For low-wage earners, rent money still out of reach

The one-stop centers have been established in cities including Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where the majority of union members are immigrants, according to Mr. Snyder.

HERE and other unions have stressed the need for an increase in the minimum wage - and an expansion of unemployment insurance benefits - to ensure that workers are able to afford housing and support their families.

Yet Ron Bird, chief economist of the Employment Policy Foundation in Washington, contends that a focus on those aspects of the labor market is short-sighted and inadequate.

"[T]he important thing is to focus on training and education, so that people have the skills to find and keep jobs, and to have the level of productivity that makes the concept of minimum wage irrelevant.

"My concern with focusing on easy-sounding solutions like raising the minimum wage," Dr. Bird says, "is that it could actually create very negative, unintended consequences of making life harder for people just trying to get in and get [job] experience."

But Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-Time America," bristles at the notion that minimum and low-wage workers are all unskilled, or are people out to gain experience.

Ms. Ehrenreich went undercover in 1998, posing as a divorced homemaker to explore the survival issues of low-wage workers. After finding work in Key West, Fla., she quickly learned she needed another job to afford her $500-a-month, one-bedroom apartment.

As she moved around the country, Ehrenreich was forced by economic necessity to live in residential motels, paying up to $250 per week.

"I was completely unprepared for how hard that would be," says Ehrenreich. "People get trapped into this kind of housing because they cannot get together the ... move-in costs of a monthly apartment rental. And then it's just a downward spiral."

In Washington State, with the nation's highest unemployment rate at 6.6 percent, the problem is acute. Because of the accompanying increase in homelessness, the Seattle City Council agreed in October to a $2.75 million plan to house homeless people, with 200 more units if voters approve a tax levy next year.

Other cities have taken an even more proactive approach, passing "living wage" ordinances that typically apply to firms doing business with city government.

In May, Santa Monica, Calif., became the first city to pass an across-the-board ordinance. Businesses with revenues above $5 million operating within a specified district will be required to pay workers $10.50 an hour beginning July 2002. (The state's minimum wage is $6.25.)

"This is not an intractable problem," emphasizes Crowley of the NLIHC, whose organization is pushing Congress to establish a $5 billion National Housing Trust Fund to help states and nonprofit agencies create affordable housing for low and moderate-income families.

"If the expectation is that people are going to achieve some sort of self-sufficiency, there is explicit in that the notion that they have the ability to provide for their basic needs," she says. "And housing is key among them."

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