As the United Autoworkers Union digs in for a long labor dispute, and as federal employees brace for a possible government shutdown, Americans are confronted with questions about economic justice: Do we value the people who power our government and our auto manufacturing base? If so, what steps can we take to support their fair compensation?
Along with breathless coverage of these disputes, the media is also filled with urgent reporting on America’s homelessness crisis. Yet few of us ever stop to ask if the frontline professionals who respond to homelessness are adequately compensated for their life-saving work.
The truth is that these workers, estimated to be as many as 350,000 people nationwide, are staggeringly underpaid — particularly frontline workers who actively engage with unhoused people. This crisis is nested within the homelessness crisis, and it directly hinders our nation’s efforts to end homelessness. It also reveals a dismaying lack of value regarding the people who undertake this vital work.
Unlike autoworkers, they have no rich legacy of organizing. Unlike federal employees, they have no connections to politicians and appointees. Who, then, will speak for them?
A recent analysis by the National Alliance to End Homelessness finds that, on average across this nation, the professionals who connect and support unhoused people in permanent housing make less than $43,000 a year. Those who staff emergency shelters make even less, earning an average annual income of under $28,000.
The horrible irony: The people tasked with ending homelessness are often at risk of homelessness themselves.
Across the U.S., housing staff would need at least a 15 percent pay raise to afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment. Shelter staff would require a whopping 77 percent raise. Notably, many in this workforce are caregivers and single parents who require larger apartments, making the wage gap even more extreme.
This economic injustice carries immense risk to society: Inadequate compensation threatens our collective efforts to end homelessness.
Frontline homeless system work is far more difficult than most people realize. Each day, workers engage with people who have experienced stark trauma, suffering, hatred and humiliation. The days are long, stressful, and physically and emotionally taxing. Despite the depths of passion and empathy frontline staff bring to their work, many simply cannot sustain themselves and their families on current wages, opting instead for higher pay in other sectors, including retail or food service. Who can blame them?
But turnover contributes to a widespread staffing crisis, which prevents systems from appropriately serving our most vulnerable neighbors. Trusting relationships — the bedrock of all social service work — are damaged by a rotating cast of new case managers; over time, people experiencing homelessness lose faith and engage less with the systems designed to serve them.
Meanwhile, the workers who remain on the job are faced with unsustainable caseloads — sometimes twice the number of clients they can adequately serve. The overload deprives them of critical time needed to do their work: building relationships and problem-solving with each individual. As a result, people experiencing homelessness suffer, staffers working with unhoused people suffer, progress on ending homelessness suffers, and our communities pay the price.
Correcting the salary shortfall will take time. But communities serious about homelessness have no other ethical choice. This work cannot be dispatched to volunteers to do in their spare time. Ending homelessness is a 24/7 operation that requires trained professionals and a binding national commitment to house the unhoused.
As a first step, Congress can enhance funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homeless Assistance Grant’s program, which is the primary funding source for federal homelessness programs. For the forthcoming federal budget, an increase of $241 million would cover the wage gap for one year for those workers employed by organizations that receive federal homelessness funding; ongoing federal investments — including annual cost of living adjustments – will be necessary moving forward.
However, many shelters and homeless programs do not accept federal funds. Sustained investments from state and local government and philanthropy will be required to adequately pay the broader workforce.
Some critics, frustrated by a perceived lack of progress on homelessness, question every investment in programs that fight homelessness. They threaten to divert or pull funding entirely as a means of forcing accountability among homelessness systems. But true accountability starts by appropriately compensating the people tasked with ending the devastating and persistent homelessness crisis.
We can all agree that the current situation is unacceptable. We can, in turn, debate strategies to address it. But there can be no question regarding ethical, moral compensation: If we truly want to end homelessness, we must honor frontline workers with a living wage.
Tom Murphy is senior director of communications at the National Alliance to End Homelessness and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project in partnership with the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.