readorperish 's review for:

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
4.5
challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced
This is an excellent book; well researched and reported. It’s incredibly raw and full of disturbing content. While it’s easy to blame the victims of homelessness for their predicaments, the author makes it clear that most of these families are where they are because of systematic racism, the US government’s abandonment of any semblance of an equitable housing program, and laws favoring the wealthy and investors when it comes to property ownership. What the five families in this book have to go through just to barely get by are an indictment of our country’s values. Working low-paying jobs doesn’t cover exploding rent. Most people faced with the type of poverty and discrimination described in this book would fail. As the book states near the end, the cause of homelessness is a shortage of affordable housing. Will the US get serious about solving this problem? Not as long as those who govern us are being bought by the wealthy and real estate investors.    
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