There's a lot of money being made off people who have nowhere to go. That's the blunt message journalist Brian Goldstone brought to Atlanta this month during a conversation with State Sen. Kim Jackson at St. Luke's Episcopal Church. His book, There's No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, tracks families who work full-time jobs but can't afford stable housing — and the private equity firms that have turned that desperation into billion-dollar returns.
Goldstone spent six years following working families as they cycled through extended-stay hotels, cars, and emergency shelters. What he found wasn't just a housing crisis. It was a business model. Private equity firms have been quietly buying up the places people are forced into once they lose stable housing — extended-stay motels, budget hotels, even trailer parks — and extracting maximum profit from people with zero leverage. For example, in 2021, Blackstone partnered with Starwood Capital Group in a 50/50 joint venture to acquire Extended Stay America in a $6 billion all-cash deal.
"There is a lot of money that can be made off of homelessness," Goldstone said during the April 11th event. "They're buying up the places people are forced into once they become homeless … Homelessness has become big business."
The Extended-Stay Trap
Here's how it works in Atlanta and cities across the country. A family gets evicted or priced out of an apartment. They need a place immediately — no deposit, no credit check, no lease. Extended-stay hotels become the only option. These properties charge by the week, sometimes $300 to $400 for a single room with a kitchenette. Do the math: that's $1,200 to $1,600 a month for a space that would rent as an apartment for half that amount.
Families think it's temporary. It rarely is. Once you're paying weekly rates and can't save for a deposit, you're stuck. And private equity firms know it. They've been acquiring these properties specifically because the margins are enormous and the tenants have nowhere else to go. You're not paying for housing. You're paying rent to investors who've turned instability into an asset class.
Atlanta has seen this up close. Our affordable housing stock continues to shrink while new developments focus on higher-income renters. The gap leaves working families — people with jobs, sometimes multiple jobs — in a permanent state of housing precarity. And that precarity is profitable for someone else.
Why Aren't We Talking About This?
Goldstone's work fills a gap most media coverage misses. When we talk about homelessness, the focus is often on people living on the street or in encampments. That's visible. That gets attention. But the working homeless — families living in cars parked behind big-box stores, or crammed into weekly motels off the highway — are everywhere and nowhere. They're invisible by design. They're working. Their kids are in school. They look like everyone else until you realize they're spending 70% of their income just to have a roof for the next seven days.
The event at St. Luke's, covered in detail by SaportaReport, highlighted how this cycle accelerates once private equity gets involved. These firms don't just buy properties — they optimize them. Minimal maintenance. Maximum occupancy. No long-term leases that would give tenants any stability or rights. It's extraction, not housing.
What This Means for Atlanta
Atlanta's cost of living has spiked faster than wages can keep up. We've covered how new luxury housing continues to dominate development, but the conversation around what happens to people priced out of the market is quieter. Goldstone's research puts a face and a structure to that displacement. It's not just that people can't afford rent. It's that the places they're forced into when they can't afford rent are now owned by investors who profit more the longer those families stay trapped.
Sen. Kim Jackson's involvement signals that this issue is getting legislative attention. Jackson has been vocal about housing policy and tenant protections. Bringing Goldstone's perspective into the conversation in Midtown— a neighborhood that knows both stability and change — creates space for a different kind of housing discussion. Not just about building more units, but about who profits when people can't access them.
This is one of those stories that rewires how you see your own city. I've driven past those extended-stay motels off the connector a thousand times and never thought about the business model behind them. Goldstone's work makes it impossible to unsee. Private equity has financed every corner of American life, and now homelessness is just another portfolio diversification strategy. If we're serious about affordable housing in Atlanta, we have to start naming who profits when people can't afford to live here — and what we're willing to do about it. This conversation at St. Luke's is a start, but it needs to turn into policy that actually limits how much investors can extract from people with zero options.
