Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.u.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

In this episode, a look at homelessness in America today.

Journalist Brian Goldstone is the author of a new

book, There's No Place for Us, Working and Homeless in America. He talks with me about the profile

of homeless people and how it's changed dramatically in recent years as more and more families with

working parents are being priced out of affordable housing. We also discuss the

woefully inadequate support systems currently in place and how things are likely to get much

worse. Let's listen. Brian Goldstone, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

Tell us a little bit about you and your work. I am a journalist. Before that, I was an anthropologist. I guess I still am an anthropologist,

but I was more firmly sort of situated in the academy. I have a PhD in cultural anthropology,

but for about the last seven or eight years, I've been working primarily as a journalist

writing, kind of long-form

magazine stories, and one story that I wrote for the New Republic in 2018, 2019, led me to write this book.

And tell us a little bit about your book?

Yeah, so the book is called There Is No Place for Us, Working and Homeless

in America, and it follows five families here in Atlanta where I live, who are working full-time.

The parents have not just one job, but in some cases multiple jobs, and it's not enough to secure stable housing for themselves and their children.

And so the book follows them over a period of, in the book of about two to three years,

...