Americans are unusually preoccupied with work. It is not just that we think about work all the time, that we feel guilty about not working, that we don’t take off all of our paid vacation days. It’s that we are constantly worrying about how much other people are working. You have surely had that coworker who side-eyed your sick day or complained that others weren’t pulling their weight. Maybe you were that coworker. We are all beholden, in our own minds and in the minds of others, to what Max Weber called “the Protestant ethic” of work.

Our new Silicon Valley overlords have taken this mindset to new levels of insanity and fraudulence. They boast about sleeping in their offices and their 120-hour workweeks as they “build the modern world” and then claim that no one else is working at all—an attitude that now dominates the federal government, where a department of dipshit memelords have authorized themselves to root out waste and slackerdom by firing thousands of civil service workers. The specter of undiscovered millions of people getting something for nothing, who can’t even write five bullet points describing what they did on the job last week, is very useful for conservatives (and any billionaire who might want cover for plundering the federal treasury). An untold number of government workers, they tell us, are getting paid to do nothing or to do bullshit; worst of all, some of what they’re doing is woke. The self-­proclaimed watchdogs of DOGE can pretend they’re shoring up a system predicated on hard work and merit while actually doing little besides destroying the ability of everyone else to rely on Social Security for their retirement or public education for their children—things that were once ostensibly benefits of living in the land of opportunity.

All of this neuroticism, the judging and the self-congratulation, makes the bitter pill go down a bit more smoothly: You must work, or you’ll die. Sometimes even when you do work, you might still risk death or injury; you might also lack healthcare or even a place to live. Indeed, between 40 and 60 percent of those experiencing homelessness are, in fact, working. But this is not the popular perception of homelessness, perhaps because it so thoroughly disproves those core principles of the American ethos.

A new book by Brian Goldstone looks at five families in Atlanta who are in this exact situation—and however thoroughly these people embody the supposed work ethic of this country, it does not save them, nor does it inspire the government to care about what happens to them. The book’s title, a quote from one of its subjects, precisely captures the dilemma these people face: There Is No Place for Us.

Where do the anti-homeless crusaders want these people to go? I live in Los Angeles, where homeless people languish at the doorstep of Yet Another Small Plates Restaurant With $19 Cocktails, and where the reaction to this daily sight has been growing popular support for repression and forced banishment—to wherever, just not this street, or the next, or the next. Some people end up in the desert, an even more ecologically inadvisable place for large-scale human habitation than Los Angeles. Some end up living in RVs on quiet residential streets, much to the chagrin of Nextdoor users. Some are just pushed from block to block over and over again, often losing their belongings in each euphemistically named “sweep.” Others live in their cars or sleep on friends’ or relatives’ floors, and these people often don’t end up being counted as homeless, Goldstone notes. But the “where” isn’t really the point, of course; that implies that the Disapproving Class, which ranges from rabid conservatives to NPR liberals, cares about whether the homeless person continues to exist anywhere at all.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that many Americans find it so hard to square these concepts—homelessness and working—even if the facts tell a different story: that many people are living in shelters or transient hotels or their cars while working full-time. We don’t want to see people living on the streets, but we also really don’t want to know that the people serving our McChickens or cleaning our hospitals are homeless too. After all, that means they’re just like us.

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There Is No Place for Us gives us five thorough and devastating accounts of what the housing system does and why, under its current organization, it fails so many. Sure, the system seems to work for most, whatever standard of “most” satisfies you. But it also sends people whose houses have burned down to extortionate, predatory hotels with their children. It pushes people unable to make rent to relapse into alcoholism and drives mothers back to their abusive ex-boyfriends. It splits up families and forces others to turn to their families for support, even when those they turn to are barely making it themselves. It erases neighborhoods and wipes out communities. Goldstone follows these five families as they are pushed into homelessness and then details their desperate attempts to hold on. Many of his subjects go through similar trials, though each one showcases a slightly different aspect of the 
system’s cruelty.

We are first introduced to Britt, who is living with her two young children in her great-grandmother’s small apartment, waiting for a housing voucher. The voucher eventually arrives, but Britt later loses the apartment that she rents with it when her lease is not renewed after she lets a relative stay with her for a few weeks upon his release from prison. The next place Britt finds, she loses when the building is sold and slated to be demolished to make way for higher-priced condos, retail stores, and restaurants. She and her children spend a tense few months in a friend’s living room until that arrangement, too, falls apart—and the next, and the next.

Kara’s story of housing instability begins when she is evicted after withholding rent following weeks without hot water, and the judge sides with her landlord. Kara and her four children, one just an infant, spend the night in her car. Her difficulty finding childcare while she looks for housing and decent work is the through line of her story, a situation that worsens with the Covid-19 pandemic. Even when Kara’s luck changes and she is approved for housing assistance through Nicholas House, a local nonprofit, another crisis hits: Her DoorDash driver account, her sole source of income, is deactivated after “multiple incidents of extreme lateness” (meaning the order was delivered more than 11 minutes late), and the apartment she was supposed to lease is somehow rented to someone else. In her desperation to secure a home, she decides to forgo the year of rental assistance that Nicholas House would provide (which would have required an environmental review of the new apartment), vowing instead that she will work “two jobs, three jobs, ninety hours a week” or whatever it takes. When we leave Kara, she and her children are housed, but in this precarious situation, with the family’s shelter dependent on her maintaining an infinite capacity to do more work—and forced to leave her children unsupervised while she does.

Celeste has been living in a run-down hotel after her house burned down. The landlord “evicted” her from the burned-down property without her knowledge, making it next to impossible for Celeste to be approved to live anywhere else. At this point, she discovers that she has ovarian and breast cancer. She ends up living with her two small sons in a derelict building where individual rooms are rented to homeless individuals and families, which she calls “Hell House”: rodent-­infested, dirty, musty, with “maggots on unwashed plates.” Celeste’s weight drops to 85 pounds as the effects of her cancer treatment persist. Her story ends with her packing up her two kids and their belongings and heading off to Tampa, with no idea of what sort of housing might await them there, either.

Maurice and Natalia, whose landlord sells their building, fall behind on the rent at their new apartment, having sunk their savings into securing it in the first place through a company called Liberty Rent, which will cosign leases for tenants with poor credit in exchange for a high up-front fee. The couple are evicted from the new place and move to an Extended Stay hotel, where the monthly rent is $2,200; plus they are still in debt to Liberty Rent for the money the company paid after they were evicted.

And there is Michelle, a mother of three who loses her home when her boyfriend, the father of her youngest child, loses his job. Michelle’s story is also told through the lens of her oldest child, DJ, who is thrust into the role of parenting his siblings as his mother relapses into alcoholism. Michelle quits her job at the Salvation Army, running the desk of the shelter where she once lived, and ends up in the arms of an abusive boyfriend. DJ takes his siblings to his great aunt’s place, and Michelle ends up in jail, then sleeping on the street, then fleeing an abusive boyfriend without her belongings, then, finally, on Facetime with her children. Crying, she tells them that she has to go away and get “straightened out.” We don’t know where or how. And then she is gone. Goldstone doesn’t try to bring these stories to a neat or happy ending, in part because none of them have ended yet. We have merely been afforded the opportunity to dip into these lives for a time.

The stories in There Is No Place for Us are not just a litany of unconnected Bad Events, though the specific twists and turns are very bad. The book is a powerful narrative of exactly why it is so hard even for people working as hard as they can to get secure housing: shitty landlords, extortionate extended-­stay hotels, impossible-to-­access social services and housing vouchers. They do everything they can and still end up in Hell. They are products of an extremely abusive and dysfunctional system.

Who is creating and enforcing that system? There are the landlords, of course: from the enormous corporations with their algorithmic rent increases, which own thousands of units at a time and disproportionately purchase lower-­cost housing, all the way down to the seedy individuals who gouge on the rent for dilapidated extended-stay hotel rooms. (Overcharging people who have no money is, seemingly paradoxically, remarkably profitable.) There are also the courts and judges who enforce landlord-protecting laws, such as ruling that a renter whose only recourse, whose only mote of power, against an abusive landlord is to withhold rent should not have done so. (This part of the system also includes the police, who enforce these evictions with guns.) And there are the local government employees, such as the one who sighs and seems sympathetic when an incredulous Celeste finds out that her cancer doesn’t qualify her for public assistance because her “vulnerability score” isn’t high enough, according to the her caseworker: Yup, that’s crazy, but it is what it is, and it’s the government employee’s job to do the crazy thing over and over again. Next, please.

But what else is there for that government worker to do? Nothing. She has no ability to legislate housing or appropriate more funds. She too is just part of the system, and her part is to enforce the limits of the programs. She is a border guard of the welfare state and can only act in that capacity. Even if these programs are ostensibly meant to help those in need, they also serve a different purpose: to get everyone back to work. This system ties work to survival as viciously and plainly as it can. It gives you no choice but to clock in to have your best chance (but no guarantee) of a secure place to live. And it helps when you are surrounded by evidence of what happens if you don’t—more and more homelessness, shuttered businesses in declining neighborhoods, people out of their minds with illness or grief or addiction, big new prisons, sirens, glass and blood on the sidewalk, death. It can always get worse.

This unfulfilled bargain is the heart of Goldstone’s research: The “working homeless” are a large population of people whose labor is still being extracted by an exploitative system, even as every other supposed benefit of living in this country and working for a living has been denied to them. The economy depends on their labor, and their labor is a direct result of their need to survive, every single day. Without being this close to the knife’s edge, they might do something better.

The subjects of the book do attempt to find alternatives, seeking out the remaining forms of public help, which are often impossible to get or to hold onto. Their efforts to survive are barely enough. Michelle sells food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar just to pay the rent on the awful hotel room where she and her children live, one basic necessity of survival elbowing out the others for a moment. Kara uses her food stamps to stock her freezer with meat, but it spoils when her electricity is shut off after months of implausibly high bills—likely due to bad wiring in her apartment complex. Management and the electric company pass the blame back and forth, leaving Kara with no recourse. Without public assistance, and with everyone else struggling too, the only choice is to keep working until you literally can’t. The problem here isn’t unemployment: It’s that the only jobs that Goldstone’s subjects can get are terrible, exhaustingly far away, unpleasant, and always underpaid.

The deftness with which Goldstone weaves together these personal tragedies with the details of the systemic cruelties that explain them is remarkable. Celeste gets evicted from her burned-down house because the state of Georgia, incredibly, allows landlords to do that—a policy choice, made intentionally. Even when Britt is briefly able to use an unbelievably rare housing voucher—only 1,674 were issued that year in the entire state—she can’t find any landlords who will accept it, because they don’t have to and because the market in Atlanta is booming, as gentrification pushes mostly Black families farther and farther out. (Of those 1,674 vouchers, Goldstone writes, 1,055 expired before they could be used.) Britt is later kicked out of a derelict building because investors can make more money selling it. The rippling effects of these policy decisions are felt mainly by those who had no hand in them.

The complexity of these issues has always been the challenge of so-called “policy reporting,” at least in my experience of writing about healthcare: How do you tell stories about the impact of purposefully byzantine policies and laws on people’s lives when the details are usually so complicated that most people would lose the thread? How can you accurately explain why someone lost their health insurance for bureaucratic reasons, a situation often involving a lot of phone calls or letters or false explanations from customer service representatives, without the reader just closing the tab? Yet Goldstone has managed to do that here for one of the most complicated issues in the country, with wide-ranging causes and consequences that touch on many aspects of modern American life. It is an incredible feat.

In the end, the effect of There Is No Place for Us is stunning and bleak. Goldstone tells stories of undeniable injustice, none of them with a happy ending or a victory for the good guys. Each story is incontrovertible evidence that the American dream is a lie and that hard work, loving your family, getting good grades, or whatever other bullshit this country supposedly reveres doesn’t guarantee a safe living. In fact, they have absolutely no bearing on whether you end up OK or sleeping in your car with your three kids.

These stories are not five individually explicable outliers concerning people who were simply unfortunate; instead, they are five out of millions of similar stories. As readers conclude There Is No Place for Us, they will feel both the deeply personal impacts of the tragedies explored in the book—the particular beloved children’s toys that stung parents’ hearts when they imagined them tossed in the trash during an eviction; the foods the families ate or cooked for others; the mornings that our subjects had no sleep and had to take the bus to work—and the horrible breadth of it all. Every tragedy is unique, and yet in some respects it is not; these tragedies are everywhere, all the time, just often hidden from sight.

And what does it mean to have these stories laid out? If there were any justice, it would lead to enormous change. They are stories of people so obviously oppressed by our institutions and forces far beyond their control—people who are not merely unlucky or who have made bad choices—that the need ought to be clear. A book like this ought to be a rallying cry, the 21st-century equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Our problem, clearly, is not a lack of information in the halls of power. Yet the experience of the first five months of the Trump administration has shown that more information outside the halls of power seems to have a limited impact on whether anything changes, too. Reading this book might not cause any policy to change. But it should change how Americans see each other and themselves, or at least our assumptions about what hard work gets you. If the deal is off—if working hard, following the rules, and scraping together everything you can doesn’t ensure a good life for you and your children—perhaps it’s time to stop imagining that the source of the problem is some hypothetical layabouts who aren’t working as hard as you. Perhaps if enough people realize this, and after enough years of letting it sink in, we might have a cure for America’s work mind virus.