Sunday Books & Culture: Before We Can Fix This Crisis, We First Have to Feel the Crisis
In "There Is No Room for Us," Brian Goldstone takes readers into a world of homelessness and the institutional challenges that have narrowed our understanding and impeded progress.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Introduction
In There Is No Place for Us, journalist Brian Goldstone tells the stories of five Atlanta families and their struggles with homelessness. These stories will challenge your perception of homelessness across the country, and here locally.
These families work lots of jobs for low pay, plan and save for their futures as much as they are able, push their children to do well in school, and work to build family and community even when they are often forced from community by forces beyond their control.
And these families do not neatly fall into categories of homelessness. Goldstone shows the fluidity of homelessness, and helps us better understand how the way we talk about it — as a problem that often has addiction or mental health issues at its core— is fundamentally mistaken.
There Is No Place for Us delivers an intimate look at how the families Goldstone writes about became homeless, the wide range of situations that create homelessness, as well as the many ways that living without a home manifests itself in people’s lives.
The book requires an investment of time, but then, complex problems require an investment.
Is it worth the investment?
Unequivocally. Because as Goldstone reveals, our perceptions of homelessness are not just fatally flawed, but our understanding of how many people it affects are grossly underestimated, and the sources we depend on to understand homelessness are themselves inadequate to helping us better understand the reality and scope of the issues.
The only way is to begin to correct our misperceptions is to go inside the lives of those wrestling with homelessness. Goldstone’s book is the single best road into that world.
Recently, Goldstone spoke with the Advance about the problems with how homelessness is defined, the misperceptions that dominate popular understandings of the homeless, and journalism’s responsibility to do a better job of understanding and explaining the challenge that has become a national crisis.
An edited version of that conversation follows.
The Advance Interview with Brian Goldstone
THE ADVANCE: Your book offers a pointed criticism of the federally mandated Point-in-Time Count that localities lean on to measure the homeless population. Can you talk more about that, and how the Point-in-Time count distorts the homeless problem here in the United States?
BRIAN GOLDSTONE: The Point-in-Time count is vital to how we as a nation and as particular cities and communities not only count the homeless, but how we understand its nature and root causes. But there’s also a lot going on every January when volunteers and service providers fan out across the country to count the homeless.
I think there are two separate things to remember about the Point-in-Time count.
The first are the well documented problems with the count on its own terms.
The count takes place on what is often one of the coldest night of the year, thus counters are going to miss a certain portion of the homeless population who are doing anything they can to not be outside on that particular night. This includes people who are in emergency rooms or in prison, for example, who are not counted.
Supporters of the Point-in-Time count will correctly point out that it is not meant to be an objective comprehensive count. It’s meant to be a kind of benchmark, or to give us a sense from one year to the next of trends and so forth. And that’s fine.
The problem comes in when the numbers make their way into newspaper headlines or media accounts that will proclaim without any of the necessary caveats that homelessness is, for example, down 4 percent year-over-year, or that X number of people are homeless in a given city of state.
The second, bigger, problem, however, is who’s left out of the count.
I was rather surprised, for example, to find that none of the families who I follow in my book would have been counted in that yearly census.
I try to argue that this not accidental, that there is a history to that exclusion, and it isn’t just a bureaucratic oversight. One way we as a country since the 1980s, when mass homelessness first exploded in the U.S., have managed to “reduce” homelessness is by defining vast portions of the total homeless population out of existence so that they literally don’t count.
This profoundly distorts our understanding of the true scale and magnitude of this crisis.
THE ADVANCE: Can you quantify by how much we are undercounting the number of homeless in our society?
GOLDSTONE: The Point-in-Time count has over the past two years shown the highest levels of homelessness nationally ever seen. If we widen the lens and expand our vision to include all the families who are doubled up with others, families trapped in extended stay hotels, and others staying in truly horrendous conditions, then I will argue that the true number of homeless is roughly three million men, women and children compared to the roughly 770,000 counted in the federal census.
Expanding our understanding of how broad the homeless problem is doesn’t end with numbers, however. It also dramatically changes our sense of the nature and characteristics of this crisis. For example, when we see the number of children who have been pushed into homelessness, we can no longer indulge some of the comforting myths about who is becoming homeless.
So, expanding our lens and truly coming to terms with this problem begins to reveal the really, really profound consequences far beyond the numbers themselves. Further, without being too conspiratorial about it, I do think that there has been a vested interest in maintaining as narrow a scope as possible when it comes to defining homelessness, because once the scope has been narrowed, it’s easier to say that the problem is being tackled.
THE ADVANCE: As thorough as your book is, there is a fascinating omission. You don’t talk about the housing first policy that has guided federal policy in recent decades. Why did you not discuss this policy, which has become controversial?
GOLDSTON: To be honest there wasn’t a deliberate choice made to not talk about housing first.
I’m a huge proponent of housing first, but I’m also a huge proponent of writing about who is being missed and who is being left out of the homeless issue. There are a lot of people who aren’t even on the radar because of the exclusion that I’ve been describing. So my book is really about expanding our lens to better understand homelessness.
It’s concerning, for example, that public housing is somehow left out of the conversation about homelessness, but we favor talking about addiction and mental health and lifestyle choices.
That we talk about homelessness in this way is a huge reason why this catastrophe continues to spiral.
For some of the people in my book, if there had been early enough interventions, then their lives would likely be quite different. Just having a roof overhead may have stopped Michelle’s addiction to alcohol, for example, from becoming what it did.
This matters because it isn’t possible to fit Michelle’s journey to homelessness into a neat category that we tend to peg homelessness into. What I witnessed in my reporting is that these categories that we come up with to separate people into distinct homeless populations is largely false and arbitrary.
I think Michelle in the book is the perfect example of how these categories fail. When the book opens, she’s making Christmas Eve dinner for her family in an apartment. And by the time the book ends, she’s sleeping in a MARTA station in the throes of alcoholism.
My hope is that the reader will see not only all the tiny steps along the way that could have prevented this from becoming, you know, literal, chronic homelessness, but all of the ways that this homelessness is not a fixed state or static condition. But a spectrum of insecurity that includes someone being housed one day in their car, and the next day in a hotel with their kids.
Homelessness is a very fluid condition.
THE ADVANCE: Homelessness doesn’t look to be a topic that you’re not going to abandon for the next assignment. What’s your next step now that you have this incredible book?
GOLDSTONE: I did an event during the book tour in Washington D.C. with a hero of mine. Her name is Sarah Nelson. She’s the head of The Flight Attendants union and a labor dynamo. After reading my book, she said something about it that in retrospect has become a guiding ethos for me.
She said that she realized reading it that “before we can fix this crisis, we first have to feel the crisis,” and wow, and I absolutely agree with that.
And I realized when she said this, that that’s exactly what I was hoping this book would do. That it would help people feel this crisis. Even those who have been steeped in housing policy or the world of direct services. Social workers, people who know this front and back. As well as though who have a glancing familiarity with these problems. I hope this book helps us all encounter anew what it’s like for the parents and their kids that I write about.
When people feel this crisis, my hope is that readers will walk away from it with new perspectives, and policy change and solutions will begin to emerge organically from the feeling of following these families and their journeys.
I want readers to feel this crisis and develop compassion, of course. Empathy is wonderful. But what I’m really hoping in terms of feeling is that readers will feel some of the anger that I felt while reporting this book, even rage at times that this suffering was being inflicted on these kids, on these adults in such utterly preventable ways.
This is so unnecessary.
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