THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US

Down and out in Atlanta.

Pete Hamill, one of the last great tabloid journalists, practiced what he preached. In News Is a Verb, he argued that reporters ought to write about ordinary people—not celebrities—and live among them. Goldstone, a veteran journalist, does both and does them well in this labor of love. While there are trenchant observations about the U.S. in this book, Goldstone focuses on the homeless crisis in Atlanta, where he lives. The “Silicon Valley of the South,” as it’s often called, is the nation’s third-fastest-growing metropolitan area. Goldstone seems to know every neighborhood and street and a great many of the down-and-out citizens he writes about who sleep on the streets, in shelters, and in hotels unfit for human habitation. Against the odds, these people hold down jobs—but, he writes, their “paychecks are not enough to keep a roof over their heads.” A map of Atlanta—with roads, highways, hotels, and motels—appears at the front of the book, so no reader can get lost, and there are ample notes and an eye-opening epilogue. Goldstone explains that he did not pay any of his sources for information. In a profession that’s increasingly lax when it comes to ethics, Goldstone is a model of ethical journalism. To protect the privacy of the people he writes about, he doesn’t use real names. With a Ph.D. in anthropology, he trains an empathetic eye on families that are struggling in an increasingly gentrified city that prizes property above people. “Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” he writes. “They’re being pushed.”

Make a place for this book alongside Jane Jacobs’ classic Death and Life of Great American Cities.