Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brian Goldstone will present his work on homelessness and low-wage labor in America.
About this Event

A book signing will follow, courtesy of The King’s English Bookshop. 

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.

By turns heartbreaking and urgent, illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right. Goldstone’s book won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction.

Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a PhD in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. — Crown publishers

This event is co-sponsored by the College of Social and Behavioral Science. Additional support provided by Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts & Parks.

Views expressed in Tanner Humanities Center events do not reflect the official views of the Center or the University of Utah.