1 week ago
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New York|When They Go Home After Working All Day, It’s Not to a Home
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/nyregion/homeless-shelters-new-york-city.html
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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.
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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.
