, outlawing predatory application fees, and reforming tenant screening practices are low-hanging fruit that could make it easier to get people into homes. But social housing is the thing that will scale up.

The other big bucket, which is often neglected, is preventing people from becoming homeless to begin with. That can take the form of everything from ensuring a right-to-counsel in eviction cases to making it easier to get direct cash assistance to families who are at immediate risk of losing their housing. We also need to have caseworkers whose sole job is to meet people while they are in their homes to prevent them from losing housing and to enact and enforce just-cause eviction protections.

How can we get out of this crisis?

We can deceive ourselves into thinking that if we can simply push people out of sight who are struggling, we will have addressed this problem. But the reality is that the major variable in why certain areas of this country have skyrocketing homelessness and others don’t is whether poor and working-class people have access to housing they can afford. It’s something that we must take seriously, regardless of how politically untenable it may feel right now to get some of these policies enacted.

I would also just add that we need to hold our political leaders accountable. They need to live up to their own rhetoric and promises. Ultimately, ending this crisis will require not only political courage from our leaders but moral clarity from all of us: a willingness to live up to the values we say define us as a society.