At 10 p.m., a hospital technician pulls into a Walmart parking lot. Her four kids — one still nursing — are packed into the back of her Toyota. She tells them it’s an adventure, but she’s terrified someone will call the police: “Inadequate housing” is enough to lose your children. She stays awake for hours, lavender scrubs folded in the trunk, listening for footsteps, any sign of trouble. Her shift starts soon. She’ll walk into the hospital exhausted, pretending everything is fine.
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.
These people are not on the fringes of society. They are the workers America depends on. The very phrase “working homeless” should be a contradiction, an impossibility in a nation that claims hard work leads to stability. And yet, their homelessness is not only pervasive but also persistently overlooked — excluded from official counts, ignored by policymakers, treated as an anomaly rather than a disaster unfolding in plain sight.
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.
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.
It’s not just in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s also in tech hubs like Austin and Seattle, cultural and financial centers like Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and rapidly expanding cities like Nashville, Phoenix and Denver, places awash in investment, luxury development and corporate growth. But this wealth isn’t trickling down. It’s pooled at the top, while affordable units are demolished, new ones are blocked, tenants are evicted — about every minute, seven evictions are filed all around the United States, according to Princeton’s Eviction Lab — and housing is treated as a commodity to be hoarded and exploited for maximum profit.
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.”
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.
But the truth is that all of this — the nights spent sleeping in cars, the constant uprooting from motels to friends’ couches, the incessant hustle to stay one step ahead of homelessness — is neither inevitable nor intractable. Ours doesn’t have to be a society where people clocking 50 or 60 hours a week aren’t paid enough to meet their most basic needs. It doesn’t have to be a place where parents sell their plasma or live without electricity just to keep a roof over their children’s heads.
For decades, lawmakers have stood by while rents soared, while housing was turned into an asset class for the wealthy, while worker protections were shredded and wages failed to keep up. We’ve settled for piecemeal, better-than-nothing initiatives that tweak the existing system rather than transform it. But the disaster we face demands more than half measures.
It’s not enough to pull people out of homelessness — we must stop them from being pushed into it in the first place. In some cities, for every one person who secures housing, another estimated four become homeless. How do we halt this relentless churn? There are immediate steps: stronger tenant protections like rent control and just-cause eviction laws, the elimination of exclusionary zoning, and higher wages with robust labor protections. But we also need transformative, comprehensive solutions, like large-scale investments in social housing, that treat affordable, reliable shelter as an essential public good, not a privilege for the few.
Any meaningful solution will require a fundamental shift in how we think about housing in America. A safe, affordable home shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be a guaranteed right for everybody. Embracing this idea will demand an expansion of our moral imagination. Acting on it will require unwavering political resolve.
We should be asking ourselves not just how much worse this can become but also why we’ve tolerated it for so long.
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?
Who gets to feel secure in this country? And who are the casualties of our prosperity?
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