Hey gang,

The last book I taught this semester was Brian Goldstone’s recent one and when I got done teaching it I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I wrote up some thoughts. Then that night I saw the news that it had won a Pulitzer, so I wrote a few more thoughts. In short: it’s good. It’s sad. What it talks about is deeply fucking outrageous and Goldstone conveys that well.

In long:

The Structural Violence and Human Costs of Labor and Housing Markets

 Brian Goldstone’s Pulitzer Prize winning book There Is No Place For Us is a very well written people-first account of several families forced into homelessness by the combination of low waged work and high prices for housing. These realities are facilitated and often intensified by policies that help landlords and employers have even more power and that tie the hands of tenants and employees. The result is excruciating to read about (I repeatedly had to take breaks while reading the book because the conditions it depicts are so intensely sad and often infuriating), let alone to actually live through. The effect is something like a horror movie - or worse, true crime show - in that we watch people we have come to care about being relentlessly stalked by a violence they vaguely sense is coming but can’t precisely predict, let alone stop.

The book focuses on people living in Atlanta from the late 2010s until the recent past. The stories don’t so much conclude as they stop, in a way that underscores that nothing Goldstone depicted has really been resolved. The people he wrote about are still frantically trying to swim through stormy water, and as the book stresses they are representative of literal millions of people. I want to highlight two things the book does especially skillfully here: Goldstone never reduces the people he wrote about, such as Michelle and her children DJ, Danielle, and Skye, to types, but he also continues to stress that while real individual people their experiences are examples of similar hardships confronting many, many others. That is to say, he tells us the story of real people in concrete, humanizing detail, while also telling us the story of the fundamentally hostile social context that afflicts them. In addition, Goldstone resists three important temptations, that of blaming people’s situations on their own choices, that of whitewashing genuine mistakes and poor choices they do sometimes make, and that of providing narrative resolution whether in the form of depicting redemption or destruction. Instead, we watch people dangling on a hook and when we close the book, we know that none of that has ended. It’s powerful affecting, sometimes overpoweringly so, especially when delving into the ways people sometimes second guess or blame themselves and the ways poverty afflicts children in particular.

In terms of time spent or word count the book focuses on the small picture of individuals and families, fostering a work of intense emotional heft. That said, Goldstone takes pains to provide policy and historical context to help draw out the bigger sociological picture that produces the dreadful human-level small pictures throughout the book. We learn, for example, about a Reagan-era policy shift away from direct government provision of housing toward a market-based system via housing vouchers.

Over and over again Goldstone points out that policies which treat housing as a commodity like any other set up a series of massive dominoes which eventually fall on people to devastating effect. He places particular emphasis on a perverse and for many people counter intuitive reality, namely that when cities undergo what is often treated in positive terms like revitalization, urban renewal, being ‘hot’, and so on, housing prices rise rapidly, leading to many people being pushed out of their homes. As the book’s title states, quoting a woman Goldstone focuses on named Britt, many people find that “there is no place for us” in the supposed success stories of up-and-coming cities.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, fostering market-facilitated urban ‘revitalization’ is at the exact same time a success for landlords, developers, and politicians and a devasting blow to actual residents of the cities being supposedly revitalized. The book’s stress on what I’ve called the small picture, in turn, prevents these policy and economic matters from becoming abstract and boring. In a sense, Goldstone shows us the fear, conflict, exposure to terrible conditions, and the resulting ill health and harms to relationships that landlords’ and developers’ balance sheets rest upon and actively produce.

The book concludes with a more aerial view epilogue, hammering the social and policy picture. Among the more startling points is that homelessness in the United States is massively undercounted (intentionally, Goldstone stresses, in order to both avoid political fallout and facilitate reduced public expenditure on social services), with more reliable estimates of homeless people suggesting that there are likely more than four million homeless people in the United States at present, which means more than one percent of Americans.

If you, like me, live in a city, are an at least moderately empathetic person, and are of modest means economically then a lot of Goldstone’s story is unsurprising. This was the consensus of the sixty or so students of mine who read the book when I assigned it. (The book reads and teaches well for an intro-level college class, by the way.) That’s not to diminish the book’s contribution, but to say that what the book does is take something that many of us encounter in passing, so to speak, and to focus on it directly and at length so as to illuminate it. This is very valuable, and the result is that reading the book underlines that things we knew were bad are even worse than we realized and that changing them is deeply morally urgent.

Several things especially jumped out at me reading the book. One is Goldstone’s persistent emphasis on structural factors. Homelessness is not an especially complicated problem in a sense. In short, the problem is high return housing markets and low return labor markets. That is to say, housing prices rise, making markets become very profitable for the people who own housing and make money off of providing it, which also means they become quite expensive to the people who need to need shelter. At the same time, wages - the cost of labor power - do not rise, or at least not commensurate with the rising cost of living, and so people can’t afford what they need. While not intellectually complicated, the problem is deeply rooted and cannot really be solved in a stable way as long as both housing and labor power are commodities.

Another is Goldstone’s stress - infrequent in terms of times and words but appearing at points of particular emphasis in the text - on the need for collective action. Markets and politicians who prioritize the health of markets (measured in profits, not human flourishing) won’t meet the need for good housing. That need has to be fought for, and specifically by organizations of tenants and their allies in similarly membership-based and justice-focused organizations like the labor movement. It would have been easy, and in some ways a more narratively satisfying read, for Goldstone to implicitly treat enlightened policymakers and the wonks who have their ear as the real protagonist for change, but he does not do so. Real change for poor people can only come from poor people banding together to fight for themselves and each other.

Especially upsetting in the book is the recurring presence of predatory actors. The book shows over and over again that, as a popular expression goes, being poor is very expensive. The flip side of that is that there is great wealth to made from poverty, by the further exploitation of poor people’s understandable desperation. We see again and again poor tenants subjected to scams in the form of fraud conducted online and by phone, as well as incredibly expensive extended stay hotels and rooming houses, where poor people paying on a nightly or weekly basis end up paying more per month for a single room than more well to do people pay for apartments or even full houses.

Lastly, and closely related, the book shows that the same processes that produce the violence that is the brutalization of poor people also produce brutes indifferent to that violence. In somewhat technical terms, Karl Marx’s lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels named the death dealing effects of ongoing structural violence “social murder,” and in reading the book we do get a sense that the people it follows are being killed by small - and not always small - daily doses of injurious conditions. The Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno termed the indifference to other people that typifies capitalism “social coldness.” Goldstone shows us the two working in tandem in the contemporary U.S. at the intersection of low paying labor markets and high-priced housing markets.

Goldstone emphasizes three main forms of cold indifference to suffering. One is that of the owners and managers (and the police and security guards they rely on) of companies profiting from exploiting tenants. This increases over the book’s narrative arc, with growing time spent depicting functionaries, such as Lisa and Camille, managers at an extended stay hotel, who seem able to shrug off the desperation of the residents they exploit and the harms that result from undermaintained housing - moldy, vermin infested, and so on - and from evicting tenants unable to pay rent. Another is that of the people in the patchwork of institutions supposed to help people - well-meaning caseworkers who are themselves overwhelmed and often become defensive in justifying the scarce and low-quality resources they offer to (and gatekeep against) poor people. The third is the set of myths that help defend policies that create and sustain homelessness, victim blaming myths that treat homelessness as caused by the homeless. Goldstone especially highlights narratives of untreated mental health issues and addiction. This resonated with me: as a kid in the 80s, my sense was that ‘homeless person’, ‘mentally ill person’, and ‘person addict to alcohol or other drugs’ were basically synonyms. Goldstone stresses that these stories serve to naturalize and thus depoliticize homelessness, rhetorically rendering it inevitable, rather than something relatively historically new and a deep injustice. As the book makes clear, it’s no surprise that a person facing the intense suffering that comes from deprivation and the relentless struggle to try to keep from drowning might experience mental illness or turn to drugs for a degree of solace, but these are effects of homelessness, not causes.

I would like to close by noting two possible mistaken ways Goldstone’s book could be taken up, mistakes which would serve to make the book more palatable to the dominant culture and politics. This is especially relevant since the book has won the Pulitzer, an event the both signals and helps enact some degree of openness of parts of the dominant culture to hearing the book’s general themes. One reaction, naively optimistic, goes ‘we should thank Brian Goldstone for speaking truth to power, now that this problem has been so rigorously documented and powerfully dramatized, surely policy change to help people will come!’ The other, a resignation born of outrage, goes ‘in an era where we have all watched Israel commit a genocide in Gaza streamed in real time, with continuing to fund that brutality being one of the rare points of bipartisan consensus in the United States, Goldstone’s depiction of the slower violence of poverty will have no effect.’ I sympathize with both responses. Each is understandable intellectually and as way to try to cope with the terrible distress of living in such a relentlessly violent society. The real answer, though, as Goldstone is right to stress, lies with building organized opposition in the form of militant protest and combative tenant unions willing and able to significantly disrupt the normal business as usual of this society. Nothing good will be done by the well to do and their politicians unless poor people force them to act. That will be an uphill battle, to be sure (one of many sobering sections in the book focuses on how an anti-eviction campaign is slowly worn down by the brute pressures of having to survive under poverty). That is an uncomfortable reality because so much work and so incredibly high stakes because, as the book documents, there is so much suffering involved, but as the book stresses collective action to demand decent housing is both possible and the only real way forward for the people currently being ground between the gears of housing and labor markets.