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

“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

“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 a 2018 survey of extended-stay guests in Gwinnett County”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“In Boston, a tenant earning the local minimum wage would have to log 141 hours a week to afford the same apartment; in San Francisco, it’s 160 hours. Confronted with the bleak arithmetic of stagnant incomes and out-of-control housing expenses, people cut back wherever possible. Eventually they’ve cut all they can.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Wearing slacks and a dark blazer”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Driving around the nation’s richest cities”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Taking in the scene”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“why. It changes our understanding of the breadth, character, and urgency of the problem. An accurate appraisal tells us that, as a country, we are in the throes of a crisis of unprecedented proportions. —”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“LaQuana Alexander eased her ailing beige sedan past Efficiency’s busted security gate, waving at a cluster of young men hanging out nearby. They stared blankly back at her. It was a Saturday morning in early May, and LaQuana—or LA Pink, as she was known—had set aside the next several hours to give away food and clothing at the hotel. Efficiency’s residents were accustomed to such activities: a few area churches had begun making sporadic visits to the extended-stays lining Candler Road, dropping off nonperishables and sack lunches for the kids. But the residents had never met anybody like LA Pink. Her”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Every day in America, caseworkers are forced to turn homeless families away for not being “homeless” in the right way.”
― 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

“The ultimate signifier of this “new Atlanta” was the BeltLine”
― 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

“The neighborhood’s rapid change was celebrated in media reports across the country”
― 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

“This was the Candler Road name-dropped in lyrics by Gucci Mane”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“Today there isn’t a single state”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

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

“Urban planners—increasingly concerned with growth, and so beholden to the priorities of developers and investors—play a critical role not only in creating rent gaps where none previously existed but in helping landlords and property owners exploit them. In this way, gentrification becomes a political process as much as a social and economic one: an outcome of zoning changes and tax abatements, infrastructure upgrades and public-private partnerships.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

“morning. Britt was still riding high a few days later when she stopped at the Walmart on Cleveland Avenue. Before Thanksgiving, she had finished her Christmas shopping for the kids, putting their presents on layaway, and now the deadline to settle her bill had arrived. At the customer service counter, she was greeted by a young guy. “Did you not see the news?” he asked. Earlier in the week, Tyler Perry, the entertainment mogul, had spent over $400,000 paying off every item on layaway at that specific store, in addition to another local Walmart.”
― Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America