When my boys were about 7 and 5 (they are now 17 and 15), a new family moved in two doors down. Mom, 20-something son, and a 7 year old. The boy–let’s call him Marcus–was not at all like my kids. They are rough-and-tumble, loud, always ready to be outside, and have voracious appetites. Marcus was extremely quiet and preferred the indoors. He was the type who knew how to play the Pokemon card game, if you know what I mean. And I swear that child never ate a thing. I do not know how he survived.
When his mother moved them into the house, I assumed it was for lack of any other options. It was the worst one on the block, with an absentee owner who had not made repairs for years. Over the next few years, the conditions worsened. A couple of times I had helped her make minor repairs, but the home got to an embarrassing state where she would not allow anyone else in. She was fierce, though, and refused to let the landlord get away with taking advantage of her without getting a few blows in herself.
The options are limited for fighting back, though. Reputational damage doesn’t bother an out-of-town landlord. Calling code enforcement risks irritating him until he refuses to renew your lease, a sort of “soft eviction” without the involvement of courts. At some point, Mom decided to withhold rent. Non-payment is plainly illegal in North Carolina, so it came with risk as well. But the landlord, either out of decency, or (more likely) fearing a judge presented with photographic evidence of the home’s atrocious condition, entered into a stalemate. I’m not fixing anything, but I’m also not raising a stink about you withholding rent.
Mom’s strategy worked, but it did not fundamentally shift the balance of power. Her residence was either going to rot around her, or, more likely, be sold to a house flipper.
Sure enough, the news came to us one afternoon, while walking back from the school bus stop: Mom took a $2,000 settlement to leave quietly. A new owner would flip the house. Within a week or so, the boys were saying tearful goodbyes to one another. Mom, Marcus, and the older son loaded everything they could into their two cars, including two rambunctious dogs, left the rest behind, and entered the harsh world of homelessness. In their case, being homeless was a series of cheap hotel rooms and extended stays. With a couple grand in savings, plus irregular work and a food stamp card, they would figure out how to survive until they could arrange a permanent home.
Life in cheap hotels and extended stays brought significant inconveniences of the kind you might expect: lack of privacy, traumatized neighbors acting out hopeless situations, microwaved foods exclusively, impatient and uncaring management. It also featured one inconvenience you might not know about: having to check out every 20 days. In North Carolina, a stay of three weeks or longer makes you a tenant, not a motel guest. For the thousands of families around the state who turn to cheap hotels as a way of avoiding unsheltered homelessness, stability can only last two and one-half weeks. Then you have to check out, move out, and either move back in or move on to the next stop. Motel and extended stay owners enforce these rules to keep people powerless.
The challenges families like our former neighbors face are the subject of Brian Goldstone’s book There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Goldstone spent years following five Atlanta-area families everywhere and documenting their struggles and triumphs. The book has rightly won wide praise as one of the best books of 2025. It is a remarkable testament to the people it features, and to the inhumanity of the housing system that accepts–even demands–that thousands and thousands of families remain unstable and unsheltered. The cost exacted upon those families results in large profit margins for investors and landholders, which Goldstone also documents.
I am encouraging you to read the book. It is wonderfully written, and Goldstone himself has used its success to assist some of the families in it, as well as to bring significant attention to the systemic conditions that he writes about.
I also want to tell you, as part of my recommendation, that it was terribly hard for me to read. I often chew through books quickly, one after the other, but this one I kept putting down. It is real, too real, devastatingly real. For every Atlanta-based character he followed, I saw a Charlotte-based family I have known. I could picture my regular trips to the Knights Inn at Glenwood and I-85, or the Lamplighter or the Charlotte Express at Freedom and 85, or any of the other spots where people I have loved were just barely hanging on, and where a couple hundred dollars by way of QC Family Tree helped them hold on a little longer, awaiting some change in luck.
I’m not the subject here. I just want to add my voice to those who are telling us that what Goldstone documents is happening everywhere, in cities and towns all across this land. Some relatively small number of people are making huge sums of money, while a huge number of people have no place to lay their heads.
Thanks for reading Trespasses of the Holy! This post is public so feel free to share it.
I read the book slowly, with trepidation, because I knew heartbreak was coming. And I know some names for that heartbreak. Mom, mentioned above, lost her oldest son. Marcus lost his beloved brother. The chaos that consumed their lives for a while activated a struggle with addiction that took his life. His name was Joshua.
As Christians gather around the world at this time of year, you’ll hear lots of talk about mangers. In the popular imagination, a manger is a little trough conveniently turned into a crib. In historical reality, a manger was the undesirable, leftover place where animal feed would be stored, or where even animals themselves might be sheltered on a cold night.
The beatific vision we’ve been taught–calm, bright, silent, holy–does not measure with actual conditions. Mary and Joseph relented to staying in a manger because there was no place for them. They were homeless. He was working. They needed someone to lighten their load. I suppose you can lift up the innkeeper’s hospitality without sentimentalizing the accommodations.
But the story is about homelessness, under unreasonable administrative burdens, facing impossible politics, amid an empire of brutality. It is a story that we keep telling because it is a story that we keep living.
Enough. Away with the Mangers.1
Book News: The audiobook of Our Trespasses should be available on January 1st, or shortly thereafter. I’ll let you know when that is official!
In the meantime, mark your calendar for a special event at Troubadour Books, a new bookseller in East Charlotte. Jan 15, 7pm. We’ll have a little reading, and I’m hoping for some discussion around the subject “the questions I wanted people to ask about the book but nobody ever did.” More to come.
One Last Note: A favorite obscure carol, with Chad Lawson on piano, the lovely Jennifer Helms Jarrell singing, and yours truly playing a little saxophone.