Across the country, men and women sleep in their vehicles night after night and then head to work the next morning. Others scrape together enough for a week in a motel, knowing one missed paycheck could leave them on the street.
Today, the threat of homelessness is most acute not in the poorest regions of the country, but in the richest, fastest-growing ones. In places like these, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen.
For an increasing share of the nation’s work force, a mix of soaring rents, low wages and inadequate tenant protections have forced them into a brutal cycle of insecurity in which housing is unaffordable, unstable or entirely out of reach. A recent study analyzing the 2010 census found that nearly half of people experiencing homelessness while staying in shelters, and about 40 percent of those living outdoors or in other makeshift conditions, had formal employment. But that’s only part of the picture. These numbers don’t capture the full scale of working homelessness in America: the many who lack a home but never enter a shelter or who wind up on the streets.
I’ve spent the past six years reporting on men and women who work in grocery stores, nursing homes, day care centers and restaurants. They prepare food, stock shelves, deliver packages and care for the sick and elderly. And at the end of the day, they return not to homes but to parking lots, shelters, the crowded apartments of friends or relatives and squalid extended-stay hotel rooms.
America has been experiencing what economists described as a historically tight labor market, with a national unemployment rate of just 4 percent. And all the while, homelessness has soared to the highest level on record.
What good is low unemployment when workers are a paycheck away from homelessness?
A few statistics succinctly capture why this catastrophe is unfolding: Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment. An astounding 12.1 million low-income renter households are “severely cost burdened,” spending at least half of their earnings on rent and utilities. Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the average “housing wage” required to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home across the country is $32.11, while nearly 52 million American workers earn less than $15 an hour. And if you’re disabled and receive S.S.I., it’s even worse: Those payments are currently capped at $967 a month nationwide, and there is hardly anywhere in the country where this form of fixed income is enough to afford the average rent.
But it’s not just that wages are too low; it’s that work has become more precarious than ever. Even for those earning above the minimum wage, job security has eroded in ways that make stable housing increasingly out of reach.
This results in a devastating pattern: As cities gentrify and become “revitalized,” the nurses, teachers, janitors and child care providers who keep them running are being systematically priced out. Unlike in earlier periods of widespread immiseration, such as the recession of 2008, what we’re witnessing today is a crisis born less of poverty than of prosperity. These workers aren’t “falling” into homelessness. They’re being pushed. They’re the casualties not of a failing economy but of one that’s thriving — just not for them.
And yet, even as this calamity deepens, many families remain invisible, existing in a kind of shadow realm: deprived of a home, but neither counted nor recognized by the federal government as “homeless.”
More and more workers now face volatile schedules, unreliable hours and a lack of benefits such as sick leave. The rise of “just in time” scheduling means employees don’t know how many hours they’ll get week to week, making it impossible to budget for rent. Entire industries have been gigified, leaving ride-share drivers, warehouse workers and temp nurses working without benefits, protections or reliable pay. Even full-time jobs in retail and health care — once seen as dependable — are increasingly contracted out, turned into part-time roles or made contingent on meeting ever-shifting quotas.
For millions of Americans, the greatest threat isn’t that they’ll lose their jobs. It’s that the job will never pay enough, never provide enough hours, never offer enough stability to keep them housed. (...)
And yet, even as this calamity deepens, many families remain invisible, existing in a kind of shadow realm: deprived of a home, but neither counted nor recognized by the federal government as “homeless.”
More and more workers now face volatile schedules, unreliable hours and a lack of benefits such as sick leave. The rise of “just in time” scheduling means employees don’t know how many hours they’ll get week to week, making it impossible to budget for rent. Entire industries have been gigified, leaving ride-share drivers, warehouse workers and temp nurses working without benefits, protections or reliable pay. Even full-time jobs in retail and health care — once seen as dependable — are increasingly contracted out, turned into part-time roles or made contingent on meeting ever-shifting quotas.
For millions of Americans, the greatest threat isn’t that they’ll lose their jobs. It’s that the job will never pay enough, never provide enough hours, never offer enough stability to keep them housed. (...)
This exclusion was by design. In the 1980s, as mass homelessness surged across the United States, the Reagan administration made a concerted effort to shape public perception of the crisis. Officials downplayed its severity while muddying its root causes. Federal funding for research on homelessness was steered almost exclusively toward studies that emphasized mental illness and addiction, diverting attention from structural forces — gutted funding for low-income housing, a shredded safety net. Framing homelessness as a result of personal failings didn’t just make it easier to dismiss; it was also less politically threatening. It obscured the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and shifted blame onto its victims. And it worked: By the late 1980s, at least one survey showed that many Americans attributed homelessness to drugs or unwillingness to work. Nobody mentioned housing.
Over the decades, this narrow, distorted view persisted, embedding itself in the federal government’s annual homeless census. Before something can be counted, it must be defined — and one way the United States has “reduced” homelessness is by defining entire groups of the homeless population out of existence. Advocates have long decried the census’ deliberately circumscribed definition: only those in shelters or visible on the streets are tallied. As a result, a relatively small but conspicuous fraction of the total homeless population has come to stand, in the public imagination, for homelessness itself. Everyone else has been written out of the story. They literally don’t count.
The gap between what we see and what’s really happening is vast. Recent research suggests that the true number of people experiencing homelessness — factoring in those living in cars or motel rooms, or doubled up with others — is at least six times as high as official counts. As bad as the reported numbers are, the reality is far worse. The tents are just the tip of the iceberg, the most glaring sign of a far more entrenched crisis.
This willful blindness has caused incalculable harm, locking millions of families and individuals out of vital assistance. But it’s done more than that. How we count and define homelessness dictates how we respond to it. A distorted view of the problem has led to responses that are inadequate at best and cruelly counterproductive at worst. (...)
Over the decades, this narrow, distorted view persisted, embedding itself in the federal government’s annual homeless census. Before something can be counted, it must be defined — and one way the United States has “reduced” homelessness is by defining entire groups of the homeless population out of existence. Advocates have long decried the census’ deliberately circumscribed definition: only those in shelters or visible on the streets are tallied. As a result, a relatively small but conspicuous fraction of the total homeless population has come to stand, in the public imagination, for homelessness itself. Everyone else has been written out of the story. They literally don’t count.
The gap between what we see and what’s really happening is vast. Recent research suggests that the true number of people experiencing homelessness — factoring in those living in cars or motel rooms, or doubled up with others — is at least six times as high as official counts. As bad as the reported numbers are, the reality is far worse. The tents are just the tip of the iceberg, the most glaring sign of a far more entrenched crisis.
This willful blindness has caused incalculable harm, locking millions of families and individuals out of vital assistance. But it’s done more than that. How we count and define homelessness dictates how we respond to it. A distorted view of the problem has led to responses that are inadequate at best and cruelly counterproductive at worst. (...)
Because when work no longer provides stability, when wages are too low and rents are too high, when millions of people are one medical bill, one missed paycheck, one rent hike away from losing their homes — who, exactly, is safe?
by Brian Goldstone, New York Times | Read more:
Image: Derek Miller Hurtado
[ed. Wait until Medicaid gets gutted (it's coming), and all the federal workers currently being dismissed are suddenly unable to pay their bills. The homelessness problem in America is going to explode.]
by Brian Goldstone, New York Times | Read more:
Image: Derek Miller Hurtado
[ed. Wait until Medicaid gets gutted (it's coming), and all the federal workers currently being dismissed are suddenly unable to pay their bills. The homelessness problem in America is going to explode.]
