Brian Goldstone: Private equity profits from homelessness

Journalist Brian Goldstone's investigative book "There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America" exposes a fundamental disconnect between the American narrative of upward mobility through work and the actual lived experience of millions of employed individuals experiencing homelessness. Goldstone's six-year research effort, which follows five families navigating Atlanta's housing landscape and interviewing workers across multiple cities, reveals that homelessness in 21st-century America is not primarily a function of unemployment, substance abuse, or personal failure—but rather a structural consequence of wage stagnation and housing cost inflation that has outpaced income gains nationwide.

The research identifies a "shadow realm" of homelessness largely invisible to housed Americans. Rather than the stereotypical street homeless population, this cohort comprises full-time and multiple part-time workers employed in essential low-wage sectors: Amazon warehouse workers, grocery store employees, daycare providers, and DoorDash drivers who lack stable housing despite consistent employment. Goldstone documents that no single state, city, or county in the United States permits a worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour—or prevailing local minimum wages—to afford a two-bedroom home at fair market rent, rendering low-wage work structurally insufficient as a pathway out of homelessness.

A critical focus of Goldstone's investigation involves private equity's role in housing displacement. His reporting documents instances where private equity firms acquire both single-family homes and extended-stay motels, subsequently extracting profits through rental escalation and aggressive eviction practices. Goldstone illustrates this dynamic through case studies, including an Atlanta family pushed into homelessness after their private equity-owned home raised rents beyond affordability. This private sector activity occurs alongside documented failures in federal housing assistance programs, including Section 8, which Goldstone argues have been inadequately scaled to address national housing demand.

Goldstone's framing of homelessness as a "spectrum of insecurity" rather than a binary housed/unhoused condition broadens understanding of housing precarity to include vehicle-dwelling, extended-stay motel residency, and overcrowded couch-surfing arrangements—all populated predominantly by employed individuals and families with children. The research challenges the foundational American myth that "hard work is the key to success," presenting empirical evidence that systemic economic forces—housing financialization, wage compression, and shredded safety nets—have decoupled employment from housing security for a substantial working population.