There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone

Homelessness seems like a fundamentally simple problem to solve – Just give them homes. So what is the issue?

Here is an anecdote: someone once told me about how every morning they would see a young, clearly homeless man by the exit of a highway begging for money, and would give the person what they could. Until, one day for lunch he saw that same young man eating at the cafeteria that he himself frequented. That for some reason changed things for him, and he stopped giving the young homeless guy money. The reasoning was a lot of unclear thinking and poorly put together thoughts – he should be saving that money, I work hard for those meals at the cafeteria – it isn’t fair…

These are all very stupid reasons. He should have saved your money? And do what with it? He could have bought groceries, sure. But what if he didn’t have a home. I was homeless for about three different periods of my life, amounting to a time of about two years. I never brought groceries. I wouldn’t have had anywhere to fucking put them. I ate a lot of very cheap fast food in those days. Apparently, that was a moral failing too.

So at the end of the day, it is lack of empathy that generates these opinions.

Those of us that are not homeless have trouble understanding how it can happen, and we tend to see our fortune as a moral virtue and their misfortune a sort of moral failing (for more thoughts on this, see The Tyranny of Merit).

This book, I hope, will dissuade a lot of people out of that opinion. It painstakingly goes through some of the horror stories of modern American poverty by following five families around the Atlanta area, and demonstrates how a lot of people are ending up as homeless not because of their moral failures but because of American society’s moral failings. Business and financial institutions have been set up to intentionally put people into precarious financial situations that make ending up in increasing debts and destitution very likely.

I am not sure I want to go into some of the examples of what these families go through. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of spoilers, but I can comfortably say that some of the things the narrative goes into really makes your damn blood boil. It is pretty damn horrific. And the book really does produce a lot of evidence that demonstrates that working full time is no longer enough for a person to live with dignity in the united states. The machine of capitalism is no longer working for the people in that country.