Where Solutions Should Focus

This week on The Intercept Briefing: What does it mean to work full-time in America and still not afford a place to live? We're resharing our conversation with journalist Brian Goldstone, whose new book  “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” examines this growing crisis. Goldstone's book — a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction — reveals how people holding down jobs are increasingly living in their cars, motels, shelters, or on the streets. This episode originally aired August 29, 2025.

Episode Description: 

Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.

The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.

Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.

“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It's an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”

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