Brian Goldstone > Quotes

“What we’re seeing today is an emergency born less of poverty than prosperity. Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness. They’re being pushed.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Someday, Carla thought, America would awaken to the immorality of allowing one of the most basic human necessities to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. “In this country,” she said, “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.” Financial support was important. But Carla had grown convinced that what her clients really needed was not assistance per se. It was power. “Most people I work with, they don’t just feel hopeless. They feel powerless. Because they’re constantly subjected to forces beyond their control—even beyond their understanding.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“In the richest country on earth, nobody—whether they work or have a disability or struggle with addiction or mental health challenges—should be deprived of stable shelter. Mass homelessness arose recently within our lifetimes. It’s worth reminding ourselves of this fact, because if it hasn’t always been like this, then a different kind of future is possible.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“A conservative estimate of the actual number of people deprived of housing in the United States—those living in vehicles or hotel rooms, or staying temporarily with others, along with people in shelters or on the street—would be well over four million.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“During the 2021–22 school year, 106,621 children enrolled in the nation’s public schools were identified as living at a hotel or motel—an increase of more than 20 percent from two years earlier.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“In Atlanta, the average rent for a basic one-bedroom unit was now equivalent to 174 percent of the maximum SSI payment of $943. Nationally, the situation was just as bad: there was not a single city or county in America where someone with a disability who received SSI could afford an apartment without other forms of assistance.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Extended Stay America would record $96 million in profits on revenues of $1 billion in 2020. Observing the phenomenal success of the extended-stay model, institutional investors had started flocking to this asset class.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“An algorithm could determine the course of action: if the rent was three days late, an eviction notice automatically went out, a late fee was tacked on, and the tenant was saddled with any court costs incurred by a filing.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“in Georgia, as in many states, creditors could legally seize a vehicle after just one missed payment.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“The reach of homelessness is expanding. As it pulls more and more people into its grip, we might wonder: Who gets to feel secure in this country? And who are the casualties of our prosperity?”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Today, of the 5.6 million hotel rooms in the United States, more than half a million are now classified as extended-stay—more than double the number that existed in the early 2000s.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“In Atlanta, no single project has more profoundly reshaped the urban landscape than the BeltLine—arguably the greatest rent-gap generator in the city’s history, and a prime example of planned gentrification. This transformative endeavor, winding through forty-five neighborhoods and redefining Atlanta’s core, epitomizes the interplay between city governance, urban planning, and real estate interests. Originally conceived as a green mobility project that would connect residents and communities in the city, the twenty-two-mile network of trails and parks was quickly recast as a means of fundamentally altering Atlanta’s character, to the tune of approximately $4.7 billion in projected costs.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Increasingly in Atlanta, there were two kinds of poor Black neighborhoods: those where property values were rising and investors were buying up land, waiting for the inevitable transformation, and those like the area around Efficiency, where people usually ended up after being pushed out of the gentrifying neighborhoods.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Recent research reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the United States, factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms or doubled up with other people, is at least six times larger than the official figure.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“The ultimate signifier of this “new Atlanta” was the BeltLine”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Like many of us”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“It is widely assumed, for instance, that a family dealing with “episodic” homelessness has stumbled into their predicament for economic reasons (job loss, an eviction), whereas “unsheltered” or “chronically homeless” individuals are believed to be in that position because of mental health issues, a disability, or substance use.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Today there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“A range of practical interventions would ease their burden: Banning extortionate application fees, capping security deposits, outlawing biased tenant screening practices, prohibiting discrimination against voucher holders (and enforcing those rules)—these are but a few ideas. Expanding HUD’s definition of homeless is another. But the biggest challenge by far is the housing itself: there’s not enough of it, certainly not the kind that’s affordable for millions of low-income renters. Restrictive land use policies have contributed to this mess. With an estimated 75 percent of land in the nation’s major cities zoned exclusively for single-family homes, it’s no surprise that the supply of housing has failed to keep pace with demand. Yet simply deregulating private development is insufficient, because the market, on its own, will never be incentivized to build and maintain truly affordable housing for those in need of it. Recognizing this fact, there is a growing consensus that, as in other times of national emergency, all levels of government—federal, state, local—must intervene directly.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“A century of housing discrimination ensured that the path to homeownership remained closed to the majority of Black Americans.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Other “hotel kids,” as they were called, were viciously teased. They might as well have been staying at a homeless shelter—the stigma was the same: such kids were perceived as dirty and foul-smelling, while their parents were derided as crackheads, hos, deadbeats.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“But since 1985, rent prices nationwide have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Like many men and women attempting to rebuild their lives after a period of incarceration, the twenty-three-year-old had confronted a harsh reality upon release: his prospects of securing not only a job but a place to live were exceedingly grim.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“the extra property inspections and administrative hassle that came with the voucher program, and they believed that accepting vouchers would hinder their ability to raise rents at will: if they wanted to charge more, they would need to get approval from the housing authority.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“she was neither bitter nor nostalgic. She just wanted to move into one of those units herself.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Roughly fourteen million poor renter households who qualified for housing assistance would never receive it. But everyone in Britt’s world knew at least one co-worker or cousin’s friend who had gotten a voucher. For these lucky few”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“that both the local and national response to homelessness was being hobbled by a kind of willful myopia. Instead of an honest assessment of why scores of people were continuing to become unhoused—poverty wages, out-of-control rents, greed, racism, gentrification—there was bloodless technocratic talk of “leveraging resources” and “program deliverables.” Instead of tenants’ rights workshops and political advocacy, there were mandatory parenting classes. “Not everything that can be faced can be changed,” James Baldwin, Carla’s favorite writer, observed in a 1962 essay. “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” For Carla, that summed it up. Even if genuine solutions remained out of reach, even if they were deemed too radical or unrealistic, Carla felt it was necessary to at least reckon with the actual causes of the problem. And chief among those causes, she felt, was a fundamentally unjust, profit-maximizing rental market—the “housing Hunger Games,” as she referred to it.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“For months, housing activists and health officials had been arguing that during a lethal pandemic, being deprived of shelter could quite literally be a death sentence.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“It used to be that owning a home was held up as the ultimate goal”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Each January”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America