Recommended Reading

Over the course of the year, I’ll share books and other reading material I think is worth reviewing for those of you who want to dive deeper.

There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (by Brian Goldstone): Journalist Brian Goldstone exposes a troubling phenomenon in American cities—the dramatic rise of the working homeless, people who maintain full-time employment yet cannot afford stable housing. Through deeply reported, multi-year accounts of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in an increasingly gentrified city, Goldstone reveals how skyrocketing rents, low wages, and inadequate tenant protections have created a crisis where families are being pushed into homelessness not by a failing economy but by a thriving one. The book documents how rapid urban growth and economic boom times are leading to catastrophic displacement, particularly in cities like Atlanta, challenging the fundamental American belief that hard work and determination lead to success and security.

Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern): Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern investigate why homelessness rates vary so dramatically across American cities by shifting focus from individuals to metropolitan housing markets. Using accessible statistical analysis, the authors test conventional explanations for homelessness—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none of these factors explain the regional variation in homelessness rates across the country. Instead, they demonstrate that housing market conditions, particularly the cost and availability of rental housing (specifically absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates), offer a far more convincing explanation for why cities like Seattle have much higher homelessness rates than other cities, even those with higher rates of poverty.

In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to do about it (2020, by Jill Khadduri and Marybeth Shinn): Homelessness experts Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri shift understanding of homelessness away from individual disability to larger contexts of poverty, income inequality, housing affordability, and social exclusion. The book is organized around four central questions—Who becomes homeless? Why do people become homeless? How do we end homelessness? How do we prevent it?—and draws on comprehensive research to provide guidance on ending homelessness for people who experience it and preventing others from reaching the point where they have no alternative to sleeping on the street or in emergency shelters. The authors demonstrate that we already know how to end homelessness if we devote the necessary resources to doing so, making the case that homelessness is ultimately a choice made not by people sleeping on the streets but by society choosing to look the other way.