America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness

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.