For many, the cost of housing is rising faster than income, as are the costs of other necessities. It’s no surprise then that homelessness is rising both in Iowa and nationally. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Brian Goldstone will speak on these issues at a free event hosted by Drake University’s Harkin Center on Tuesday, which will also be livestreamed on their YouTube channel.
Goldstone’s There Is No Place For Us is a well written, people-first account of several families forced into homelessness by the combination of low-waged work and high prices for housing. These realities are facilitated and often intensified by policies that empower landlords and employers while tying the hands of tenants and employees.
The result is excruciating to read about. I repeatedly had to take breaks while reading because the conditions it depicts are so intensely sad and often infuriating. (Obviously the reality is far worse than the experience of reading about it.) The book has a feel of something like a horror movie; we watch people we have come to care about being relentlessly stalked by a violence they sense is coming but can’t precisely predict, let alone stop.
There Is No Place For Us focuses on people living in Atlanta from the late 2010s until the recent past. The stories don’t so much conclude as they just… stop, in a way that underscores that nothing depicted has been resolved. Goldstone’s subjects are still frantically trying to swim through stormy water, and as the book stresses, they are representative of millions in similar situations. Goldstone presents real people in humanizing detail, while also describing the fundamentally hostile systems that afflict them.
In addition, Goldstone resists temptations that come with this conversation, such as blaming people’s situations on their own choices, whitewashing poor choices they do sometimes make and providing narrative resolution, whether by depicting redemption or destruction. Instead, we watch people dangling on a hook, and when we close the book, we know that none of that has ended. It’s powerful and affecting, especially when delving into the ways people second-guess or blame themselves, and the ways poverty afflicts children in particular.
Especially upsetting in the book is the recurring presence of predatory actors who profit from poor people. There is great wealth to be made from poverty and the further exploitation of poor people’s desperation. We see poor tenants subjected to scams online and by phone, as well as outrageously expensive extended-stay hotels and rooming houses that end up costing more per month for a single room than some pay for apartments or even full houses.
There Is No Place For Us focuses in on Atlanta, but makes clear the same forces are at play in communities across in the United States. Des Moines is one of those places. The Des Moines Register notes that changes at the federal level will likely push several hundred more people out of housing. Iowa Public Radio reports that as of the last count official, there were almost 3,000 Iowans without housing.
While damning enough already, Goldstone argues that these kinds of counts are massive underestimates, sometimes intentionally so: undercounts help politicians avoid fallout for actual conditions and facilitate reduced public expenditure on social services. He contends that the actual national counts are likely only including about one-sixth of the actual population without housing.
Goldstone takes pains to provide historical context to help draw out the bigger sociological picture at play. We learn about a Reagan-era policy shift away from direct government provision of housing toward a market-based system via housing vouchers. We follow as those policies, which treat housing as a commodity like any other, set up a series of massive dominoes which eventually fall on people to devastating effect. Particular emphasis is placed on how revitalization or urban renewal causes housing prices to rise rapidly, leading to many people being pushed out of their homes. The book’s title quotes a woman Goldstone covers named Britt, who notes “there is no place for us” in the story of American success.
The same processes that produce the brutalization of poor people also produce brutes indifferent to that violence, Goldstone notes. Karl Marx’s lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels named the death-dealing effects of ongoing structural violence “social murder,” and in reading There is No Place for Us, we do get a sense that the people it follows are being slowly (and in some cases, not so slowly) killed via daily doses of harmful conditions. That violence is supported by what Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno termed “social coldness,” meaning a kind of indifference to other people that is encouraged by social hierarchy. Without using those terms, Goldstone shows us how social murder and social coldness overlap, working in tandem in the contemporary U.S. at the intersection of low-paying labor markets and high-priced housing markets.
The policy, in Des Moines and across the U.S., of bulldozing homeless people’s tents and often destroying their belongings is simultaneously a deeply cruel attack on people already in conditions of terrible hardship and an attack on the moral character of the rest of us, as it encourages us to be fine with that attack and that hardship. One of many sobering sections in Goldstone’s book focuses on how an anti-eviction campaign was slowly worn down by the brute pressures of having to survive under poverty. That is an uncomfortable reality.
Nevertheless, as the book stresses, collective action to demand decent housing for all is the only real way forward for the people currently being ground between the gears of our society.
Related event:
Fall 2026 Sussman Lecture w/ Brian Goldstone, Sheslow Auditorium, Des Moines, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 7:30 p.m., Free
