01/05/2026
She makes $18.50 an hour and still lives in a camper.
For nine years, she worked the same job managing returns for a cashmere clothing company just north of Detroit.
The pay was never great, but it was steady, and that stability mattered.
Then the pandemic hit and her job disappeared.
When the paycheck stopped, so did her ability to pay rent at her mobile home park. She sold her trailer for a few thousand dollars, which was the last real asset she had, and left town with little more than what she could take with her.
“Losing my job made me lose everything,” she says.
She bought a camper and headed north to Michigan, taking whatever work she could find just to survive. Fast food shifts. Hotel housekeeping. Anything that paid something.
After months of scrambling, she landed a part-time job at an Amazon delivery station earning $18.50 an hour. It was better money than before, but still not enough to qualify for stable housing.
And this is the part people need to sit with, because her story is not unusual.
• Median rent in the U.S. now exceeds $2,000 a month
• In 99% of counties, a full-time minimum-wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment
• Housing costs have increased 120% since 1979, while wages have risen only 17%
For millions of Americans, the promise that hard work guarantees stability no longer reflects reality.
People are doing what they were told to do, and the math still does not work.
Something in this system is broken, and pretending otherwise does not make it go away.
