There is no place for us Working and homeless in America

Even fully employed Americans are being pushed into homelessness, according to this harrowing debut report. Journalist Goldstone follows four single moms and a married couple living in metropolitan Atlanta--all of them steadily employed as restaurant workers, cleaners, health aides, call center staffers, and mechanics--who had to find new places to live because of rent increases, layoffs, a sudden large expense, or other one-off events. They face a labyrinth of obstacles: income and credit-score requirements that they don't meet; high up-front application fees; fake realty agents trying to scam them out of their deposits; and maddening bureaucratic regulations on housing assistance. (One renter had to wait weeks for the city to review an apartment's environmental impact before she could use her subsidized housing voucher on a deposit--by which time the apartment was no longer available.) The biggest roadblock is that, in a gentrifying Atlanta, housing is simply no longer affordable for working-class families. The result is many downward spirals through ever-worsening housing options, including the already overcrowded apartments of relatives, squalid yet exorbitantly expensive motels, a Salvation Army shelter, a car, and even the chairs in an all-night laundromat. Goldstone weaves a richly detailed narrative of his subjects' increasingly desperate struggles, and he offers a searing indictment of a greedy corporate real estate industry, which he consistently pegs as the culprit behind these woes. It's a gripping, high-stakes account of America's housing emergency. (Mar.)

Down and out in Atlanta. Pete Hamill, one of the last great tabloid journalists, practiced what he preached. InNews Is a Verb, he argued that reporters ought to write about ordinary people--not celebrities--and live among them. Goldstone, a veteran journalist, does both and does them well in this labor of love. While there are trenchant observations about the U.S. in this book, Goldstone focuses on the homeless crisis in Atlanta, where he lives. The "Silicon Valley of the South," as it's often called, is the nation's third-fastest-growing metropolitan area. Goldstone seems to know every neighborhood and street and a great many of the down-and-out citizens he writes about who sleep on the streets, in shelters, and in hotels unfit for human habitation. Against the odds, these people hold down jobs--but, he writes, their "paychecks are not enough to keep a roof over their heads." A map of Atlanta--with roads, highways, hotels, and motels--appears at the front of the book, so no reader can get lost, and there are ample notes and an eye-opening epilogue. Goldstone explains that he did not pay any of his sources for information. In a profession that's increasingly lax when it comes to ethics, Goldstone is a model of ethical journalism. To protect the privacy of the people he writes about, he doesn't use real names. With a Ph.D. in anthropology, he trains an empathetic eye on families that are struggling in an increasingly gentrified city that prizes property above people. "Families are not 'falling' into homelessness," he writes. "They're being pushed." Make a place for this book alongside Jane Jacobs' classicDeath and Life of Great American Cities. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.