>> chip: hELLO AND WELCOME, WE’RE GOING TO JUST LET SOME FOLKS FILTER IN.
Thank you for being here and spending some time with us. We’ll get started shortly. Hello and welcome, everyone, my name is chip Colwell, I’m here with Dr. Brian Goldstone, a journalist and author who’s long form reporting and essays have appeared in the New York Times, harpers, the new republic among other publications and has written across wide-ranging topics such as the plight of chronic Spain sufferers
pain sufferers.
Brian received his Ph.D. from Duke University and is a recipient of grants of learned societies and the Wenner-Gren Foundation which of course is a SAPIENS sponsor. Just before we jump in I have one note and that is if you have any questions for Brian please do use the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom window there. We would love to have your questions and I will pick out a few of them for Brian to answer as we go along.
So please do join the conversation. So welcome, Brian. Welcome to the conversation, thank you so much for being here and spending some time with us today.
>> BRIAN: It’s wonderful to be with you, Chip, I really appreciate the opportunity.
>> CHIP: Absolutely, yeah, I’ve really been looking forward to this and congratulations on your newest book, there is no place for us working and homeless in America, it truly is a magnificent work. How exactly did the book come about?
>> BRIAN: Yeah the genesis for the book was actually around 2018 my family and I had recently relocated from New York to Atlanta and my wife who is a nurse-practitioner was working at a community health center here called mercy health care and at that time I had already written several magazine stories.
Some of the topics you just mentioned a moment ago but, you know, when Elaine would come home from work at this community health center she told me about this startling trend that she was noticing where her patients, you know, they were working at Wal-Mart, they were driving for Uber and Lyft, they were packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse or were home health aids.
They were employed in care work and when they finished their shifts they weren’t going to an apartment. They were going to shelters if there were any shelter beds available. They were sleeping in the same cars they had just done Uber run to the airport in. They were going to the overcrowded apartments of others.
Or they were going to these awful squalled extended stay hotels which maybe we could talk about this more.
When she told me about this I was stunned. I think like many people I had this intuitive assumption that work is like an exit from homelessness. Work is an exit from this most severe form of deprivation not an accompaniment to it and I remember around that time I typed working homeless into an academic search engine expecting to just find this plethora of articles and there was virtually nothing.
On the contrary, when work was discussed it was discussed negatively. It was what was missing from the world of homelessness. Peter Rossi, a sociologist in a classic text of his called down and out in America he has this formulation that those who are homeless in this country are “unconnected to the world of work” so that I think was very much my assumption.
And a desire to sort of investigate, like, okay, the is what my wife is saying is this pervasive?
If it is pervasive, why is it pervasive? What does this tell us not only about housing and homelessness in this country but about the nature of work itself? The volatility of work and so forth.
And so that led me to write first a kind of long form narrative article for the new republic. Which I researched and reported over a period of about seven months and when I was done with that I realized I had only scratched the surface and I wanted to sort of expand it into a book where I follow five different families still based here in Atlanta.
And if I could just say like one really major kind of argument in the book is that
because this was very much my own experience as I began to delve into this is there’s this entire world of homelessness that we’re not seeing that is not just invisible but that has been actively rendered invisible. It’s a kind of engineered invisibility. And just to put a number on it, I discovered that, you know, while the official homeless count that is conducted every year by the federal government
has shown in the last two years that we’re at the highest level of homelessness on record in this country. That’s the official number but that’s only counting those who are living on the street or in shelters. All the families I follow in this book are not counted.
They literally don’t count and there are, I argue that the real number of people experiencing homelessness right now in America is about six times greater than the official number so we’re talking about four million men, women and children who are unhoused right now. Yeah so the idea that there’s just this entire universe. This entire world of homelessness that’s out of sight.
And that the tense that we see, the encampments that Trump is trying to banish from sight that is just the tip of the iceberg in many ways my book is about this much, much bigger iceberg that’s under the water surface.
>> CHIP: Your description of this as a kind of invisible problem really resonates with me I think when I first picked up your book that is what struck me first is it seemed like a paradox that those two parts of this world
that world, just doesn’t seem to go together. And just a follow up on that, though, you use the phrase an engineered invisibility. Which is very provocative and evocative, could you just elaborate on that a bit more in what sense is the
unseen part of this created or, you know, in an intentional way.
>> BRIAN: Yeah, there’s so much to say about that but just really quickly I trace a lot of this back to the early 1980s when mass homelessness first erupted in America. I think for people who were born after that time, I mean, I was only, I was born in 1980 so I was just, you know, a child when homelessness was first emerging in this country. But
I think it’s good to remember that, like, homelessness as we now know it. As seemingly unremarkable, as apparently intractable, a kind of inescapable feature of the cityscape is a relative new phenomenon and the reason I talk about it being an engineered invisibility is because at that time the Reagan administration really undertook this concerted campaign to
shape public perception of this burgeoning crisis. To really narrow the scope, the lens on what we even consider homelessness to be and so
, you know, that involved not only of course like employing all of the kind of stock stereotypes that in many ways this book is trying to up end that homelessness is caused by mental illness, by addiction, caused by laziness or refusal to work when the New York times and CBS news in the late 80s conducted a poll of New Yorkers asking them what caused homelessness. Not a single person mentioned housing.
That propaganda campaign was successful and it’s narrowing the lens. When you narrow the lens on homelessness so that all we’re talking about or seeing are people who are con spick lousily suffering on the street that gives you a very particular impression of homelessness.
But widen the lens, expand the frame and homelessness begins to look very different and so it’s not just that the scale and severity of this crisis has been
downplayed systematically, it’s also that in down playing that scale and severity and really only talking about the narrow sliver of the total homeless population, our understanding, our conception of who is becoming homeless and why has become sort of profoundly distorted.
>> CHIP: As you describe it the scale of the crisis is so huge and yet the book provides intimate portraits of what these experiences actually are for people in the greater Atlanta community.
And we don’t have a lot of time today but in the stories are heart rending and heartbreaking and really give us a sense of the structural inequalities and as much of the ingenuity and the ability for a lens to try to navigate the personal experience in a personal way can you give us a sense of some of the stories?
Who did you meet? How did you help tell their stories in the book?
>> BRIAN: Yeah, definitely, so, the book follows five families the reporting itself and research went, over five years but in the book about two years is covered in these families’ lives.
Each of the five families are tenants they’re renters their part of a kind of permanent renter class in this country that is growing bigger and bigger. They are all part of the low wage workforce. They’re headed by parents, these family who is are working not just one job but often several jobs at once. And
they are all Black. Like 93% of homeless families in Atlanta, they are all Black. And so that kind of racialized dimension is also really crucial here. Yeah, I wish I could tell you about each of the families’ journeys but I will just tell you about Celeste because I feel like her trajectory illustrates a lot of what the back is trying to show. So her story begins in this really dramatic way.
With a phone call from her neighbor that her rental home has burned down and by the time Celeste makes it back to this rental house with her kids it is completely destroyed. It turns out that an abusive ex, set fire to the property and was later arrested for arson. But I am kind of at pains to say, that when I’m telling people the story
and they say, oh, that’s terrible that she became homeless, her and her kids because of this fire, because of this abusive ex. I say, no, what pushed Celeste and her children into homelessness and even that language of being pushed into homelessness not falling into homelessness is really important I think.
It’s important for to us kind of discipline our language when we’re talking about these things. What pushed her family into homelessness was the fact that after the fire, months later she was desperate to get into an another apartment. She realized to her horror as she began her housing search which she thought would be quick that over the last few years in Atlanta.
The city has undergone this celebrated renaissance and a lot of the precarity, housing and labor that we’re seeing in this country is the product not of a failing economy, it’s the product of a booming economy. It’s, you know, it’s a crisis not of poverty as we tend to think of it but really a crisis of a particular kind of prosperity. It’s being fuelled by gentrification.
By the revitalization of our cities and so when Celeste is looking for a new place to live she realizes that rents have gone up like 65% just in the time she’s been renting she realizes that over, you know, that tens of thousands of affordable housing units and formally working class neighborhoods have disappeared in favor of luxury developments so when she finally finds an apartment that she can afford
the leasing agent encourages her to apply and when she applies she learns her landlord at the house that had burned down which was not just an ordinary kind of mom and pop landlord it was a private equity group they filed an eviction on her for refusing to pay rent on this home that had burned down.
They told her to terminate her lease on this home, this was after the fire happened she would not have to pay the current month’s rent but an additional month as well. She finds an eviction notice in the mail of the house that has not been repaired and the sheriff written served to fire destroyed property because in Georgia a tenant doesn’t have to be notified in person that an eviction has been filed against them.
By the time Celeste finds out it’s too late, her credit score, this three digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to something as fundamental as just a place to live, her credit score’s been tanked and at that point she is in effect pushed out, she’s forced out of the formal housing market and because there were no shelters in DeKalb County, one of the most populous counts in the south.
She did what scores of other families do, she went to this extended stay hotel where she began to pay more than double per week what she was paying for this rental home that had burned down and she fell into what, another family in the book calls this expensive prison of an extended stay where you are basically stuck in this
never ending purgatory.
>> CHIP: Hm. Such a powerful tragic story and I think this is what captures the book so well is the way it’s through these individual lives you understand the bigger forces at work and how people are swept often into terrible effect. I came across your book in my local library, I was there browsing the shelves one day and there was the new nonfiction table and the title grabbed me.
And I started reading and I was like oh, I got to read this so I piled it up, took it home and only then when I kind of looked at it in more detail I saw you were an anthropologist. I kind of assumed it was a journalist and you cross these worlds of journalism and anthropology. How do you think these two lenses
anthropology as an academic discipline and journalism as a form of reporting. How do you think these two lenses help tell this story?
>> BRIAN: Yeah, that’s a big question. It’s one that
I ask myself a lot. You know, because on some of it I think I’m only learning in retrospect like how my training as an anthropologist informed this kind of work. I think one way of answering this question is like that it has deeply informed this work both methodology and I guess like on the level of the sensibility that animated the
reporting and the book itself, the writing. First on methodology, I definitely approach this much less in the way that a journalist might, where, and this might be a kind of caricature of how journalists work but I have a lot of journalists who operate this way. You drop N know the story in advance, you know who the central protagonists are going to be.
And it’s just, it’s a matter of piecing it together and what I try to do was much more, I guess immersive in
… it was much more an attempt, an aspiration really to
immerse myself in the day-to-day lives of these families as much as humanly possible. I, yeah, I, and one thing about that is, like, yes, did I have this kind of orienting frame for the project, of course. You know, coming out of the magazine story. I knew what the basic kind of subject matter was
and there was this kind of, like, very rudimentary set of, like, characteristics that each of these families had, like I said, they were in the workforce, they were struggling to secure housing. I mean, one thing I will say about just that is unlike some projects where
, you know, a reporter is, like, they have the investigation they want to do but then they struggle to find, you know, the story to kind of carry it, the people to carry it. In my case, it was like how do you narrow it down? Because this is so
kind of omnipresent now, this kind of insecurity and it was really more a matter of like who is going to be willing to have me immersed in their life than it was a matter of me like choosing people and so
yeah, I really, I think my training as an anthropologist each though this particular project much of it took place like a mile or two from where I live here in Atlanta it wasn’t the other side of the globe. Like my research in West Africa had been. I really kind of approached it the same way. I
think I mean a really kind of scary thing about doing this kind of work, ethnographically is not knowing where you’re going to end up. You know? You are
flung sort of into the midst of things. And then you try to attend as carefully as possible to what you’re witnessing and, you know, and it involved getting creative. Like when I couldn’t be physically there in-person because of course these were five families, I was trying to go with them to, I mean, like, family gatherings, Christmas Eve dinners, appointments with child welfare investigators.
Doctors appointments, you name it. I was just sort of there. Court appearances. And when I couldn’t be there in-person, I got digital recorders for the families to sort of just be recording themselves. One of the people in the book, Kara, she during the pandemic was driving for DoorDash with her kids in the backseat because she didn’t have child care.
And so I got her a dash cam so I could be in the car with them when I couldn’t physically be with them and it was an attempt to capture as much as I could. As much detail. And it was important to do that and this is something I get from anthropology because a lot of reporting on poverty, a lot of reporting on homelessness only captures people in their moments of crisis.
And I think it was absolutely crucial to see people, to capture people
in all kinds of other moments. To show the fullness of their humanity. To show them in all of their desires. All of their, even like, decisions that they regret and
I also, it also felt important, not to just present like these angelic figures. You know, these angelic victims. Which I think a lot of well-intentioned academic research and reporting on these issues falls prey to. We don’t trust readers that if you give like real people
that they’re going to be received well. You know, it’s like we have to turn them into kind of human arguments.
I think that can be just as dehumanizing as simple pathologizing people and I will say on the level of sensibility,
you know, one thing that really guided this work and that I think has just been clear to me over time is how much of, like the overarching
aim of this project is to kind of do what, you know, I remember ta la la said that there’s two dominant traditions in anthropology.
One is a kind of, I guess he would say more imperialist tradition that is about making the strange familiar. You know, taking concepts, practices, beliefs out there and translating them into terms for our own
sort of consumption. And circulation. What he practices and what I would like to believe I practice is a kind of anthropology that is about making the familiar strange. And, you know, holding our own
taken for granted assumptions up to interrogations, scrutiny and nowhere is that more urgent than when it comes to housing in America. I really am trying in this back to say to readers, like, how utterly weird is it? How utterly bizarre is it that we have taken this basic human necessity, a roof over head and allowed it to be commodified.
That we’ve essentially auctioned it off to the highest bidder. It doesn’t have to be that way, in many countries it isn’t that way. Why is it that way here? Why is it that we’ve allowed housing to be sort of horded up. And yeah, I remember during
early in the pandemic there were these two brothers in Tennessee who were going around buying hand sanitizer and putting these bottles of hand sanitizer in a U-Haul truck and selling them on eBay and Amazon for 80 dollars.
And that’s what we’ve done to housing it but we don’t call it price gouging during a state of emergency. We just call it supply and demand economics. We just call it capitalism. And a case manager in the back Harlow Wells has a great term for what we allowed housing to become. She calls it the housing Hunger Games and I would like to belief that my attempt to sort of
force even those who are like steeped in housing policy, even those who are steeped in the world already immersed in the world of homeless services and poverty research and reporting will
themselves experience a kind of defamiliarizing effect in reading this book that it will sort of shock them anew.
>> CHIP: M-hm. Well we only have a few minutes left so I save the best question for last.
In your ethnography and reporting did you come across any programs or efforts that have been effective at the problem of working and still experiencing homelessness and if not, what policies would you most like to see implemented?
>> BRIAN: I think, I mean, there’s like two big buckets of solutions that I think any attempt to meaningfully address this crisis fall into. The first is, like, getting people into homes they don’t yet have. And that can take the form of everything from banning these extortion at and extremely large application fees where people pay two hundred dollars to apply for an apartment.
And it’s nonrefundable even if you’re rejected. This is landlords and project management companies just preying on people’s desperation and making it that much harder to get housed. Everything from that to of course like building more truly deeply affordable housing. In this country. And ultimately, social housing, which is like public housing done right. It’s a model that has been
incredibly successful in Vienna, Singapore, social housing I think is the only solution that will really meet this catastrophe at scale and the other bucket of solutions is getting… is keeping people in the homes they currently have and that means strengthening tenant rights, kind of protections, it means rent control, a right to council in eviction cases.
Giving people direct cash assistance in their homes. Preventing homelessness from happening to begin with before people end up in
these extended stay hotels, before they end up in tents is absolutely crucial and, you know, although the Federal Government right now is pouring gasoline on this disaster, I mean, I really thought it couldn’t get any worse but it absolutely is getting worse. As horrifying as what we’re seeing from this administration is. There is this vibrant tenant rights movement that has emerged in recent years.
And there’s a lot happening at the local level. A lot of housing policy, a lot of homelessness policy is really determined by city councils, by state legislatures, and so there is a lot of promising stuff happening there and I would just encourage everyone who cares about these issues to get involved even at that scale. If there’s any capacity to do so.
>> CHIP: Brian, thank you so much for being here, sharing your book, sharing your research, ideas and thinking. I simply can’t recommend this book enough. There is no place for us working in homeless in America you can get it wherever you buy books today. So please get one.
Share it with your friends and family networks. So that we can I think raise the invisibility of this into a visible
crisis that needs our immediate attention. If you enjoyed today’s
program we have one last 5Q event. I just put it in the chat. You can see it it’s in a few weeks. It’s going to be another amazing conversation. So please join us if you can. But Brian, thanks again so much, really appreciate it.
>> BRIAN: Thank you, Chip, this was really great. Thank you.