Homeless Tigers

Princeton University operates at full tilt for roughly nine months of the year. In the summer months, when students flock to Washington, New York, and the cosmopolitan corners of Europe for glamorous internships, some of Princeton's hardest working Tigers find themselves in a less desirable circumstance: homeless.

That's right. During the paycheck-less summer months, a number of employees of an institution with a $9 billion endowment are unable to pay their rent and are forced from their homes. The worst-off end up living meal-to-meal and turn up regularly at the Crisis Ministry food pantry on East Hanover Street in Trenton.

A local housing and homelessness nonprofit reports that homeless Princeton employees, almost all of them dining hall and facilities workers, turn up looking for shelter and food for the same reasons that most homeless people in Mercer County do: not because they are unemployed, but because they are underpaid in a region with a severe affordable housing crisis.

The homelessness of Princeton workers is symptomatic of the affordable housing crisis in central New Jersey, and of the University's failure to provide a living wage for its employees. Four years ago, the Workers' Rights Organizing Campaign (WROC) battled the administration on the latter front with limited success — despite some concessions made by the University, many of Princeton's workers still do not earn enough to cover basic costs of living.

While continuing to pressure the administration and trustees to grant their employees a living wage, we should also demand that they guarantee to Princeton University workers the basic human right to shelter.

Of course, guaranteeing such a thing is easier said than done.

Mercer County is an expensive real estate market highly segregated on the basis of race and wealth. University employees are not exempt from these patterns. Last December, the Princeton Justice Project mapped the geographic distribution of University employees based on salary classification and, not surprisingly, found that highly-paid faculty and administrators were mainly clustered in the affluent Princeton area, while most low-paid staff (including many dining hall and facilities workers) were ghettoized in the region's poorest neighborhoods.

Since overpriced housing is the only housing available in Mercer County, even in the poorest areas, many of the lowest-paid University workers can barely afford to pay their rent. Those that cannot afford it end up homeless.

In some indirect ways, the University has begun to acknowledge this crisis as well as its own ability to improve the situation. In 2004, the administration made an unheralded but significant decision to extend the University's mortgage assistance program to Trenton. This program, which offers below-market rate mortgage loans to faculty and some select staff, had previously only applied to homes purchased within nine miles of the University. The effect of the decision is that, for the first time, the University is giving an incentive to its professors and administrators to live in Trenton, a boon to a city whose population and wealth have declined precipitously over the past half-century.

In theory, the expansion of the mortgage assistance program to Trenton is beneficial to all — it generates sorely-needed investment in Trenton and takes some pressure off of the Princeton real estate market, making the Princeton area more affordable for low-income workers.

In reality, expansion of the program is barely half the solution. If it is not complemented by an effort to subsidize the housing costs of low income workers seeking to live in and around Princeton, it might even make things worse for those workers living in Trenton by driving up housing costs there.

An inexpensive solution is at hand. Existing state-level programs are ready to at least partially fund another dramatic expansion of Princeton University's mortgage-assistance program so that low-paid workers are afforded the basic opportunity to secure housing for 12 months of the year. New research by the Fannie Mae Foundation suggests that this type of program benefits employers and employees, allowing employees to compete in the overheated Mercer County real estate market and reducing turnover and recruitment costs for employers.

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There is no good reason to delay, especially when delay could mean another summer on the street for Princeton University workers. Thomas Bohnett is a sophomore from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.