As a renter, I’ve got no love for the way we do housing in this country. The rent is too damn high, shady landlord practices abound, and so many apartments are priced at “luxury” levels yet are anything but luxurious inside. Instead, they’re depression-inducing, “greige”-coated, devoid of usable kitchens, and sometimes even windowless. And good luck making life decisions about, say, jobs or moves when your lease tethers you to a property for a specific amount of time that cannot be changed unless you’re willing to pay exorbitant penalty fees. 

My most recent experience with what we might call the real estate/housing industrial complex was something of a disaster. I had planned for a calm, orderly DIY move out of my apartment only to end up with a very stressful, hectic half-move. It turns out that for-profit moving truck rental companies do not actually honor their reservations so much as take casual requests for moving trucks. The day before your reservation date arrives, they may calmly tell you they have no moving trucks after all, like it’s just a totally normal occurrence. No apologies or anything. And then you’re left to fend for yourself. When this happened to me last month (thanks, U-Haul and Penske), I panicked. Perhaps overly dramatically, I imagined the local sheriff bringing movers to remove my things if I couldn’t vacate somebody else’s sacred, money-making piece of property on time. I asked the property manager if I could delay my moveout by a couple of days. I was told that that was impossible because a new tenant would be moving in the day after I left. Ultimately, the situation got partially resolved. I forked over some money to some other for-profit corporations (last-minute storage unit and SUV rentals) and my partner and I made hasty car trips back and forth to empty the apartment. (I still have to go back for my stuff at some point.)

Housing is often on my mind, and so is homelessness. I’ve moved about a dozen times in the last couple decades, dealt with too many sleazy real estate agencies, and have been frustrated and priced out by too-high apartment income requirements. (You have to have a salary that’s three times the monthly rent?) Over the last couple of years, on my way to work or just moving about the city, I would encounter many homeless people, especially in my now-former neighborhood, where the property values can reach into the millions of dollars. This latest experience with moving left a nasty taste in my mouth. And my housing frustrations pale in comparison to the experiences of the estimated four million homeless people in this country. I’ve read about the practices of eviction, as described in Matthew Desmond’s 2016 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. I’ve learned about the “predatory inclusion” of African Americans in housing—things like higher interest rates, more fees, and substandard housing inflicted onto Black people after the end of their legalized exclusion from the housing market—as described by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her 2019 book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Both of those books helped me understand just how much greed and injustice is baked into housing policy, landlord/tenant relations, and the workings of the real estate industry in this country. 

Despite all this, I still was not quite prepared for the amount of disgust I would feel while reading Brian Goldstone’s new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Don’t get me wrong—the book itself is expertly and beautifully crafted. What I mean is that what the book says about our country disgusts me. By the time I was about two-thirds of the way through reading it, I could not get one word out of my mind: cruelty. There’s no two ways about it. The way we do housing and the way we purport to address homelessness in this country is nothing short of absolutely cruel. It’s completely unacceptable.

The book describes so many practices that are cruel and situations that should never happen. SWAT-style “surprise mass evictions at gunpoint.” Predatory profit-making off people who are in desperate situations—trapped in overpriced extended-stay hotels because they have been shut out of the rental market, or taken advantage of by rental assistance companies like Liberty Rent, which cosign leases and guarantee approvals for a hefty fee. Weak or nonexistent tenant protection laws. Government housing vouchers that vanishingly few landlords will accept and that expire as soon as 60 days after they’re issued, making them all but impossible to use. Endless nonrefundable fees just to apply for rental housing. Given all these obstacles, one couple described in the book, desperate for cash, even goes on a reality show for feuding couples to get $550 apiece. 

Oddly, despite so many people lacking safe and affordable housing in this country, we are in the midst of a kind of housing boom: that of temporary housing. As Goldstone explains, the extended-stay hotel industry has taken off in the last few years, with private equity firm Blackstone purchasing a large portfolio of these properties in 2021. Because the pandemic caused massive job and housing losses, people were forced to turn to these extended-stay hotels. It’s a classic case of disaster capitalism: something terrible happens, the government fails to do enough to meet people’s needs, people are left looking for temporary housing in the form of these hotels, and the private sector swoops in to make a killing. One chain, Efficiency Lodge, even got a government Paycheck Protection Program loan for $329,200, which was later completely forgiven! What it did for the public in turn was to offer overpriced, poorly maintained, filthy rental units overseen by abusive and/or absent management. 

Then there’s what one social worker calls the “homeless industrial complex.” This consists of “government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and philanthropic groups” that together concoct various programs that claim to help people who lack housing. Really, though, they use “semantic gatekeeping” to impose endless eligibility requirements. To be considered “homeless”—in other words, “homeless in the right way,” as Goldstone puts it, and thus eligible for assistance in this “cruel and arbitrary system”—you have to be living in a shelter (some of which don’t accept children of a certain age) or “somewhere not meant for human habitation.” It didn’t quite count if you were doubling up with family or friends, or staying in a gross rodent- or roach-infested, moldy extended-stay hotel where the management was not responsive to maintenance concerns and the cost was more than one would pay for a regular rental apartment. (Another cruelty: these extended-stay facilities were excluded from pandemic eviction protections.) As one woman Goldstone follows, Celeste, reflects on her predicament and her awful stay at Efficiency, she replays in her mind what “all the people and institutions that had mistreated or taken advantage of her” had told her “tacitly or overtly”: “You’ll do this because you have no other option. [...] You’ll put up with this because you can’t go anywhere else.” This part of the book, along with the descriptions of dilapidated, pest-infested “rooming houses” in Atlanta, really made my blood boil. 

Goldstone sets his book in metro Atlanta, one of the most gentrified cities in the country. Historically, Georgia has also had relatively weak tenant protections. He follows five families during the early years of the pandemic, all of whom are Black and all of whom have children, as they deal with precarious housing situations while making extraordinary efforts to work, pay their bills on time, obtain higher education, and generally follow society’s rules and be good parents. Nothing is ever enough, though, because the system has been designed to make them fail. Their jobs don’t pay enough. Rent is too high. Car costs are too high. Daycare is too costly. Public transit sucks. Healthcare, including mental healthcare, is often out of reach or too expensive. Corporate slumlords don’t keep their properties maintained and can retaliate when complaints are made. Couch-surfing arrangements, which are themselves stressful due to crowding and other factors, can turn on a dime, as a disagreement or episode of violence with a family member or friend can cause families to flee and end up sleeping in their cars (if they have one or it hasn’t already been repossessed due to missed loan payments). 

Pandemic social spending programs, such as increased unemployment benefits, helped some people to some extent, but these benefits were too short-lived or delayed in their receipt to make a continuous difference in people’s lives or keep them out of financial precarity. (And before long, the government cruelly allowed its pandemic social spending programs to expire.) And an eviction history can absolutely ruin your chance at future housing. Goldstone writes about a couple, Natalia and Maurice, who had been without secure housing for eight months post-eviction:

[T]here was no end in sight. Natalia had lost count of the number of rental applications she’d filled out, not only for apartments in Sandy Springs and Dunwoody but farther afield, in suburbs they had never heard of. She had lost count of the number of times they had been rejected, the money they had thrown away on application fees, and the comments she had left on housing forums to the effect of “Anyone know of a private landlord willing to take a family with an eviction?” Eight interminable months of this, with nothing whatsoever to show for it.

Consider Britt, whose apartment complex, Gladstone, is scheduled to be demolished to make way for new high-end housing development:

Since receiving the letter from Gladstone’s management, Britt had felt paralyzed, unable to do or even think about anything pertaining to the move. Her inertia was born less of fear than a sense of futility: a feeling that no matter how hard she worked or how punctually she paid her rent and other bills, she would never be able to escape this cycle. She would never be able to look her kids in the eye and assure them that in a year’s time they’d be going to the same school or sleeping in the same bedroom or playing with the same friends next door.

A book like this is important for a number of reasons. First, two of Goldstone’s major points are that a) homelessness is severely undercounted in this country and b) many homeless people are working full-time jobs, which runs counter to prevailing myths that homeless people are simply not trying hard enough or aren’t making good life choices. Additionally, the book humanizes a group of people that’s constantly being attacked and dehumanized in the public discourse. It documents a particular moment in our country’s history by showing ordinary people’s struggles. I genuinely appreciated Goldstone’s empathetic portrayals of the people he follows. Empathy is always good. But I think we have to go way beyond empathy in terms of how we respond to the truths in this book. 

We need to be enraged that a book like this can even be written, that our fellow Americans are facing such horrific conditions every day while politicians refuse to even talk about the financial precarity that makes their housing insecure while at the same time trying to rid our public spaces of homeless people. It’s much easier to typecast homeless people as lazy or deserving of their fate—or as nothing but “violent drug addicts,” as Elon Musk said last year—if you ignore the reality that as rents rise, so does the level of homelessness. When you plot the two things out on a graph, the line gets steeper—meaning a higher rate of homelessness—when the rent rises to certain thresholds. People don’t lack housing strictly because there aren’t enough buildings but because the landlord class limits housing access by making it unaffordable.

In short, we’re not going to win radical change in housing policy if more liberals simply read this book. If you don’t think every human being deserves safe (and even beautiful) housing, or if you think it’s legitimate for landlords to charge whatever price they want and kick everyone who can’t meet it out into the street, I doubt more stories will convince you. Fundamentally, the problem of homelessness is not about a lack of empathy. It’s about power and about who controls access to the basic necessities we all need. As a social worker named Carla says, 

In this country, [...] it’s simply a fact of life that if you’re a renter, especially a poor renter, you’re always going to be at the mercy of a landlord who may or may not have an interest in keeping you housed. As soon as it becomes more lucrative for them to sell the property, or to raise the rent, or to get wealthier tenants in—if the market allows that, they’re going to follow the market.

And as Maurice succinctly puts it: “[I]f you can’t own your own property, you have to pay someone else for a place to live. Then they’ve got you.”

This all reminds me of something Dr. Mark Vonnegut said in his reflections on his 40-year career in pediatrics. He said, essentially, that you have a choice between two mandates, people or the market. And healthcare, he opined, could not serve both. This is correct. Similarly, housing cannot serve both mandates. People have to come first.

Unfortunately, the “abundance” idea of unleashing the private sector and cutting red tape is having a moment. These ideas have even made their way into housing legislation. A new bipartisan Congressional bill, the “Reducing Homelessness Through Program Reform Act,” simply doubles down on the homeless industrial complex. The legislation “cuts red tape and reduces administrative burdens” in existing programs and seeks to improve coordination between government and the private sector. 

But program tweaks are not housing, and the private sector cannot solve homelessness, because it causes homelessness in the first place. It does not provide housing, it pricespeople out of it, and the solutions offered by these much-vaunted “public-private partnerships” are pathetic. So-called safe parking lots, where people can sleep in their cars, are not housing. Warehouses, where homeless people are forcibly relocated out of sight to make way for major events like the Super Bowl, are not housing. Shelters, extended-stay hotels, and other temporary places that no one would ever choose to live in if they had other options are not housing! The solution to lack of housing is simply to provide housing; nothing short of that is acceptable.

As Goldstone’s book makes clear, we cannot depend on the current half-measures to eliminate homelessness. Vouchers can only go so far as long as they’re issued in limited numbers, landlords can refuse to take them, and they come with such onerous terms of use. The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program that Goldstone describes—which allowed for the existence of the “affordable” Gladstone apartments that were later allowed to be demolished because of a loophole in the law—isn’t going to cut it, either. The government has to stop trying to pretend that it can coax a predatory real estate market into doing the right thing. And we cannot allow the homeless industrial complex to keep people drowning in eligibility rules and means testing while making them choose between filthy, substandard boarding rooms, or the streets, or their cars, or shelters that have endless rules. 

We cannot allow people to be victims of their shitty state legislatures, so that some people get good tenant protections in one state and others not. We cannot depend on the whims of charities, either (which can simply deny help to people whose lifestyles they don’t like). Tenant unions, which should have our full support, are doing important work to help tenants exercise their rights and fight abuse from landlords, and that work must continue. But, as Goldstone argues, we ultimately need a real right to housing in this country. Housing as a right is a basic concept that’s hardly new. FDR proposed it in his Second Bill of Rights in 1944. Bernie Sanders revived it in his 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights, which included things like a right to a good-paying job, education, healthcare, and housing.

Homelessness, just like poverty, is a solvable problem. Other countries have done it. We can, too. We have the money. Yet, as Goldstone himself pointed out recently, our current political priorities are absurd: “Last year, the US budgeted $12.8B for new affordable housing. This country is now poised to spend $45B on immigrant detention centers. That's nearly *four times* as much on cages as on homes—in the middle of a devastating housing and homelessness crisis.”

We need to provide housing for everyone, period. That means housing everyone as quickly as possible and keeping people in their housing who are at risk of losing it. We need to be willing to build, repurpose existing buildings, and regulate as much as is necessary to achieve the goal of universal housing. We need public and social housing for all. And nobody’s housing should be ugly or falling apart. Dilapidated housing for nobody, beautiful and safe and functional housing for all. 

True abundance in housing means putting our country’s resources to work for ordinary people and ending the dictatorship of private property over our lives.