the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 15, 2025
This book describes the lives of the working homeless. Their jobs are minimum wage or barely better. They are not counted as homeless as they are not living on the street or in a shelter. Instead, they more and more are unable to find affordable places to rent, so they are forced into living at squalid “Extended Stay” hotels or overcrowded rooming houses or sleeping on the floor of a relative. This means they have no tenant rights and at the same time do not qualify for the limited available aid for the homeless. The author has assembled a stunning array of facts and details of this steadily worsening disaster.
This crisis is especially bad in rapidly gentrifying cities. The author focuses on five families in such a situation in “booming” Atlanta, Georgia. Through an in-depth narrative of these families, he shows the effects of rising rents and frantic profit-driven development, which literally razes what affordable housing there is. You see people working as many hours as they can, sometimes two jobs, but still, pushed to move to less and less desirable (yet more and more expensive) housing. You see hopes dashed, families fractured, move after move destroying any stable life.