In a city celebrated for its booming economy and rapid development, thousands of working families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brian Goldstone brought that reality to the forefront Oct. 2 during the 21st Decatur Book Festival’s keynote conversation at First Baptist Church of Decatur. Moderated by author and activist Brea Baker, the discussion centered on Goldstone’s book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” which follows five Atlanta families experiencing homelessness despite being employed.
The book won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was named one of the 10 best books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Opening the festival, Bailee Yarbrough, Executive Director of the Decatur Book Festival, emphasized the importance of literature in bringing communities together and confronting difficult issues.
“As the Decatur Book Festival enters into its third decade, we remain committed to the idea that books build strong communities and reflect the complexity of the world around us,” Yarbrough said.
“Our guiding mantra has been our community,” she added. “It’s not my festival. It’s not the team’s festival. It’s the community.”
Baker, whose book “Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft & The Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership” examines land dispossession and Black land ownership, guided the conversation toward the structural forces behind homelessness and the importance of challenging public perceptions.
“There’s a bittersweetness because what you wrote about is a very harrowing, harsh reality that a lot of us typically are walking past and not thinking about, and the book forces us to think about it,” Baker said.
For Goldstone, a former Decatur resident who wrote portions of the book in local coffee shops, returning carried particular significance.
“Most of the book was reported … just a couple of miles away from the festival,” Goldstone said in an interview with SaportaReport.
Goldstone’s investigation began after his wife, a nurse practitioner at Mercy Care, noticed that many of her patients were employed but experiencing homelessness. Some worked in warehouses, drove for rideshare companies or held jobs in education.
“I think I had the assumption that many even well-intentioned, educated people have, which is that a job … surely that will be an exit from homelessness,” Goldstone said.
His reporting challenged that belief.
Through the experiences of five families, Goldstone examines how rising rents, evictions, low wages and redevelopment can push working residents out of housing.
At the festival, he argued that Atlanta’s prosperity and housing instability are not necessarily separate phenomena.
“This is not a crisis of poverty. This is a crisis of a very particular kind of prosperity,” Goldstone said.
One family featured in the book is led by Celeste, a warehouse worker whose home was destroyed by fire. Goldstone described how an eviction judgment subsequently complicated her housing search, eventually forcing her family into an extended-stay hotel.
Baker also questioned Goldstone about the responsibility journalists carry when documenting vulnerable communities, particularly when their reporting involves differences in race, class and lived experiences.
Goldstone said building trust with the families required years of reporting and creative methods, including dash cameras and digital recorders.
“It was very important to me that the people in this book not be human arguments, like mere vehicles for the point that I might want to make, but that they be allowed to live and breathe as human beings in this book,” he said.
Goldstone estimates that including people staying in vehicles, extended-stay hotels or temporarily with others would bring the nationwide homeless population to approximately 4 million, substantially exceeding official figures.
Despite the difficult subject matter, he hopes readers emerge with a sense of possibility rather than hopelessness.
“Before we can fix this crisis, we have to feel this crisis,” Goldstone said.
Ultimately, he called for greater public investment in permanently affordable housing and recognition of housing as a fundamental human right.
For Goldstone, the families’ stories do not end with the final pages of his book.
“The story is not done, and it is on all of us to ensure that not just the families in the book, but the millions of people like them, have a different ending to their story.”
