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- [00:00]
Tracy Thomas
Hey listeners, I'm here to tell you about an exciting event that's happening on Sunday, May 4. It is called Stack the Shelves and it is a special pop up bookshop that the Stacks is hosting dedicated to supporting individuals and families impacted by the recent Los Angeles wildfires. We're going to have books, author signings, a kid's corner, food, music, lawn games, special guests and more. And so now here's the part where I turn to you, the amazing Stacks community and ask you for help in order to make this day a safe, smashing success. We need volunteers local to Los Angeles. We need your donations which will be tax deductible thanks to our partners at LA Room and Board, a fantastic nonprofit. 100 of your donations will go directly to families, including gift cards to Octavia's Bookshelf so they can continue to build their libraries. And we need your help spreading the word. Head to the snackspodcast.com shelves to get all the details. Again, that is the stacks podcast.com shelves.
- [01:05]
Brian Goldstone
The chasm between what people are earning and what it costs to have a place to live is by no means unique to New York and LA and San Francisco. There is no city or county in the entire United States of America where someone earning the local minimum wage can afford a modest two bedroom apartment. And I argue that the sprawling tent encampments that we see driving around LA or San Francisco are only the tip of the iceberg of this far deeper catastrophe.
- [01:48]
Tracy Thomas
Welcome to the Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host Tracy Thomas and today I am thrilled to welcome to the podcast Brian Goldstone. Brian is a journalist and the author of a brand new book that came out last month called There Is no Place for Us Working and Homeless in America. The book explores the world of the working homeless people who are employed full time but still unable to afford permanent housing by following five families in Atlanta. Today, Brian and I talk about how he found and approached the families to cover in this book, how America got to a place where housing became so unaffordable and what he thinks can be done about it. Don't forget our book club pick for April is Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton. Tiana Clark will be back on Wednesday, April 30th to discuss the book with us, so make sure you read along and tune in. Quick reminder, everything we talk about on each episode of the Stacks can be found in the link in the show Notes if you're listening to the show, if you love this show, if you want to support the work of this show, head to patreon.com thestax and join our bookish community, also known as the Stacks Pack. Or check out my newsletter@tracythomas.substack.com where I give you some exciting perks and a lot of hot takes. Joining these communities is the perfect way to support the work of the Stacks. And make sure you get this podcast in your ear every single Wednesday. Okay, y'all, that does it for us today. Now it's time for my conversation with Brian Goldstone. Okay, everybody, welcome to the Stacks. Brian Goldstone, author of There Is no Place for Us Working and Homeless in America. Brian, welcome to the Stacks.
- [03:25]
Brian Goldstone
Hi, Tracy. It's so good to be with you.
- [03:27]
Tracy Thomas
I'm so happy to have you. I'm so excited. I. I think when I reached out to your team to have them send me this book at the end of last year, I said, please send this book. I think it was built in a lab specifically for me. It is. I'll let you tell the people what it's about, but for those of you who love the kind of nonfiction that I love, narrative embedded with people, deep dive into systems that are fucked up. There is no Place for Us is is our book. So, Brian, in about 30 seconds or so, will you tell people about. About this book?
- [04:04]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah. So the book follows five families in Atlanta who are part of a growing but largely hidden crisis. The dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across the country. And these are people with full time jobs, Uber drivers, janitors, warehouse workers whose paychecks simply are not enough to secure stable housing for themselves and their kids. And so, by following these families journeys over a period of about two years. In the book, it shows how this toxic mix of skyrocketing rents, low wages, a lack of tenant rights, along with forces like gentrification and racialized displacement, are just driving more and more people into homelessness in America.
- [04:55]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah, I mean, I think. I think the word harrowing gets used too much to describe books. Like, I think they throw it on anything. Not this one. This was. That was the only word I could think of as I was reading it. It's such an intense experience for the reader, which only leads me to believe it's an even more intense experience for the people who are living it. I'm curious, when did you become familiar with this group of people, this working homeless and. And what was it about, you know, specifically working homeless as opposed to, I guess, like broadly unemployed homeless, that was inspiring enough for you to want to write about it?
- [05:38]
Brian Goldstone
So the Genesis of the book was in about. I think in 2018. My wife is a nurse practitioner, and she was working at a community health center in Atlanta, where we live. And she was just struck by the number of patients she was seeing at this community health center. People who didn't have insurance. That's why they were there, but who were working at Walmart or, you know, driving for doordash or Lyft or working at McDonald's or any number of other jobs. And at the end of their shifts, they were going not to an apartment, but sleeping in their car or even in a homeless shelter, in one case on the street. And she was stunned by, like, this trend that she was seeing. And when she told me about it, I was pretty stunned. I had been reporting on, you know, things, usually really difficult things in different parts of the world, but this was happening in my own city, my own backyard. And so that was kind of the initial question of, like, is this some bizarre anomaly or is this pervasive? And if so, like, how pervasive and why? So I ended up writing a magazine piece for the New Republic. I recorded that over the course of about seven months. So it was pretty. It was pretty deep into this one family's experience. And it was in the course of recording that story that, on the one hand, like, I just realized there were so much more to say and investigate and so many systems interlocking to make this crisis, this phenomenon possible. And I also realized that I was just, like, I was meeting all these people in the course of reporting that. Not just caseworkers and church volunteers and, you know, social workers and housing activists, but also, like, individuals and families who were also experiencing homelessness while working in the labor force. And so it kind of organically, as organically as I think a book can emerge, it's sort of emerged in that way, out of. Out of that reporting.
- [07:54]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah. For people who are listening to this, you know, and as I was reading the book, I was confronting a lot of my own notions of homelessness and who is homeless and what it means to be homeless. And I'm. I'm wondering if you can. This is in the book, for sure, but I'm wondering if you can explain a little bit to the audience, like, who is considered homeless and who is counted as homeless. Because those are sort of two things, it turns out.
- [08:23]
Brian Goldstone
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, a huge impetus for the book, for writing the book, was my own astonishment at how there's this kind of, like, received or prevailing narrative about what homelessness is, what causes it, who is homeless. And then the reality that I was confronting in my. In my research and reporting and. Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to believe or to remember that mass homelessness in America is like, a relatively recent thing. It's a. It emerged in the 1980s, as many of America's maladies did under the Reagan administration.
- [09:08]
Tracy Thomas
Shout out to Ronald Reagan.
- [09:10]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, he always manages to make an appearance in these conversations.
- [09:14]
Tracy Thomas
You have a whole chunk on him in this book, like, towards the end, like, where you sort of go into detail about what you're going to talk about right now. And I had just read that Reagan biography, and I was like, this isn't in the biography. Weirdly, I wonder why not.
- [09:28]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Reagan administration made a concerted attempt as more and more people around the country were being forced out of their homes, to shape the public perception and sort of story that America told about this emerging crisis. And that basically, I mean, at first they tried gaslighting the country and saying it's not actually happening. Like, one of Reagan's deputies actually said, there are no people on the street. And people like everyone else had to just look outside their windows and see that was a lie. But so once, like, denying the reality became impossible, they began to kind of shape the perception. And. And it boiled down to, like, making people believe that homelessness was the product of mental illness, untreated mental illness and addiction, alcoholism, these kind of personal pathologies, these individual pathologies. And they actually, like, as we're seeing today under the current administration, researchers who wanted to study the effects of, say, like, racist housing policy on this growing population of homeless Americans were not funded. There was even an article that's. I think it was in Time magazine, and it was Reagan versus the Social Sciences. So, like, there was this very deliberate effort to make the general public believe that this emergency that was, like, was not a product of deliberate policy choices, that it was like these individual failings. And you know what that neglected was the fact that even at that time, the fastest growing segment of the total homeless population were children under the age of six. So, like, from the very beginning, the rhetoric and mythology did not match the reality. And. But most Americans bought into the myth and the sensationalist media accounts. And by the end of the 80s, a New York Times poll asked people, like, what causes homelessness? And the number one answer was, like, psychological problems? And then after that, it was laziness and, like, a refusal to work.
- [11:44]
Tracy Thomas
So what wasn't on the list? Because that's what I thought was really Interesting. What was not the answer that people.
- [11:50]
Brian Goldstone
Gave, what not a single person answered with was housing. So like astonishingly, housing from the very beginning of home, of the emergence of mass homelessness in America over the last four decades, like housing strangely was like missing from that conversation.
- [12:09]
Tracy Thomas
I mean, and that is clearly a win for Reagan. Right. That he was able to like to be the person who started mass homelessness and then not even have it connected to housing or like housing crises at all. I think that's like for a win.
- [12:27]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah. Or to like his administration's definition of the social safety net, housing being a really important part of that stripping away of funding for public housing rental assistance. So like, and to get to another part of the question you were originally asking, like about the kind of invisibility of this, um, at that time, you know, it wasn't just shaping the perception. When you can narrow the, the kind of characteristics of those experiencing homelessness down to this, you know, down to alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, you can exclude everyone who doesn't fit into that. And over the years like a definition, an actual definition of homelessness materialized where. And they call it literal homelessness, that this definition determines who gets counted every year during the federal homeless census. And so like all of the families I write about in this book are not counted in the census that is given to us every year as the public. You know, like here's how many people are homeless in America and it's because.
- [13:36]
Tracy Thomas
The people who are literal homeless have to either be living on the street or in a shelter.
- [13:43]
Brian Goldstone
That's right.
- [13:44]
Tracy Thomas
And so the people in your book are, because they're working and they have some income, they are able to pay for these extended stay hotels. So a lot of people end up there, other people end up staying in an extra living room or on a couch or on a floor and family members houses. And so those kinds of, those people who find those kinds of housing are not considered homeless in the eyes of the homelessness census, even though they do not have their own place to live. And also rooming houses are the other kind of third.
- [14:22]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah.
- [14:22]
Tracy Thomas
Place that people end up in the book.
- [14:25]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, totally. I mean there's like this whole array of temporary situations that people cycle in and out of. You know, a lot of even the people I followed in the book, they are in their car at one moment they're trying to get into a shelter, the next there are no shelter beds available. Or in one case like the shelter says, yeah, you can come, but your 14 year old son has to go to a men's shelter by himself because we don't allow boys over the age of 13 in our shelter. So, like, so they don't go to the shelter and they end up spending the entirety of their weekly and monthly income at this squalid extended stay hotel. But it's. They're always very temporary and. And yeah, they're all kind of sites or spaces of homelessness. But only a very, very narrow sliver of those experiencing homelessness in America are counted. Like, the families I write about, like, literally don't count. They're literally written out of the story.
- [15:29]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah. And there's another thing you cite about counting in schools. Like, that some school districts or schools count differently. They count kids who live in extended stays and that the number of, like, children, just the children, far exceeds the total number of homeless people according to this census, which I thought was just like, oh, okay, well, since this data is not matching, it was like 300,000 kids and then like 10. 10,000 homeless people.
- [15:59]
Brian Goldstone
Absolutely, absolutely. And. And the federal Department of Education does count families living in hotels or living temporarily with others in these kind of precarious situations. They, they do count them as homeless. But the Department of Education does not control and determine the allocation of resources for homeless assistance. Right, right. So that. That's hud. That's like. So you have two federal agencies, HUD on the one hand and the Department of Education on the other. But one of them determines who gets help. And the other one, I mean, it's important that the Department of Education data exists because it shows how misleading, like, HUD's numbers are. But, you know, as we're speaking right now, the Department of Education is in the process of being defunded. Defunded and dismantled. And it's so crucial that that not happen, because if it does, we'll lose even this kind of minimal data that exists on children and students who are homeless in America.
- [17:06]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah. I want to shift a little and talk about how you came to putting together this specific book that we have here. I know you live in Atlanta. Is that the reason you picked Atlanta. Is Atlanta representative of something as a whole for the United States? Is it uni in certain ways? Like why Atlanta?
- [17:26]
Brian Goldstone
Part of the answer to why Atlanta? Is that so much of the reporting on America's housing crisis and homelessness crisis tends to center on, like, a predictable set of, like, coastal cities, LA, San Francisco, NY. And I think a lot of people living in the rest of the country know that this crisis is way more pervasive and, yeah, extensive. Like in where they live, but it's just not in the coverage. So like, the first reason to focus it in Atlanta is just that I think Atlanta actually is representative in many ways of what any number of other cities in America. Austin, Nashville, Charlotte, Phoenix, San Jose. There's a whole range of cities that aren't typically in that discussion that are, I would argue, trending in the direction of what LA is seeing or what New York is seeing with these astronomical rates of unsheltered homelessness. But Atlanta is also unique in a lot of ways. Like Atlanta for over a hundred years has been kind of a laboratory for housing policy in America. So like, Atlanta was the first city in the nation to build public housing during the New Deal kind of progressive era. And Atlanta was then, during the 1990s and early 2000s, the first city in America to destroy all of its public housing intentionally in favor of kind of leaving low income tenants, letting them fend for themselves on, on the private market and, and giving, you know, subsidizing, basically landlords to take care of the housing needs of the most vulnerable, vulnerable people in the city. So Atlanta has also kind of been in the vanguard of, of housing policy. I think most importantly though, it is representative. Like the trends that I'm documenting are not in any way unique to Atlanta.
- [19:32]
Tracy Thomas
You mentioned that some of those other cities are sort of trending, trending to have more homelessness or like ramping up this, this group of people. What, what are the predictors of that? What are you looking at to see that a city is headed in that direction or a city is maybe like headed in a more housing direction? Is that even a thing that's happening right now? Like, is there any positive cities doing good things?
- [19:59]
Brian Goldstone
Maybe we can return to the question of hope because we will return to that.
- [20:03]
Tracy Thomas
Because I have, I have some questions about that at the end.
- [20:05]
Brian Goldstone
We will.
- [20:06]
Tracy Thomas
Let's stick with the dark and dreary. I'll let you kind of make us feel a little better maybe at the end. But yeah, what are the predictors? I know you talk about rent gap as something in the book.
- [20:15]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, I, I mean the chasm between what people are earning and what it costs to have a place to live is, is by no means unique to New York and LA and San Francisco. So like the rents in New York are notoriously wild, but the wages also are relatively higher in those cities or area in that city or in LA where the minimum wage is higher. In Atlanta, the minimum wage is still 7, 25, which is the federal minimum wage. And as the National Low Income Housing Coalition points out in a report, there is no city or county in the entire United States of America where someone earning the local minimum wage, so, which again is like sometimes higher than the federal minimum wage where they can afford a modest two bedroom apartment. So like that phenomenon is, it's a nationwide phenomenon. This is not specific to a handful of cities. And I argue that the sprawling in tent encampments that we see driving around LA or San Francisco are only the tip of the iceberg. That it's only the most kind of conspicuous edge of this, of this far deeper catastrophe. And it's everything below the water surface, so to speak, that like that's happening everywhere in the country, that that's what we don't see it because they're in these hotels and they are doubled or tripled up with other people. But, but that is what's under the water surface. And the more like, the more it comes out, the more it becomes conspicuous, the more people become aware of it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- [22:13]
Tracy Thomas
Right? Right. How did you pick the families you were going to follow? How did you start with one and kind of build from there? Did you start with 20 and whittle your way down? Just like how does a book like, like how do you decide who's, who's worth your time and focus?
- [22:34]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, I mean it was a very, it was a very hard and complicated process because I mean it was less a question I think of like who is worthy of my time and focus and who, who is going to allow me into their lives in such a way that like the depth and texture of what it's like to be deprived of this most basic need is felt by readers. I knew that would require a kind of engagement that is not, is not easy to come by. And, and so for some of the families, like I met them, I kind of immersed myself at this extended stay hotel called Efficiency Lodge. And I was just there a lot. I was just hanging out there a lot. I met dozens of families there and there were a few who both kind of gravitated toward me or I gravitated toward them. And some of them ended up being in the book. They, they ended up being kind of prominent in the book. There were others who I tracked with for weeks or even months. And then it just became clear for different reasons that, that they weren't going to be featured as prominently even if they're stories there. There were definitely cases where like people's stories were really dramatic and on paper like their story Exemplified a trend or made a certain argument that seemed important, but like, there's so much more that is necessary to do this kind of reporting over, you know, where you're not just dropping in and getting, getting the story, but it's, it's a long process of, of cultivating a relationship in both directions. So even though the, the superficial aspects were important, like we ended up just either tacitly or explicitly saying like, yeah, we're gonna stay in each other's lives, but, but it's not gonna be in the book.
- [24:46]
Tracy Thomas
Can you give an example of like, without like getting anyone in trouble or anything of like, what, what would cause you to, to decide against someone being a good fit or them to decide you're a good fit or whatever?
- [25:00]
Brian Goldstone
I think the most common, because it happened several times. I mean, I, it's kind of mind blowing to look back at these, you know, past five, six years and realize like, how many people, I have hours and hours and hours of recordings with them. Hours and hours, like going around with them to food pantries or to various places. And, and they make no appearance at all in the book. And, and in most of those situations it was because their, what they were going through was so intense and so acute that they simply did not have space in their life.
- [25:42]
Tracy Thomas
I see.
- [25:43]
Brian Goldstone
For anything else. And as much as I would like to believe that I was just kind of there in this kind of unobtrusive way, I know that wasn't the case. And like I was asking a zillion questions. And what did you mean by that? And, and they just didn't have space for that in their life. Right. And that's absolutely understandable.
- [26:07]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah, yeah. And then this might be a stupid question. I do believe there are such thing as stupid questions, but this is really just a nosy question. You, Brian, you walk up to the Efficiency Lodge and you go, hi, I'm Brian Goldstone, I'm going to write a book about you people. Anyone want to talk to me? Like, what is the initial? You don't know anybody? What is it, a handshake? Is it, I'm a journalist, Is it, hey, want to talk? Like, it just feels so hard.
- [26:42]
Brian Goldstone
So with Efficiency Lodge, I showed up with Little Caesars. Um, that was my pizza.
- [26:49]
Tracy Thomas
Pizza.
- [26:50]
Brian Goldstone
That was my entree into. I came with pizzas. I, I actually live not that far from this road, Candler Road, where there's, I think, you know, over 10 extended stay hotels just lining this road. Um, I lived not too far from there. And one night, this is before the Pandemic. I got a call from a woman who runs, like, a homeless outreach at, at her church in southwest Atlanta. And she is, she was one of many people who I had kind of like, cultivated a relationship with. You know, like, what are you seeing out there? If you know of people who might be willing to share their stories, let me know. This was right at, like, the very, very early stages of reporting the book. And she called me one night and said, there's a family who just ended up at this hotel. I was supposed to bring them food because they don't have any money, they don't have any food. Would you mind bringing them something? I'm not able to get over there. And this was at like 11 o'clock one night. And I was like, okay, sure. And I stopped at Little Caesars and got, I don't know, like, four pizzas because it was a mom and her, her three children. And she, her name is Michelle. She ends up being a central person in the book. I. I called Michelle when I parked outside and, like, in the parking lot, and she ran down to meet me and she said, I didn't want you to come up to the room because it's, like, too scary here at night. And so that was my first encounter with this hotel. And after I, I think it was actually the next day, she, she said, can you bring me, I, I need these, like, personal items and toothpaste. Would you mind? Is there any way you could bring that stuff tomorrow? And so I did, and it was daytime and I met the manager of the hotel. I just introduced myself and. And then I went back the next day and the next day. And I don't know, it just kind of happened that way.
- [28:58]
Tracy Thomas
Got it. So you didn't just, like, roll up, just like, hello, like you had, like, a reason to go there that first day?
- [29:05]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:06]
Tracy Thomas
Okay. This brings me to the question that you listen to. You've listened to the show. You've probably heard me ask this question of journalists who do this kind of work. It's, it's the, you know, question of ethics. It's the ethical question about following people. In this case, I mean, in your acknowledgments or in your notes at the end, you mentioned that you did buy meals for people throughout the process of, like, the research and the gathering information. And then it wasn't until after you had finished that, that you sort of had a more financial relationship with these, with the people that you followed. So, like, while you were reporting, you know, you might take them out for coffee, you might grab a bite to eat, but you weren't paying bills or anything like that. And then. And then after you. You said that you were more financially involved. I'm wondering about, like, not even the ethics of it, like, for a journalist, but, like, what does it feel like for you, Brian, to be standing next to a woman and her three kids and being like, all I can do is buy you a coffee when you could conceivably do more? Like, how. How is that. How does that work? Because I. I just. It feels like it would be hard.
- [30:21]
Brian Goldstone
It's incredibly hard. Any reporter, researcher, journalist who is writing about people who are struggling in this way, in very basic, material ways, and they're not kept up at night by this question, I think is really suspect. And so it's very, very hard. I did try to have ground rules going into this that I. That I adhere to. I'm not. I can't give you, like, large sums of money. If you're facing the possibility of being evicted from this hotel room, I. I can't give you $300, $400 to, you know, to prevent that from happening. One way that this tension that I navigated, this tension was there's a woman in the book, La Pink, who. I think when readers encounter her in the book, there's kind of a sigh of relief. It's like, she's a really powerful presence. And whatever readers feel when they encounter her in the narrative, like, I certainly felt in real life, because she was someone who I was able to sort of, like, be with her as I was with many of these families. And when situations arose that were more, I don't know, like, when there was a very obvious, pointed need, she was often the one who was able to draw on the resources that she had and, like, help them out in that way. And. And she was also able to exercise, like, the judgment of, what do I do in this moment? It's often hard to know, do you give the money? How much money do you give? Et cetera. So she was the one sort of struggling with some of that. It's not to say that I was, like, offloading all of this. All of this tension and all of this responsibility onto her, but it definitely helped to have someone who was just there with me most of the time and was, like, willing to intervene actively. But having said that, yeah, it's. I think Andrea Elliott, when she was on the show, she spoke really eloquently about the arbitrariness of a lot of the rules that we come in with. And yeah, the idea that you can take someone out to eat, but you can't give them money for someone who's hungry, like, taking them out to eat is just as transactional. So. Yeah. And, and, and often it's not even money or food. It's like knowledge. It's, it's knowing how to navigate systems. Things that.
- [33:13]
Tracy Thomas
Right.
- [33:13]
Brian Goldstone
As a, as a journalist or a scholar or someone who has spent time understanding how these systems work, that knowledge becomes very valuable or it could be very valuable to, to people. And knowing how much, like, as someone is trying to get assistance to avoid being on the street with their kids, how much of that information do you give them as someone who has like, acquired it? That was.
- [33:43]
Tracy Thomas
And how much can you, how much could you give of that information?
- [33:48]
Brian Goldstone
I mostly erred on the side of like, sharing what I knew. Um, and there were a couple of situations. Those families I was alluding to earlier in our conversation, who I ended up not including in the book, who were like, I was instrumental in connecting them with an organization or a, a case manager who was able to get them the help they needed, and they were able to find a degree of stability as a result. And I just realized that my action had become so decisive. That couldn't. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, and that was a conscious decision on my part. Like, I. Yeah, I mean, that was pretty clear cut. And there really weren't that many moments with those who. And I ended up following in the book. Who. Where. Where that came up is explicitly.
- [34:44]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. Hey, all I wanted to tell you about Village well. It is a woman owned, community focused bookstore and cafe located in the heart of downtown Culver City. If you live close to Culver city, you should 1000% stop by, but if you're not in the Los Angeles area, you can buy books directly from their website, shop.village well.com. you can also support their podcast, Village well Podcast, which interviews authors and fellow readers about the books that capture their imagination. There's a fantastic episode with friend of this pod, Jason De Leon, that definitely check out. Village well Podcast releases new episodes every Wednesday. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, you won't want to miss it. Hey, friends, it's me, Tracy. And if you love what you hear on today's episode of the Stacks, or any episode of the Stacks, and you want to dive deeper into the world of books with me, I've got two great ways for you to do that. The Stacks pack on Patreon and my newsletter Unstacked over on Substack Patreon is where the Stacks community really shines. We've got a Discord monthly book club meetups and our year long mega reading challenge to help you push your reading goals. If you want to be part of this incredible community and I cannot overstate that, head to patreon.com the stacks now over on my substack, I'm sharing my thoughts twice a week from what I'm reading to what's happening in the book world in pop culture and sports. And on Substack you're going to find my mini reviews, rankings, reading goals and plenty of opinions. Whether you want to subscribe for free or unlock even more with a paid subscription, you can do that by going to Tracy Thomas substack.com and if you join Patreon or Substack you are going to get a monthly bonus episode. If you want to support this black woman run independent podcast and treat yourself to some extra bookish bonus content, go to patreon.com thestacks or Tracy Thomas substack.com to join. I would love to have you.
- [36:50]
C
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- [37:22]
Tracy Thomas
Okay, we're back. As far as like the rules that you put in place for yourself, were they like very specific, like no more than a hundred dollars? Or was it like how, I guess how did you know what was too much and to help? And how did you communicate that those rules to the families? If they were asking for help, did.
- [37:48]
Brian Goldstone
They ask for help with everyone who I ended up writing about and even those who I didn't, who I just spent a lot of time with thinking I might write about them. I was constantly trying to remind them that like why I was there, that I was there to ultimately write a book about their experience, it felt important to do that for reasons of consent that just because they told me at the very beginning of this process, you know, two years ago that they were okay with me tracking with them. Like I wanted them to remember that even though in their eyes I think I was often just like their support system. Like, I was the guy who they called at one in the morning to just unload their feelings. And so I was constantly reminding them. And part of that was also saying, like, here is why I am tracking with you, because people need to see what it's like to go through what you're going through. And they felt that, too. Nobody in the book didn't want their story told or didn't feel very strongly like, I want the world to know what this feels like. And so it was kind of just together. It wasn't this authoritarian kind of rule, like, I won't do this for you. Right. I'm not going to help you. It was like, how can we make this as real as possible? We can't. We're not acting here. We're not, like, doing some kind of performance where I'm going to be manipulating things behind the scenes, and then I'm going to pretend that's not the case. I just have to be showing what it's like. And I think they got that in an intuitive way. If I could just speak to that a little more. Like the question of helping them or intervening. I think it ultimately the hardest thing for me was not do I give $100 right now, or do I spend the money on this food right now? Or whatever. The hardest thing for me in this whole process was I really tried to cultivate from the very beginning what I would describe as kind of like this radical availability to them, that this comes out of my training as an anthropologist, my background as an ethnic.
- [40:21]
Tracy Thomas
I was going to ask about this because, as you know, we had Jason De Leon on the podcast, and in his book, he's radically available as well.
- [40:30]
Brian Goldstone
Yes. Yeah. And. And a lot of what ethnography is about is you go in with as few boundaries as you possibly can have. Not necessarily ethical boundaries, but boundaries in terms of, like, when the reporting begins and when it ends. And ideally, you don't know necessarily what the story is until you discover it, and you don't have an argument until you discover it. And so I needed to let the people I was writing about know that I was just there as much as humanly possible for whatever they needed in terms of, like, you need a ride somewhere, you need to talk to someone in the middle of the night, you need me to take you to the er, as I did in one case, like, what? Whatever it is, I'm. I'm going to be there. And mostly that was emotional because the very nature of being without housing in this way has a lot to do with not having much of a network to rely on. Right. And I was able to provide some of that support for them just emotionally, like, I'm going to walk with you through this. And there came a point where I had to start writing and I had to step away from the sort of day to day just being with. And had to put words on the page or else this never would have gotten to. And I think that was the hardest thing was having to navigate. Do I take this call? Do I drop everything and run to the courthouse? Do I? And ethically, morally, that's what troubled me the most. Because I think even. Even though I was constantly reminding them of my role and what I was there for, they didn't see me as a journalist. I think it's shocking to them, even now with the book coming out that, like, wait, you're a writer? Because they see me as just the guy who they were talking to and the friend and the. So that was the hardest thing was like, how to have. How to create that kind of boundary in order to, like, put this thing out into the world.
- [42:41]
Tracy Thomas
At what point, Brian, like, did you. Did you decide, okay, I ethnographed enough, like, it's time to get to the writing. How do you. How do you make that call? Is that just like deadline stuff or did you come to a point where you felt, okay, I think I have enough to write a book.
- [43:04]
Brian Goldstone
I am extremely fortunate in having an absolutely incredible editor. And, you know, most of.
- [43:12]
Tracy Thomas
Who was your editor?
- [43:13]
Brian Goldstone
Her name's Amanda Cook, and she was with me through this whole process. You know, most of the reporting for the book took place during the pandemic. There were a lot of uncertainties when. When the pandemic struck. Like, how is this going to work logistically? Yeah. And a lot of what's in the book wasn't there originally. You know, some people write a book proposal and they know kind of what is going to be in the book. In my case, I had kind of a skeletal frame conceptually, argumentatively, you know, for the book about the working homeless and about the ways that gentrification and kind of the revitalization of our cities is fueling a lot of this incident security. But in terms of the actual people and the stories, that wasn't there when I began. When I began this process. So my editor, Amanda, we were just constantly on the phone. We talked, I think, like, at least once a month during the reporting process. And the question of, when do I have enough? When. When is it time to start writing that to her credit was really left open ended and it was just like, we're going to know when we know. And I think there were definitely moments, like some of the more climactic moments in the book, like the mass eviction of a dozen families at gunpoint from Efficiency Lodge from this extended stay that I had already been spending months and months at when that happened. It felt both in terms of narrative but also practically because I wasn't allowed back on the property for a while after that they hired these guards and I just wasn't allowed on the property. So like, that was kind of a natural conclusion. And yeah, it, it, it's sort of case by case, but. But it was all done in collaboration consultation with my editor. And because I just didn't see the forest for the trees, I was so, so, so deep in the weeds with what people were going through and just trying to capture it that I needed someone who had more perspective to tell me when it was time to, to start writing.
- [45:34]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah, that makes sense. Speaking of seeing the forest through the trees, the title of this book is the last line of chapter, I think 29. And someone says it to you. One of. One of the mothers says it to you. Did you know when she said it, were you like, boom, title of my book or did someone else pick it out from a draft or something?
- [45:55]
Brian Goldstone
I could not come up with a title for this book. The working title for most of the time I was working on this book was the New American Homeless. That was the name of the magazine story that I wrote and got it. But we always knew that wasn't going to be the title that ended up. And, and so the whole time I was working at like, in the back of my head I was thinking, what is this thing going to be called? And it was only when I was actually writing that chapter, so at the very end of like the writing process. Got it, that I, I was actually like brainstorming the ideas for the chapter with my wife and I had that quote in my notes and I said it out loud and I was like, I wonder if that could work. That's the title of the book. And it seemed to capture so much of what the book is doing. And the fact that it's in the voice of one of the people in the book is really important because it's not me imposing something on the story. This is just her say, there's no place for us. And I think that works existentially as well as in just kind of material terms.
- [47:08]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah. One of the things I wanted to just Point out for listeners and ask you about is that in the five families you follow? First of all, they're all families, so there's children involved in every single case. And also, they're all black. And I'm wondering if you thought at all about including people who didn't have children, including people who weren't black, like, how important of sort of like a quote unquote, diversity of representation? Were you thinking about that at all or were you focused on it in a different way?
- [47:43]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, I think initially, when I first began this project, I did have this ideal of having, you know, the white working class family or individual alongside, you know, some, you know, people of color and just, yeah, to get at some of that diversity. Single people here in Atlanta, there are a lot of trans youth and individuals who are experiencing homelessness, lgbt, you know, so getting some of that diversity in terms of race. It also happens to be the case that in Atlanta, which is no longer majority black, 93% of the families experiencing homelessness in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement, are black. So in one way, it would have been forced to, like, find the one white family somewhere in the suburbs somewhere and just latch onto them because they're white and because I need that kind of diverse. I mean, the fact that all five families are black is actually true to the reality of homelessness in Atlanta. But also the desire for to, like, check these different demographic boxes ran up against the much more important need to have people again who there is a rapport with, who, like, they're willing to allow me in. And. And there were people throughout this process there. There was a white woman who I followed for several weeks. Like, we went out for lunch many times, and she told me her story. And she was a gig worker living in her car. And again, she was one of those people, like, she just had so much she was dealing with that it didn't. It didn't work out for us to continue. But, yeah, that I. I think it's really important, though. This isn't just a question of demographics. It's also so often the history and the story of homelessness in America is told in this kind of colorblind way or like the. The Wikipedia version of homelessness in America is really a white story. It's a story that begins in the colonial period and runs through the Depression and Jacob Reese's, you know, great army of tramps going throughout the country. And these are mostly white men. And there's a really important moment in the book where Natalia, she starts reading some of the history of housing and displacement and dispossession in America, beginning with Reconstruction and sort of the post emancipation period. And I began to wonder, like, and I hope readers will latch onto that too, that what if we told a story about housing insecurity and homelessness in America that began not with that great army of tramps during the Depression, but that began with 4 million recently emancipated, formerly enslaved human beings who were systematically deprived of land and forced into an economy of rent and debt and precarity. What. How would that change our very idea of homelessness and housing insecurity? Because this didn't just emerge over the last few years. So, like, the. The racialized dimension of this is actually super important, I think, to what the book is trying to do.
- [51:06]
Tracy Thomas
Brian, how open are you to me telling you what your next book should be?
- [51:11]
Brian Goldstone
I am very open to that because I have no idea what my next book will be.
- [51:17]
Tracy Thomas
Okay, I have your next book for you. I need you to write the expose on Blackstone because they're my enemies, and they show up in this book. For people who don't know, Blackstone is like a big. What are they, like a hedge fund or something? I don't know. They're like a big private equity company.
- [51:38]
Brian Goldstone
Yes.
- [51:39]
Tracy Thomas
Private equity giant.
- [51:40]
Brian Goldstone
Yes.
- [51:41]
Tracy Thomas
But they show up in this book like, surprise, We've bought up all the efficiency lodges, and we're making them even worse. And I feel like they do that for everything. And so I need you to dig in there and write all about it, because I haven't read that book, and I need it.
- [51:58]
Brian Goldstone
So as much as I would love to get a book deal based on this suggestion, I actually just read in galley form an incredible book by a reporter named Megan Greenwell called Bad Company. And it's about that, about the rise of private equity. It's not just Blackstone. I think it's important that it isn't just like it's all these other private equity firms, but it's. It's about how private equity is. Equity has just taken over our lives in this country, and it's an incredible book. And so now you have to give me a different idea for a book.
- [52:34]
Tracy Thomas
Okay, well, I'll think about it. I. I only come up with these brilliant ideas every once in a while, but also, you could do it different because you could do, like, a deep dive, like, into, you know, like, it could be like just the Blackstone, and, you know, you could expand out, like, this is how other companies are doing it. But, like, you know, the Empire of Pain, but of Blackstone, anyways.
- [52:53]
Brian Goldstone
Yes.
- [52:54]
Tracy Thomas
You know.
- [52:55]
Brian Goldstone
Yes.
- [52:56]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. I have to ask you about how you write, because we're definitely running out of time. But how do you write? How many hours a day? How often Music or no snacks and beverages. Rituals set the scene.
- [53:11]
Brian Goldstone
I have two kids. Two. Two boys. And, you know, when I began the book, Elliot, my youngest son, was two years old. And. Yeah. So having young kids in the house definitely creates certain limitations for writing. So the only way I was able to get this book done was I started. I had always told myself that I wasn't the type of person who could wake up really early. I needed a certain number of hours of sleep every night, stay up really late, but I ended up waking up every morning at like, 4:00, 4:15, 4:30, for months and months and months. And it ended up being this really magical time where for, you know, three hours before the kids wake up, and I just have this kind of quiet. And so it became a really beautiful and kind of magical space for me. And definitely, like, the most productive space. Lots of coffee. Just the boring, predictable stuff that all writers, I guess, need. Yes. Snacks and.
- [54:32]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah, which ones? Which snacks?
- [54:35]
Brian Goldstone
It's funny because I don't know if other parents do this, but I would never, like, buy snacks for myself because that was too explicit and indulgent.
- [54:46]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah.
- [54:46]
Brian Goldstone
So it was always like the Annie's Cheddar Bunnies that I end up just, like, ravaging. Yeah, yeah. And it's always in the afternoon. Yeah, yeah.
- [54:59]
Tracy Thomas
Okay. And we love a cheddar. I am a goldfish person myself, but, you know, I respect the cheddar bunny. It's fine. It's a fine. Second place, there's two things we have to talk about that we said we would. One is solutions or, like, hope. I don't know if you've got a lot on that, but if you've got anything on that, I think we'll take it.
- [55:17]
Brian Goldstone
Now, I think one of the most frustrating things in reading about homelessness going into this was so often the writer leaves you with this kind of like, well, who's to say both what caused this and who's to say what can end it? This kind of, like, vague sense of, well, you know, getting people into homes, but they also need rehab. They also need mental health services. And you know that that's true. Like, people do have needs and those needs do need to be met. But I want to be super clear that the reason this catastrophe is spiraling in this country and continues to spiral is because housing has been treated as a, as an asset class A, a vip, an investment vehicle, a commodity that the few people who are lucky enough to own property are going to profit from the many, many, many more who are in desperate need of a place to live. Like fundamentally, that is why we have a homeless business crisis in this country. And there are other places, other countries where housing is treated as just a basic human necessity, like health care or education, and it's funded accordingly.
- [56:45]
Tracy Thomas
Two other things we don't really have.
- [56:46]
Brian Goldstone
Two other things we don't have. I mean we do have private, we, we do have public schools because we said we're not going to leave K through 12 education to the whims of profiteers like and pride and private schools. Like we're going to make sure that every kid has access to education. And for some reason we haven't done that with having a home which is so basic to people's stability and survival. So fundamentally that's. There has to be an expansion, a radical expansion in our moral and political imagination that is not content any longer with just nibbling around the edges and you know, going back to that drastic kind of narrowing of the problem, the, the population experiencing homelessness that we were talking about with regard to Reagan and has continued into the present. We've narrowed the problem and then we come up with solutions and convince ourselves that the solutions will be adequate because the problem itself has been so drastically limited and, and narrowed. But when you widen the scope and you confront the true reality and the magnitude and severity of this precarity, we then have to come up with like a much more imaginative approach. And ultimately, you know, my hope lies in social housing and I don't know if there's time to say, go ahead.
- [58:16]
Tracy Thomas
And just say what that is.
- [58:17]
Brian Goldstone
So social housing is basically, if public housing in America hadn't been allowed to fail, has it hadn't been set up to fail, if there hadn't been this engineered neglect that turned public housing into the stigmatized, deteriorated place to live. That's what social housing is, social housing. It exists in other countries like Vienna in Austria. Vienna is kind of the paradigmatic site of social housing where it's been really, really successful. But Finland was in effect able to end homelessness by building social housing, which is like housing for people across the income scale. It's not just for the poorest of the poor, it's where middle class people can live as well without a fear that from one year to the next your rent is going to skyrocket. And you're not going to have a place to live anymore or where your landlord's going to terminate your lease because it's no longer profitable for them to have you as a tenant and they want to get someone else in, or they want to sell the property where you can live with that kind of safety and stability and knowledge that you're going to have a place to live from one year to the next. That's what social housing is, and that's what public housing was at one point, and that's what it could be again. But it will require a truly massive public investment in people having homes in this country.
- [59:49]
Tracy Thomas
What's the difference between social housing and public housing?
- [59:54]
Brian Goldstone
I mean, in some ways, it's public housing rebranded. I mean, public housing has become so stigmatized that a lot of people just stop listening when you say public housing. So. Okay, but social housing is also what it's called in other countries where it has taken off.
- [60:12]
Tracy Thomas
Got it. Okay. The other thing I wanted to get to, which is about you, actually, and about the Trump administration and dei. You had a book event canceled because of DEI related issues, I guess. Right. And I guess, first of all, what the. And second of all, did you ever think, as a white guy, you were going to be DEI Target? I'm. I mean, it feels like at DEI means anything now. So I'm just really curious about what happened. Tell people what happened to your book event. And I mean, whoa.
- [60:51]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah. So I was scheduled to launch the book at the Carter Library, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library here in Atlanta, where. It's the place in Atlanta where many, many, many book events have happened over the years. It's kind of. Yeah, it's a. It's a wonderful place. And the bookstore, Acapella Books, that was facilitating that event, they've worked with them for years and years, and it's been on the books for months. And in February, my publicist got a call that the event was canceled and we would have to find a different venue. The bookstore was shocked. We were shocked. We weren't given a lot of information. And then it was revealed that two other book events, one having to do with the civil rights movement, the other having to do with climate change, was also canceled. And other events on ostensibly less threatening topics, more innocuous topics, were allowed to continue. And, yeah, it was demoralizing. It was discouraging. And we don't know whether this was the library, the Carter Library, preemptively canceling something because they didn't want to rock the boat or if There was a directive from the National Archives, which oversees all the presidential libraries, saying this event will not continue. But, you know, once I realized the other books that. The other book events that had been canceled, I felt like I was in good company. And. And I guess I feel like, you know, if a book about housing insecurity and homelessness is now deemed subversive or threatening, it just underscores the urgency of having that conversation.
- [62:42]
Tracy Thomas
Well, I'm sorry that happened to you. That sucks. Did you find a new place for your book event?
- [62:47]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, we did. It's. It's going to be my local library, which I'm really excited about, and. Yeah.
- [62:54]
Tracy Thomas
Okay, good. What's a word you could never spell correctly on the first try?
- [63:00]
Brian Goldstone
Bureau.
- [63:02]
Tracy Thomas
Like the Bureau of Investigation?
- [63:04]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah, I. I. And I had a hard time saying it even for many years.
- [63:08]
Tracy Thomas
It's a hard one.
- [63:08]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah.
- [63:10]
Tracy Thomas
For people who love. There is no place for us. What are some other books you'd recommend to them that are in conversation with your work?
- [63:17]
Brian Goldstone
Ooh. I mean, a book that has meant the world to me, and I was so honored that she read the book and blurbed it. Is Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's random family. That book has, you know, was crucial for me. Behind the Beautiful Forever is Katharine Boo, Andrea Elliott's invisible child. Matthew Desmond's evicted. There's Roxanna Asgardians. We were once a family.
- [63:47]
Tracy Thomas
She's the one who put your book on my radar. She's the one who's like, have you read this? Have you heard of this? I was like, no. She's like, feels like you. I immediately was like, it is me.
- [63:56]
Brian Goldstone
Yeah. These are all writers who. And journalists, researchers who have narrative ambition and writerly ambition, but who are also deeply connected to a kind of moral and political sensibility. And for me, that's really important, that combination.
- [64:18]
Tracy Thomas
Can I also throw out rough sleepers?
- [64:20]
Brian Goldstone
Did you read that, Tracy Kidder? Yes. I thought that was really good. Yes, that was. That was.
- [64:24]
Tracy Thomas
I mean, that's like, more literally in conversation because it's about homelessness and it's about people who sleep on the street and a doctor who sort of takes care, who's sort of changed his life goals into helping take care of and giving health care to people who sleep on the street, AKA rough sleepers, for sure. Last one. If you could have any person dead or alive read this book, who would you want it to be?
- [64:48]
Brian Goldstone
That's really hard. This is going to sound a little trite, I think, but my initial impulse is to name someone in A position of power. Not necessarily Donald Trump, because he doesn't read, but one of his lieutenants, someone who can really make a difference with these issues, you know, and who is instrumental right now in, like, decimating the already shredded safety net that exists even further. But I honestly, I really believe if any of this is going to change, it's going to come not from the top, but from the bottom. And so I just want the people listening to this to read the book. I want people to get so pissed off and shocked and outraged that even people working their asses off in not just one job, but two jobs, like, aren't able to have this most basic thing, a roof overhead in this country, the wealthiest country on Earth. I want them to read it, and I want them to be so angry at that they start caring about their neighbors who are experiencing this and demanding of anyone around them who's in any position to affect policy change, to demand that they take this seriously, that that's who I want to read this. And I know that maybe can sound precious, but that's. That's the truth.
- [66:15]
Tracy Thomas
I love it. It's a great answer. Okay, everybody, you have your marching orders. Go get the book and then call all the people that you need to call. I will say, since I finished this book, I live in Los Angeles, which, as you mentioned, is, you know, homelessness is a huge. Not only is a huge issue here, but it's a huge topic of conversation in California and in Los Angeles, and I haven't been able to drive through the city in the same way. Like, I just. It's changed so much of how I. How I'm thinking and moving through my own personal life. So I can definitely, you know, highly recommend this book to. To listeners. And I think, like you said, I. I agree. I think any change is going to come from. From the people saying, like, this is ridiculous. Which it is. Everybody, you can get your copy of. There is no place for Us. Wherever you get your books. I know there is an audiobook. Do you read it?
- [67:08]
Brian Goldstone
The incredible Dion Graham read.
- [67:11]
Tracy Thomas
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Okay. I read the book off the page. I saw the audiobook, but I was like, this is the kind of book I need to, like, be alone within my bathtub, like, in a dark room.
- [67:21]
Brian Goldstone
I just heard a sample, and it's.
- [67:23]
Tracy Thomas
Is it amazing?
- [67:24]
Brian Goldstone
It's amazing. I'm so grateful that he did this.
- [67:28]
Tracy Thomas
He's so good. I got to meet him, and I was such a fan girl, and he was sort of like, okay, weird.
- [67:36]
Brian Goldstone
And he's such a good person. Yeah.
- [67:38]
Tracy Thomas
Yeah. He's such a nice guy. Well, okay, so if you were on the fence about if you should read it off the page or audio, now you have all the information you need? Probably both. Brian, thank you so much for being here. It's such a pleasure.
- [67:51]
Brian Goldstone
Oh, Tracy, thank you so much.
- [67:53]
Tracy Thomas
And everyone else, we will see you in the stacks. All right, y'all, that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you again to Brian Goldstone for joining the podcast. I'd also like to say a big thank you to Mary Coates and Penny Simon for helping to make this conversation more possible. Remember, our book club pick this month is Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton, which we will discuss on Wednesday, April 30th with Tiana Clark. If you love this podcast and you want inside access to it, head to patreon.com the stacks to join the Stacks Pack and check out my newsletter@tracy thomas.substack.com make sure you're subscribed to the Stacks wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you're listening through Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please leave us a rating and a review. For more from the Stacks, follow us on social media, Hestacks, Pod, on Instagram, Threads and TikTok, and check out our website@thestackspodcast.com Today's episode of the Stacks was edited by Christian Duenas with production assistance from Megan Caballero and Wykea Freelo. Our graphic Designer is Robin McRite and our theme music is from Tagirijis. The Stax is created and produced by me, Tracy Thomas.