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There’s a particular kind of empathy in the way Brigid Schulte tells the story of the Godfrey family, a willingness to sit inside the discomfort rather than flinch from it. In her recent Guardian piece, Schulte doesn’t turn to statistics first. She turns to Na’Kaya Godfrey, a 14-year-old girl who has lost count of how many homes she’s lived in.

Schulte, Better Life Lab Director, takes us to Stone Mountain, Georgia, into an unheated house warmed only by space heaters. She catalogs the Godfreys’ years of instability: the evictions, the couch-surfing, the extended-stay hotels, the nights sleeping in a car before it was repossessed. 

At the center is Jaimie Godfrey, a 35-year-old single mother of three whose struggles dismantle the easy stereotype. She has never stopped working: managing a phone store, baking pies, braiding hair. She is, however, trapped by rising rents and a housing waitlist she’s been on since 2017.

The Godfreys aren’t in shelters and they aren’t counted in official homelessness statistics. They are invisible even as those numbers hit record highs. Housing instability can set children back academically.

“I just want something better for them than I had,” Jaimie Godfrey says.

Read her full .