Key points:
- Homelessness is a growing crisis, with over 700,000 people officially counted as homeless last year.
- Homelessness is driven by a lack of affordable housing, not individual pathologies, says journalist Brian Goldstone.
- Corporate landlords and private equity firms have reshaped the rental landscape.
Homeless encampment sweeps have become a bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the housing crisis, embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House. Critics warn that the practice does not solve homelessness, but instead pushes it out of sight while the emergency worsens, according to a recent episode of The Intercept Briefing featuring journalist Brian Goldstone and host Laura Flynn.
The discussion builds on reporting published by The Intercept, which frames sweeps as a spectacle that obscures policy failures rather than addressing the shortage of homes people can afford.
Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded, including nearly 150,000 children, according to the program. Those tallies omit the “hidden homeless,” including families doubling up in cramped apartments, rotating through motels, and sleeping in cars.
The conversation highlights how a growing number of households are one setback away from eviction amid rising rents and stagnant wages, with nearly 10 million children living in poverty.
“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” said Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. He argued that what appears as a natural disaster is instead the byproduct of decades of political choices. “It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families,” he said.
The episode traces the policy lineage to President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, which pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing and ushered in a patchwork of vouchers and tax credits.
Goldstone said the shift, combined with later cuts to the safety net, set the stage for today’s shortage of deeply affordable homes and the normalization of homelessness as an inevitable urban condition.
The politics of the present are leaning into punishment and removal. “We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve very dirty, very — got a lot of problems. But we’ve already started that, we’re moving the encampments away — trying to take care of people,” President Donald Trump said in remarks included in the program’s transcript.
Goldstone said the administration’s approach, coupled with proposed cuts to food assistance and health care, will intensify housing instability.
Goldstone’s reporting focuses on working families who cycle across a spectrum of insecurity — from motels to cars to shelters to the street — often excluded from federal definitions that gatekeep assistance.
He contrasted the U.S. Department of Education’s broader recognition of motel-dwelling students and doubled-up families with the narrower U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development criteria that many communities use to determine eligibility for help.
He described a mother in Atlanta who, despite serious health diagnoses and living in an extended-stay hotel, was told she did not meet HUD’s definition of “literal homelessness” and would have to enter a shelter to qualify — only to learn her teenage son would be barred from family shelters because of his age.
Extended-stay motels, he said, have become “extremely profitable homeless shelters” that do not require credit checks, drawing in the “credit underclass” priced out of the formal rental market.
“These hotels … are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. … They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live,” Goldstone said.
He added that weekly rates in such motels often exceed the rent on the apartments families just lost, trapping them in debt while offering substandard conditions.
Goldstone also detailed how corporate landlords and private equity firms have reshaped the rental landscape, citing automated eviction systems that file cases within days of a missed payment and pass court costs on to tenants. He described a family pushed out of a private equity–owned complex and into a studio room at Extended Stay America at more than double their former rent.
During the pandemic, he noted, while traditional hotels emptied, extended-stay chains maintained high occupancy and attracted Wall Street buyers; he pointed to the sale of Extended Stay America for $6 billion as an example of how investor interest followed steady revenues in the budget-hotel segment.
“How extremely profitable all of this precarity has become,” he said.
The forces that displace families operate alongside city-led transformations that boost land values and narrow housing options for low-income residents, he said. In Atlanta, Goldstone argued, the celebrated Beltline project widened the “rent gap” — the spread between current property values and what owners could command after redevelopment — encouraging speculation and accelerating gentrification.
He noted that gentrification is not merely aesthetic change but a planned process linked to specific policy decisions that make neighborhoods “gentrifiable” well before cafés and new apartments arrive.
Goldstone cautioned against narratives that attribute homelessness primarily to individual pathologies. He said mental distress and substance use are often consequences of homelessness rather than causes, and that research funding under Reagan-era priorities steered public attention away from structural drivers such as housing supply and affordability.
He said a late-1980s poll asking New Yorkers what causes homelessness reflected this shift, with respondents citing psychological problems and a refusal to work — and “not a single person” mentioning housing, according to his account on the program.
“The current homelessness disaster … is the product, not of a failing economy, but a booming economy, a thriving economy. It’s just not thriving for the people I’m writing about,” Goldstone said.
He described homelessness as a continuum that can change overnight: a motel room today, a car tomorrow, a tent a month from now.
“They have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness. They literally don’t count,” he said.
On solutions, Goldstone urged policymakers and the public to move beyond symbolic gestures and small-scale pilots.
“Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in most desperate need of a place to live — I think that that is misguided,” he said.
He argued that large-scale social housing — publicly owned, safe, dignified, and affordable units built on public land — is necessary to meet the crisis at the scale it exists. He added that “low-hanging-fruit” measures that keep people housed — like preventing evictions, expanding rent relief, and cutting red tape that blocks access to aid — can reduce suffering immediately while broader construction ramps up.
Goldstone said shifting cultural assumptions is part of the task. He compared housing’s treatment in the U.S. to pandemic-era price gouging of essential goods, arguing that accepting steep rent hikes as “supply and demand” in an emergency misses the moral stakes.
He quoted labor leader Sara Nelson’s view that “before we can fix the crisis, we have to feel the crisis,” urging readers to confront the lived realities of families navigating toxic stress with lifelong consequences for children.
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Breaking News Homelessness Sacramento Region
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Atlanta BeltLine Project Brian Goldstone encampment sweeps Extended Stay America Homelessness housing policy Laura Flynn President Donald Trump President Ronald Reagan private equity landlords Social housing The Intercept