By four in the morning, the young woman has already signed out of the Blue Sky Residence, the Queens homeless shelter where she lives, and started her commute to work. The local bus doesn’t run this early, so she sets out on foot, walking along the highway. She arrives at LaGuardia Airport before the first flight of the morning departs. For $22 an hour, she will spend her day directing travelers to their gates.
Around the same time, one of her neighbors at Blue Sky is resting her feet in a Target break room, nearing the end of her overnight shift preparing the store for its 8 a.m. opening. She makes $19 an hour, $20 for every hour she works after midnight.
And as the sun begins to rise, Kuber Sancho-Persad, who lives a few doors down, is napping in his taxi in the Kennedy Airport parking lot, waiting for the first passengers of the day to arrive with the early morning flights.
Their routines, quiet and mundane, signal a growing — and largely invisible — crisis that threatens New York City’s future.
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.
This is not the homeless problem that New Yorkers are most familiar with: people sleeping on subway cars or begging for change on street corners, often struggling with mental illness or addiction. These are the people who help make New York run, now shut out of the city’s rental market.
“We are living in a world of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs for everyone,” said John Kimble, a senior adviser at the NYC Fund to End Youth & Family Homelessness. “Someone is going to be left standing.”
There is perhaps no more visceral symbol of the hollowing out of New York City’s middle class than the emergence of the employment shelter: facilities that cater to people who work in jobs, many of them full-time, that in a different city or a different economy would never make them rich but would not leave them homeless.
“The saddest thing I’ve seen is that people are getting priced out of New York City so badly that they are not even moving out of the city,” said Mr. Sancho-Persad, 30. “They are just getting evicted and coming to live in the shelter.”
Thousands of working people live the way Mr. Sancho-Persad does. 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.
“New York City is becoming more for the wealthy, and I don’t think that’s going to end well,” Mr. Sancho-Persad said. “You know why? Poor people make this city go.”
Years of work unraveled by illness
Mr. Sancho-Persad first arrived at the Blue Sky shelter late one evening in the summer of 2023. He parked his yellow taxi outside, hoping he wouldn’t get a ticket in the morning. He helped his mother out of the passenger seat and lifted the bags they had hurriedly packed when they realized they were being kicked out of their home. They have lived at the shelter ever since.
Mr. Sancho-Persad’s parents, immigrants from Trinidad, had done everything they thought they were supposed to do to keep their family out of this kind of trouble. They worked hard, saved money, bought a house and invested in their son’s education. The taxi, which Mr. Sancho-Persad’s father drove for about 30 years, was always at the center of their push to achieve a working-class life.
Mr. Sancho-Persad joined the family business in his early 20s, after completing three semesters of college. He had been pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, hoping to fulfill a childhood dream of working on public transportation systems. Then his parents got too sick to work.
His mother, who was a home health aide, was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. His father was weakened by years of struggling with asthma and diabetes.
The family had been climbing the economic ladder for years, saving enough to go on occasional vacations — once driving to Canada to visit relatives in Mr. Sancho-Persad’s father’s taxi, with the light turned off. His father purchased a modest home in the East Bronx, though a relative took out the mortgage for him because of his low credit score.
But illness unraveled those years of work, and soon Mr. Sancho-Persad was the only member of the family who could consistently bring in money.
The first day that he drove a taxi on his own, he got into a fender bender. So the next day, his father rode shotgun, guiding him through traffic and offering wisdom: Never race other taxis to a fare. Always ask passengers what route they’d like to take. If they keep talking after that, it means they want to chat. If they don’t, it’s better to stay quiet.
His father died in 2017. His mother was still sick, and Mr. Sancho-Persad started working as her caregiver in the morning for $18.75 an hour, paid through Medicaid, while still driving his cab at night. But when the coronavirus pandemic struck and the streets emptied out, he struggled to find enough fares to make ends meet.
At home, things were falling apart. The relative whose name was on the house’s deed wanted to sell the home. He was threatening to evict Mr. Sancho-Persad and his mother, who could no longer keep up with the monthly payments and could not find an affordable rental.
They were shellshocked and frightened when they entered the shelter, fearing they would encounter the kind of unpredictable mentally ill people they avoided on the subway.
But they soon found that they were living with families a lot like them — working people who had endured a stretch of bad luck.
As Mr. Sancho-Persad got to know his neighbors better, he discovered that many of them had something else in common: They made too much money to qualify for their ticket out.
Omar Robinson had lived nearly all his life in a public housing development in Brooklyn. By the time he turned 55, he assumed he would be there forever.
Then, a fire broke out in the apartment. The damage was so extensive that he could not stay. Priced out of apartments in his rapidly gentrifying corner of Bedford-Stuyvesant, he ended up at a Bronx employment shelter.
Mr. Robinson had spent years advancing at the Department of Parks & Recreation, starting as a cleaner, then working at a recreation center and eventually maintaining the vast lawns of Pelham Bay Park.
He had a decent salary, $24 an hour, and assumed his stay in the shelter would be brief. He hoped to secure a housing voucher from the city, available primarily to people living in shelters, that would make him eligible for privately owned housing. His rent would be partially subsidized by the city for at least five years.
The reality was far more complicated.
Mr. Robinson earned too much money in the summer, when he worked his longest hours, to qualify for a voucher. He would have to seek out lower-paid work and now makes $18 an hour, working 30 to 40 hours a week as a fire guard, monitoring safety equipment at city buildings and construction sites.
That job keeps him eligible for a city voucher. But the city’s housing supply and demand is so profoundly out of balance that Mr. Robinson, now 58, has spent about two years trying to find an apartment he can get with his voucher, which has a rent limit. There is no limit to the amount of time he can spend in a shelter, no deadline for him to leave. It takes all his energy not to give into his overwhelming feeling of being stuck.
“I had ambition,” Mr. Robinson said. “I try to do the best I can. It seemed to me like that backfired. Being lazy would have been more efficient than trying to do better.”
In many ways, New York City’s rental assistance program is working the way it was designed to. Over 120,000 New Yorkers are using the vouchers to help pay for their housing, and about 22,000 people used the program to move from homeless shelters into apartments.
But well over 10,000 people with vouchers are still looking for open apartments while the city’s vacancy rate sits at a 50-year low.
To qualify for a voucher, New Yorkers cannot earn more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which works out to about a $30,000 salary for a single adult and roughly $60,000 for a family of four.
That means, like Mr. Robinson, many working homeless people are playing a constant game of mental math to calculate how many hours they can work without losing their housing voucher.
One Blue Sky resident made $90 too much one month and lost a subsidized apartment she thought she had secured, said Shantel Hayes, the shelter director.
“Do you have that conversation with your residents to be like, don’t work the overtime, because we want you to qualify?” Ms. Hayes said. “It sucks.”
A new kind of shelter
Everything about the Jamaica Women’s Employment Shelter, on the eastern edge of Queens, revolves around work.
The walls are covered with job listings for home health aides, subway cleaners, and positions at Best Buy, Old Navy and Starbucks.
The shelter, originally built as a hotel, has meals ready to reheat in its cafeteria, so that women who come home late or wake up early for their jobs always have something to eat. Residents can consult with an on-site employment specialist and pick up free MetroCards for their commutes.
At the end of the day, the women — about 70 percent of whom are employed — return to tidy, small rooms they share with one or two others. They sleep in twin beds and have night stands and lockers to store their belongings.
The city has 22 employment shelters for single adults, several of which opened in the past few years amid protests from neighbors worried that they would bring crime and disruption. There are also many more family shelters, operated by nonprofits that contract with the city, where a large percentage of the residents have jobs.
Ruth R., a single mother, is one of those people. Ruth, who spoke on the condition that her full name be withheld because of the sensitive nature of her work as a family advocate for struggling New Yorkers, lived most of her life in an apartment in the Bronx with her family.
But then her mother got sick and had to move into a nursing home. Ruth, whose name was not on the lease, could not afford to stay by herself.
Two-bedroom apartments nearby were renting for $3,000, and Ruth’s paycheck is $2,800 a month after taxes. Even if she could find something cheaper, how would she pay for her toddler’s diapers, clothes and food? Ruth’s “good salary,” she said with a tight smile, makes her ineligible for food stamps, and she works full-time and does not have time to wait in food pantry lines, she said.
“I like what I do. I’m helping others,” she said. “I don’t plan to decrease my hours in order to get food stamps.”
She has considered picking up a second job in the evening, but who would watch her son, and when would she get to spend time with him? A local day care center quoted her $700 a week.
She is now living in a shelter on Staten Island where nearly half of the residents are employed. She commutes about two hours each way to her office in the Bronx.
Ruth said living in a shelter has only deepened her commitment to her work, which includes teaching parenting classes for people whose children have been removed by child protective services, and connecting New Yorkers with mental health resources and social services, including shelter placements.
“I’ve always been sending people to this place, but this is my first time here, and now I know how it feels,” she said.
Diamond Hammond, 36, had also managed to avoid homelessness for decades, despite a tough childhood in foster care and a young adulthood spent partially in prison.
But after years subletting a room from a relative, for a price he called a “family special,” the landlord raised the rent and he did not want his relative to lose out on a higher rental income he could not afford. He ended up in a Bronx shelter.
In his 20s and early 30s, Mr. Hammond took any job he could find, building out what he said, proudly, was an “extensive résumé.” For the past few months, he commuted to work at a different shelter — a common situation for the working homeless — in maintenance. He recently started a new job at the Parks Department.
What he found at the Reaching New Heights shelter in the Bronx, which looks across the Harlem River toward Manhattan, was a group of men who were eager to share information about jobs. About half the residents at the shelter are employed.
“We all network,” he said.
As soon as Mr. Hammond can get his financial footing, he said, he will most likely leave New York, a plan that was echoed in interviews with working homeless people across the city.
He wants to live somewhere close by, so he can visit his children, who live in the Bronx. Moving, Mr. Hammond said, would give his family its best shot at financial independence.
“In the next five years, my kids will be going to college,” he said. “I’ll be helping them pay rent. I have to think about what I can afford, and what I can’t.”
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.