New Face of Homelessness

By Tammy Green | Deputy Chief Operating Officer

Bum. Hobo. Junkie. Tweaker.

All names I’ve heard in reference to those who live on the streets. There’s a certain goal behind each word, it generates an immediate vision. Lazy. Hopeless. Addicted. Insane. All of these insinuate that the fault lies on the person stuck in the situation. Homeless people have long since had the stigma that they were unable to pull themselves along or that they’ve failed in some way to get to a point where they’re without shelter. It pushes the narrative that they don’t need help. They chose this. It didn’t happen to them right? They caused it.

It’s easy to think this way, if anything, this is the prevailing thought pushed to us through pop culture. Homelessness doesn’t just happen to us, it’s a series of choices and the average person is far away from ever experiencing it. This may have been believable back in the golden age of sitcoms or more accurately, before the 2008 market crash. The reality of homelessness is no longer the man living in the cardboard box but rather the wallet squeezing full time employees who simply cannot keep up with soaring costs. The face of homelessness is changing. It’s the single mother struggling to find a rental in a decent school district. The college graduates who can’t get a job in their field. The folks who’ve lived in the same neighborhood since they were a child. The victims of gentrification whose housing options shrink to worse and worse circumstances. It’s fully employed Americans.

It’s not a new problem, it’s a worsening one. In 2021 a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 53% of adults sleeping in homeless shelters and 40% of people sleeping on the street or other places not fit for human habitation were employed the same year they experienced homelessness. By 2023, homelessness had spiked by 12% since 2022 with more than 650,000 people living in shelters, tents or in cars. These statistics don’t even take into account those “technically” homeless who survive by couch surfing with family and friends. In the last two years, saving has become a luxury with over 28% of Americans having less than a thousand dollars in their savings account. The statistics get worse when examined by generation with Gen Z & Millennials, only 21% of each group has more than a thousand dollars saved.

But what does that really get you? Most of the way there on winter tires? For the 28% who have under a thousand saved in their accounts, it’ll maybe cover ⅓ of an emergency room visit even with insurance. At this rate it feels like for more than a quarter of the population is only one or two unexpected costs away from losing everything. And that’s only if they can even find a spot to lay their head down. Rental adjustments in 2023 climbed as high as 32% from the prior year even in formerly affordable cities like Nashville. Nationally, the statistic climbed 15% for rental hikes across the country. And this is just for rentals. Home ownership, without monetary help from families, is becoming an outdated dream for most Americans who now have to figure out how to pay their rent versus saving for a downpayment. Cases like Kim Drotar, a public school teacher with a middle school aged daughter, are becoming as common as the rain. Her rent rose 22% in 2023 and any attempts she’s made on owning a home have resulted in her being outbid. At the time of the rental hikes, saving for a downpayment seemed impossible and I could only imagine now how much further off the idea seems.

Personally, I think the raise I received that year was about 4% for “excellent work” within my company. Meaning I streamlined processes that saved thousands of dollars for the branch, but according to the average cost of cereal, I was going to be losing money going into 2023. But I was one of the lucky ones with a working partner, two college degrees and a family willing to open their doors to me if it ever hit a critical point. That’s not the norm for most people anymore. The majority of homeless are not drifters, but rather they’ve lost housing in the state they live in. With shelters also locking their doors at set hours, it can make those utilizing these services have an even tougher time making ends meet with second or third shift positions. Considering these positions typically offer better money for odd hours, it limits their ability to earn and puts them in a position of having to juggle priorities. And that’s even if the shelter has space for temporary housing. My city has a pretty robust assistance structure with rehabs, halfway housing & shelters but it is consistently at capacity. Living near a psych ward hasn’t made my outlook much better either as I’ve consistently run into folks pushed out confused & unsure of what to do because they need to make room for more severe cases. My evening walks are usually spent giving out directions and phone numbers versus breathing in that good valley air.

Stories like Takia Cheeks & her family are becoming more normalized by the month. With two disabled children, her family moved to Virginia for her to accept a higher paying job. As a paycheck to paycheck family, they hit the ground running which left little time for her to be able to be there for school enrollment or getting them set up with accommodations. After six absences, her employer let her go. Things spiralled from there with their new apartment turning out to be a dud. With no hot water, AC or screens to be able to open windows, Cheeks complained and was ultimately evicted quickly once her job loss forced her to be late on rent. As of when this was reported, she was living with her family in a Ford Fiesta in a Walmart parking lot. Since then, she barely slept in the parking lot with her children bathing in gas stations until she secured a job with Amazon. She was able to move her family into a motel for the interim with rental assistance, but even that was temporary.

Now you may think to yourself, should her employer have kept her on with absences? Do you really need screens for your windows? Maybe they should have planned better!

There’s a deeper issue at hand than an HR one with this scenario. I’ve worked as an educator in public & special needs environments, you need to be at the meetings to set up accommodations for a child. It’s involved, it’s required by law but that doesn’t mean the school admin won’t push back if you don’t stop them. Accommodations are a beautiful thing for children of varying needs. But they require a lot of thoughtful work on the part of educators who, if you haven’t heard, are horribly underpaid and overworked. Budgets are constantly slashed and if you’re not there to advocate for your child, you can’t expect the burnt out social worker to do it for you successfully. Also the window screens are a necessity in Virginia. Their mosquitoes are borderline Jurassic and the heat can rise to dangerous levels with apartments becoming more like tea kettles during the summer highs.

The problem isn’t the employer necessarily or maybe not even the landlord to this extent. It’s the whole system. A woman who moves her family for an opportunity should not have to lose absolutely everything if it doesn’t work out. We shouldn’t have families living paycheck to paycheck because our housing costs have outpaced wages. There isn’t even a county or state where a full time minimum wage worker can afford a modest apartment. At minimum wage, people have to work 86 hours a week to afford the average one bedroom.

If you’re going to bring up the old, “Minimum wage jobs aren’t meant to be lived on by adults,” let me ask you, when’s the last time you applied for a job? The market has been terrible as more and more jobs are cut for efficiency or outsourced overseas. At this point, millennials make up for about 70% of minimum wage workers. A lot of them have college degrees. The folks I talk to on the production line at a factory also have a surprising amount of college degrees from various different fields. It’s not just the folks who pursued philosophy degrees or art therapy, but it’s folks who went into marine biology or decided to become teachers in fields like history. But the price of progress and certainly the price of AI sweeping into any role it can get, means that the most educated generation is getting the short end of the stick. You need to work to live but your work isn’t going to actually let you live anymore. It’s just going to be enough to bring you in the next day and if not, you’ll be replaced. I’ve known folks who no longer want to have kids. Not because they don’t want to be parents but the stress of not knowing how they’d be able to afford a child is too much to consider.

This isn’t the woke liberal mindset turning young folks against having traditional families. It’s the fact we cannot survive on what we have and it doesn’t seem like anything is being done to make it better. With housing hitting its lowest build rate in 2010 since the 1960s, we have an extreme lack of affordable housing and the “not in my backyard” attitude makes it difficult for any low income units to get off the ground. Because again, homelessness is seen as the fault of the individual by most people. Until we can acknowledge the systematic issues that are causing more and more families to find themselves on the streets, change will be difficult if not impossible.

If you take away anything from this piece, just think on this: how much would it take to put yourself on the streets? How long could you afford rent or your mortgage if you lost your job? How about an emergency where you or your loved ones are injured? Sure, you might have a good credit line but with a trip to discount stores like Aldi’s running around $100 a week for just two people, how long will that last you? You’re probably much closer to the edge than you think. And you’re certainly going to be closer in circumstances to the homeless man in the cardboard box versus the man in office who has made millions in the short time since he took office. He’s gotten a private jet from a foreign country and all I have at this point is $8 bags of Doritos in a city where 33% of the residents live in poverty.