Sept Book of the Month: There is No Place for Us

This month I want to recommend a book that is not a Christian book. It will not quote Scripture or explain theology. But I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I finished it, and I believe it is one of the most important things our community could read together right now.

“There Is No Place for Us” by Brian Gladstone is a Pulitzer Prize winning book that follows five Atlanta families over several years as they try to hold onto housing while working. Not families who lost their jobs. Families who worked, sometimes two and three jobs between them, and still could not keep a roof over their heads. Brian Goldstone, a journalist who lived for a long time in Atlanta, spent years reporting this story, and what he found does not fit the picture most of us carry around in our heads when we hear the word “homeless” or “unhoused.”

We tend to imagine homelessness as something visible. A person on a corner. A tent under a bridge. But Goldstone shows us a much larger and much less visible reality, one made up of people cycling through extended stay motels, doubling up with relatives, sleeping in cars, all while clocking in for work the next morning. Men and women who fall through every crack our systems have, including the cracks in how we define the problem in the first place.

First, I chose this book for us as Atlantans. This is our city. The families in this book are our neighbors, not in the abstract sense but in the literal one. Some of the families Gladstone writes about live within a few miles of Redeemer. The forces pushing them out of housing, rising rents, predatory landlords, a maze of bureaucratic requirements, the slow erasure of affordable neighborhoods as the city grows and changes, are forces shaping the westside and the neighborhoods around us right now. You cannot read this book and drive around Atlanta the same way again.

I also chose it because it is genuinely eye opening. Like many of you all, I have spent years thinking about housing justice and I still found myself surprised, and at times undone, by what Goldstone uncovered. The book does not ask you to feel guilty. It asks you to see clearly. And once you see clearly, it becomes very hard to hold onto easy explanations for why people end up without a stable home.

This is not recommended reading because it fits neatly into a sermon series or a theological theme. It is recommended reading because loving our neighbor requires first knowing our neighbor, and this book will teach you things about the people around you that you did not know you did not know. It is an opportunity to learn, plainly and honestly, from someone who did the hard work of listening to these families for years so the rest of us would not have an excuse not to.

Highlights from the Book

The Working Homeless
Goldstone introduces a category, people who work full time and still cannot secure stable housing. The book argues this is not a fringe problem but a rapidly growing one, hidden in plain sight in cities like ours.

Five Families, Told in Full Rather than Statistics
Goldstone gives us people. Maurice and Natalia. Kara. Families with names, jobs, children, and dignity, followed closely enough that their struggles stop being an issue and start being a story you carry with you.

A Thriving City, Not a Failing One
One of the most disorienting arguments in the book is that these families are not being pushed out by a struggling economy but by a booming one. Atlanta's growth and gentrification are part of what makes housing unreachable for the people who help keep the city running.

The Maze
Goldstone walks through the almost unbelievable obstacles families face, credit and income requirements they cannot meet, application fees they cannot afford, scams targeting people desperate for housing, and bureaucratic delays so long that approved housing assistance can expire before it is ever used.

What Counts as Homelessness
The book presses on how we define and count homelessness in the first place, and shows how our official categories leave out enormous numbers of people who are, in every meaningful sense, without a home.

Summary
There Is No Place for Us will not comfort you, and it is not supposed to. It is a work of patient, deeply reported journalism that asks Atlanta, and every growing American city, to reckon with what our prosperity is costing the people at its margins. Goldstone does not moralize. He simply shows you what is true, and trusts that once you see it, you will not be able to look away.

Like I said, this is not a theology book, but I believe it is exactly the kind of book our faith calls us to read. Loving our neighbor starts with knowing our neighbor, and this book will introduce you to neighbors many of us have driven past for years without ever really seeing. Read it to understand our city better. Read it to understand why housing has become such a defining issue. And read it because these are not distant statistics. They are the people we are called to love, right here, right now.

I want to be honest with you. You may finish this book feeling overwhelmed. The problems Goldstone lays out do not come with easy answers, and you may close the last page with more questions than solutions. That is a fair response to a book like this, and I do not want to talk you out of it. But overwhelmed is not where we are meant to stay. We are people who are called to hope, even and especially when the answers are not clear, and that hope is what frees us to keep seeking, to keep learning, to keep loving and serving our neighbors rather than looking away because the problem feels too large.

Redeemer, my hope is that this book stretches our understanding and deepens our love for this city and the people in it, especially the neighbors our current systems overlook.

Grace and peace,
Pastor Drew