They Have Jobs—But No Homes: What One January Night Taught Me

Written by Robert Boyle, Principal Director of Fund Development – as told from his experience during the 2025 Point-In-Time Count.

It was my first Point-In-Time Count…and it was around 9 pm on a cold, especially dark Wednesday night. I was in a car with three other volunteers and we were looking to – in the words of the Department of Housing and Urban Development – get “a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January.” 

Part of this effort included driving through several big box retail parking lots, where people living in their cars will frequently stay because it offers lighting and more safety. As we were driving through a Walmart lot, we saw a small, older sedan parked toward the back of the lot, away from the other cars. The car was running, and the driver’s side window was no longer there, replaced by Visqueen and metallic duct tape.  

As we approached the car, the man in the driver’s seat could see we wanted to speak with him, so he cracked the door as there was no window to roll down. He seemed to be in his late forties or early fifties. He didn’t want to give us his name, though acknowledged he was living in his car… and then he told us he had a job at the Walmart.

Homelessness is frequently associated with extreme poverty, mental illness and substance abuse, but the sad fact is that more and more working people cannot afford to live in a home of their own. 

This problem is addressed in an excellent new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in the U.S. by journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone, and summarized compellingly as he documents the plight of a home health care worker named Cokethia and her children.

“It was the fact that they had become homeless despite her full-time job as a home health aide – a point that Cokethia returned to again and again, as if unable to wrap her mind around it. Like many of us, she had been taught to believe that homelessness and a job were mutually exclusive; that if she worked hard enough and stayed on top of her responsibilities, if she clocked enough hours, she could avoid such a fate. And yet here she was, dressed in bright blue medical scrubs and checking her phone to see if any shelter beds had opened up.”

Goldstone goes on to write, “Today there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), an average minimum wage worker would need to work 2.4 full-time jobs to afford a one-bedroom rental at a fair market rate.  A recent study by the NAEH estimates there is a nationwide shortfall of 3.8 million affordable homes. Here in Michigan, the shortfall is estimated to be 185,354 affordable homes – and just over half of the need is right here in Metro Detroit.

The 2025 Point-In-Time Count totals won’t be available until later this year, but the 2024 count found more than 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night, which is an 18-percent increase from 2023. But this does not include people staying with friends or relatives, or in hotels or motels, which is why many experts say that Point-In-Time Count data is, in fact, a serious undercount. A 2017 study by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty estimated that the actual homeless population could be anywhere from 2.5 to ten times higher than the Point-In-Time Count total. 

United Way documents the increasing struggle of working families through their “ALICE” reports, which compares household incomes to the true cost of living. The acronym stands for “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed,” and more than 40% of local households are currently at or below this threshold. It’s both shocking and sobering that the most recent ALICE report finds a Metro Detroit family of four with a household income of $90,000 on the precipice of financial hardship.

In times of high inflation that drive up construction and development costs, and cuts proposed to an already underfunded housing safety net, it’s critical that we understand the housing crisis extends well beyond people in extreme poverty. If we can’t come to the realization that more and more working folks can’t afford a home of their own – and address this problem with adequate solutions and resources – the housing crisis will only get worse.