Plight of America’s Working Homeless: Trying to Squeak By on Minimum Wage

Gloria and Melvin Perry both work. She serves up burgers and fries at a fast-food restaurant. He doles out meals part-time in a kitchen for the homeless. But they can’t afford a place to live.

“Sometimes we have jobs, sometimes we don’t,” said 40-year-old Gloria Perry, whose husband, 50, checks the want ads but isn’t qualified for most of the offerings.

“The thing is, it doesn’t seem to make much difference,” she said. “Even when we have jobs, we can’t do much but survive.”

Scraping by in this gambling city whose economy turns on services to tourists, the Perrys represent thousands of others around the nation working at minimum-wage jobs that don’t leave enough money for permanent shelter.

Slept Under a Bridge

The couple, who met in a California homeless shelter three years ago, recently camped beneath a bridge over the Truckee River. With the approach of colder weather, they have been spending more time at a shelter for families and couples.

The Salvation Army Family Emergency Shelter, or SAFES, is a stopover for the Perrys and about 70 other people trying to make a transition from their cars or the river bank to motels, where about 4,000 working homeless live in this city of 200,000, according to Salvation Army estimates.

Local motels run $80 to $120 a week for a room. One-bedroom apartments are available for $300 a month, but they require the first and last month’s rent and a $100 to $300 security deposit, putting them out of the reach of minimum-wage families.

“Hopefully,” Gloria Perry said, “our Christmas present will be a roof over our heads. I’m not the picket-fence type. I just want a roof over my head that I can call my own.”

Hard to Pay Bills

But even in a motel, people with no home still struggle to pay their bills. They are often seen in lines for free food and clothing or outside blood banks, where a survey shows more than half of them go to supplement their incomes, for up to $10 a pint.

Motel owners, like Sam Dibotonto, say many of the people who live in the downtown area hotels and motels are not unhappy.

“There have always been seasonal people,” said Dibotonto, who was Reno’s mayor in the early 1970s. “They aren’t looking for a permanent residence; just work and a place to sleep. Of course, more and more of them are coming to Reno.

“They hock everything to come here for jobs, so they don’t have anything when they arrive. Most likely, they’ve never had much to begin with.”

But to Robert Hayes, counsel for the New York-based National Coalition for the Homeless, these people represent a new phenomenon. “It’s probably the first time in American history that homelessness is appearing among employed people. And it’s on the upswing.”

Les Brown, president of the Illinois Coalition for the Homeless, agreed: “The old myths about bag ladies, bums and winos no longer hold any water.”

The plight of the working homeless appears in varied forms across the nation.

A count of residents in Connecticut shelters found that 20% were working full-time.

In many once-booming industrial areas, much of the economy has shifted to lower-paying service employment. Manchester, N.H., for instance, “is not a factory town anymore, it’s a service economy,” said shelter director Henrietta Charest.

In other states, such as Washington, the working homeless include migrant farm workers.

Inflation in housing costs keeps even modest apartments beyond the reach of those earning low wages. “Look at northern Virginia,” said Sue Capers, an advocate for the homeless in Richmond. “My God, where do you live on $3.35 an hour?”

At an Indianapolis shelter, Dale Foley, who works trimming trees, said he could afford $50 a week for a room but can’t find anything. “I’m looking for a place where I can get up at home,” he said, “make my own breakfast and go to work.”

In Reno, Karen Martin, who runs the 4-year-old SAFES shelter, sees this national problem first-hand.

“We have families come in from all over the West, but we’ve never had this many in November before. It’s really getting scary.

“What they don’t know is you can get a job in Reno, but you can’t live.”

Drawing Attention

Hayes said the homeless coalition thinks the problem is just now getting national attention. “There’s lots going on but the target, I think, is the battle to increase the federal minimum wage,” he said. “That’s the best place to begin.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to raise the $3.35-an-hour federal minimum wage to $4.65 over a three-year period.

The minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 1981. “During the past six years, purchasing power has decreased 27%,” Kennedy aide Paul Donovan said. “The working poor are slipping further and further behind in the economic race for survival.”

Although Nevada’s jobless rate mirrors the national rate at about 6%, about half the state’s workers are in the two lowest-paying types of jobs: hotel-casinos and retail and wholesale sales. Their average pay is less than $288 a week, according to the state Employment Security Department.

The state Welfare Department and the Salvation Army and United Way in Reno estimate that 40,000 to 50,000 people are homeless in Nevada, a state with a population of about 1 million. The state has 1,250 emergency beds, most of them in the population centers of Reno and Las Vegas.

“My husband and I both work graveyard at Circus Circus (casino and hotel), but it’s real hard saving money,” Dalena Spears said. Her husband and two children, aged 6 and 1, live in a nearby motel.

“We scrape to pay our motel bill, put food on the table, pay the baby sitter, make payments on the car and put clothes on the kids. They’re growing all the time.”