Whatever the reason behind it - mental illness, substance abuse, bad choices, bad luck, or just plain poverty - homelessness is terrible. If I ever fell into this circumstance, I think I'd have a nervous breakdown on Day One.
But I find homelessness especially disheartening when those without a place to call home do have a place to call work. Sure, they're working, but they don't make enough to find a place to call home. And there are plenty of them. (In an expensive old city like Boston, it's not just the working poor who can't find affordable housing. There are plenty of folks - young, college-educated people in their twenties and early thirties - making salaries that, in a lot of other places, could pay for very nice homes. Not here. They just don't tend to be homeless. They're living with their parents, or sharing with roommates when they'd rather be on their own.)
Back to the working homeless, I can't tell you how many times a client of St. Francis House has excitedly told me that they got the job. Or that they can't sign up for a clothing appointment that day because they have to get to work. Just hearing the pride in their voices, I can't tell you how happy it makes me. Unless they tell me where they're living, I never have the heart to ask where they're staying these days. Because I know the answer, as often as not, is going to be a shelter.
A recent article on a type of homeless shelter (a.k.a. an employment shelter) dedicated to those with jobs in The New York Times brought the situation of the working homeless into relief. It chronicled the lives of those with the sorts of non-glamorous jobs held by people with few other options. For whatever reason - mostly being mired in poverty from the jump - many of these folks are just trying to eke out a living, not pursue some high-end professional career. But plenty are in jobs that one would consider solid middle class, you-should-be-able-to-afford-a-place to live jobs.
They are line cooks, librarians, home health aides, bartenders, truck drivers, janitors and nurses. They drive ambulances and Ubers and work in construction and in concessions at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. They wheel teetering piles of Amazon packages into apartment buildings.
They work with children and adults with disabilities and often conceal their housing situation from their co-workers and clients.
Some work for the city or state: as cleaners and fare evasion beaters on the subways and buses, mental health counselors, exterminators in public housing, school teachers and police officers. (Source: NY Times)
And they're living in shelters that aren't like the shelters where you have to exit with your possessions in the morning, and queue up to get back in come evening. You can leave your stuff behind, and lock the door to your room. But they aren't exactly like home, either.
On such shelter is the Blue Sky Residence in Queens.
Who lives there?
A woman who works at LaGuardia, "directing travelers to their gates." She makes $22 an hour, but because of her work schedule and bus schedules, she has to walk part of the way along the side of a highway in order to get to work. She leaves for work at 4 a.m.
Another woman living there works the overnight shift at a Target for $19 an hour, with a buck extra for hours worked after midnight.
Then there's the cab driver who picks up fares at Kennedy Airport. He's the son of immigrants - his father was a cabbie as well - who dropped out of college when his parents became ill and he became their caretaker, and the sole family breadwinner. Things fell apart, as they do, especially when you're living on the edge. His father died, covid crushed the taxi business, the family lost their home - the sort of modest home that working-class families used to be able to afford.
About a third of the families living in New York City’s homeless shelters, not including migrants, have at least one adult who gets up and goes to work. But their salaries — some as high as $40,000 or $50,000 or more — are outmatched by the depth of the city’s affordability crisis and the severity of its housing crunch.
And, the system being the system, those salaries often mean that people make to much to be eligible for any sort of assistance: housing vouchers, public housing, food stamps. So they find themselves figuring out how to play the game. Don't take that overtime shift, don't take that promotion, because you'll lose whateer help you're getting and fall off the cliff. But you're trapped, big time. You have a couple of kids, so you need a two bedroom. But you take home $3K a month and the two BR's rent for $3K a month. You do the math.
A no-win situation, that's for sure.
Boston, like NY, also has a housing crisis, a shocking but not surprising situation when the working- and middle-class people who make the cities run can't afford to live there. The cities are hollowed out: the totally impoverished, through subsidies, can still hang in. And the rich, well, they'll survive.
One thing we're sure of,
The rich gets richer and the poor get poorer.
In the meantime, in between time, ain't we got fun!
Well, true dat about the rich and the poor. But 'ain't we got fun?' Not really.
Just depressing.
2 comments:
And ye, Congress….
I meant yet, not ye
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