The People Who Hold New York Together Should Be Able to Afford to Live Here
Everette Green’s story is not simply about one man’s careful budgeting. It reveals the impossible bargain New York has made with the people who care for its most vulnerable residents.
By Nathaniel M. Fields, Chief Executive Officer, Urban Resource Institute
The most revealing object in the recent New York Times profile of Everette Green may be the grocery circular he carries while shopping.
Mr. Green studies prices with the attention other people reserve for investment reports. A carton of milk that once cost $3.09 now costs $4.49, and he notices. Charcoal is purchased during holiday sales and stored for the summer. A family birthday dinner is planned months in advance. Each dollar has an assignment before it arrives.
These are not the habits of a careless man. They are the disciplines required of a New Yorker earning $21 an hour while spending his working life caring for other people.
Mr. Green is 63. More than three decades ago, after incarceration and treatment for substance use, he decided to rebuild his life through service. He became a human services worker because he understood what it meant to struggle and believed that experience could help someone else find a different path.
It did.
He bought a home in Canarsie. He raised two children. He paid his mortgage for approximately 30 years. He became the sort of neighbor who grills for community gatherings and the sort of father who quietly saves for a family celebration. At work, he supports adults with developmental disabilities, helping them manage daily responsibilities and set longer-term goals.
His life is an extraordinary story of transformation. His paycheck is an ordinary story of the human services sector. That contradiction should trouble us.
I have spent much of my career working alongside the people who keep New York’s social infrastructure functioning: social workers, residential specialists, case managers, clinicians, security personnel, facilities teams, prevention educators, advocates, and direct-support professionals.
At Urban Resource Institute, nearly 1,000 employees and team members support survivors of domestic violence, families experiencing homelessness, young people, and communities across New York City. Our organization operates residential and nonresidential programs that impact approximately 40,000 people each year.
The scale of that work can be expressed in numbers. Its weight cannot.
Human services workers are present during moments that rarely appear in annual reports. They are there when a mother arrives at a shelter carrying everything she could gather before leaving an abusive home. They help a child adjust to another unfamiliar bedroom and another new school. They sit with families navigating grief, trauma, housing instability, court proceedings, and systems whose requirements can feel endless.
They help people complete applications, find apartments, prepare for interviews, understand legal options, establish financial goals, and imagine lives beyond the crisis that first brought them through our doors.
The work requires expertise. It also requires patience, judgment, emotional steadiness, cultural understanding, and the ability to build trust with people who may have been repeatedly failed by those they were told to trust.
Yet we have constructed a public system that too often depends upon the private sacrifice of the workers who sustain it.
New York contracts with nonprofit organizations to provide essential services because these organizations possess deep community relationships and specialized knowledge. But the value assigned to the workforce is frequently constrained by contracts that do not reflect the actual cost of recruiting, retaining, and fairly compensating qualified employees and the value of their work.
We praise human services workers as essential. We call them heroes during emergencies. Then we ask many of them to live one rent increase, medical expense, or family emergency away from needing the very services they provide.
We assume people will accept inadequate compensation because the work is meaningful. We depend on their commitment to clients to close the distance between what a government contract pays and what it actually costs to live here. Meaningful work, however, does not make rent less expensive. Dedication does not reduce a grocery bill. A sense of purpose cannot fund retirement.
This inequity has also never been distributed evenly. New York City’s contracted human services workforce is overwhelmingly composed of women and people of color. The same communities historically expected to provide care—often without adequate recognition or compensation—continue to carry much of this work today.
Pay equity is therefore not only an economic question. It is a question of racial justice, gender equity, and what kinds of labor our society chooses to value.
It is also inseparable from the quality of care clients receive.
When experienced workers leave because they cannot afford to remain in the sector, organizations lose knowledge that cannot be quickly replaced. Clients lose trusted relationships. Remaining employees absorb additional responsibilities, increasing burnout and making further turnover more likely.
For people healing from trauma, continuity is not an administrative convenience. Trust may be the first condition of recovery. When underpaid workers are forced to leave, survivors are forced to begin again.
That is why the movement for fair compensation must be understood as more than a workforce campaign. It is an investment in stronger programs, safer communities, and better outcomes for the people these programs serve.
A meaningful solution must include a true living-wage floor for human services workers, including the current push toward a minimum of $29 an hour. But the mandate must be accompanied by sufficient government funding. Nonprofit providers cannot be expected to finance public policy through already strained operating budgets.
Government contracts must fully support competitive wages, benefits, supervision, training, and the actual cost of delivering high-quality services. Compensation should rise predictably with the cost of living rather than depending on annual budget battles. Contracts must also be registered and paid on time so organizations are not forced to borrow money simply to meet payroll while waiting to be reimbursed for work already performed.
New York has the resources to address this. What has been missing is the willingness to value the human services workforce accordingly.
Mr. Green is now thinking about retirement, family dinners, concerts with his son, and restoring the backyard pool for his granddaughter. After a life he once doubted he would survive, he is looking forward to the years ahead.
That dignity should not depend on decades of sacrifice and constant financial calculation. The question is not how Mr. Green has managed to live on $40,000 a year. It is why New York continues to demand so much from the people who make it possible for others to live here at all.
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Nathaniel M. Fields is Chief Executive Officer of Urban Resource Institute, the nation’s largest provider of domestic violence shelter and support services and a leading provider of housing and services for families experiencing homelessness.
Survivors and concerned family members can find information about safety, shelter, legal assistance, and other services through URI’s support and resources page.
