Shirley Phinzee blinked wearily under the fluorescent lights of a Miami Wendy’s. She had slept in her car the night before, as she has nearly every night since January.

Phinzee is 63 and, for the first time in her life, homeless. That’s despite having a full-time job. She works 40 hours a week for $16 an hour — $3 more than Florida’s minimum wage — as a unionized janitor.

Phinzee, like more than half of Miami-Dade residents, is what United Way considers ALICE — asset-limited, income constrained, employed. They’re people who work, often earning too much to qualify for state assistance, but effectively live paycheck to paycheck.

There are 527,469 such households in the county, United Way Miami found in a recent report. That’s 54% of Miami-Dade households — a 40,000-household increase since 2023 — and the highest rate of Florida’s larger metropolitan areas.

In the Sunshine State more broadly, 47% of households are financially pressured, according to United Way. In only three states — Louisiana, Mississippi and New York — are greater percentages of residents under more economic strain.

Though lower than a 2014 peak, when 60% of local families didn’t earn enough to make ends meet, Miami-Dade’s ALICE population has crept up since the pandemic, when a surge of higher-earning, out-of-state residents moved to South Florida, driving up local costs, especially for housing. Local wages, however, haven’t kept pace, pushing more and more households toward the financial brink.

“These are child care workers. These are health aides. These are folks who may serve you a drink or a meal at a restaurant,” said Symeria Hudson, CEO of United Way Miami. “They keep the city going.”

And yet, many of those workers are fighting just to stay above water. They might have to choose between food and child care or car insurance and a medical procedure. Many are just a crisis or two away from financial ruin.

Phinzee was.

The first blow came three years ago, when her car was totaled. “A drunk driver hit me and left me for dead,” she recalled, rubbing the back of her neck, which has hurt ever since.

The physical recovery set her back financially. So did the new car, which Phinzee needed to make it across the county in time for her night shift, from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.

But it was the death of her roommate — a elderly pastor, whom she took care of for reduced rent — in January that landed Phinzee in her car.

“I haven’t been able to cry or worry about none of this stuff. I just had to keep going,” she said matter-of-factly, though her voice cracked a bit. “I just put everything in the (car) and I prayed.”

A friend lets Phinzee park her car in his driveway so she can sleep. “Sometimes,” she said, “some neighbors let me come in, take a shower, let me stay overnight.”

Phinzee’s torn on how to use the money she has. So far, she’s prioritized paying off her car. She doesn’t feel she can rely on public transportation to get to and from work, especially at 1 a.m., when her shift ends.

At the same time, Phinzee’s struggling to save the money she needs to rent an apartment. First month’s rent, last month’s rent and a security deposit are thousands of dollars upfront. “I don’t have that type of money,” she sighed. “I’m looking every day for something cheap.”

That’s hard to come by in Miami-Dade, especially for those earning less than $21.11 an hour — or $42,228 annually — which United Way Miami identified as the minimum wage a single adult Miamian needs to earn to stably afford housing, transportation, food — the necessities.

But prices keep going up. Miamians’ transportation expenses ballooned 66% between 2020 and 2023 alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning many locals spend nearly 20% of their income just to get around. Grocery costs, another major line item, jumped by nearly a quarter over the same period.

But housing has been the real kicker.

“The housing cost is just unbelievable,” said Hudson, the United Way Miami CEO. According to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rental cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Miami-Dade has grown by almost 48% in the half-decade since 2020.

Local wages, meanwhile, only increased 30% between 2020 and 2024, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Six in 10 metro Miami residents now spend at least 30% of their income on housing, while three in 10 spend at least half, making them the most cost-burdened urbanites in the United States.

Enocch Marshall’s no stranger to being cost-burdened or living paycheck-to-paycheck. At 25, that’s been his reality for pretty much ever. But he’s fighting for financial stability, and, for the first time in his life, he’s nearly got it.

Raised in West Little River, Marshall’s parents — his mother, a cashier, and his father, unemployed after he became permanently disabled following a gunshot to the head — could barely make ends meet.

Marshall said he had to drop out of elementary school to sell “chocolate bars, cookies, stuff like that to make money, to catch up on the rent.” Though he and his family constantly scrambled to stay off the street, they spent the occasional night outside, in a car or a storage unit.

“At that point,” Marshall reflected, “it’s only surviving. It’s not living, it’s surviving.”

He worked odd jobs throughout his later adolescence, scraping together cash to help his mom, with whom he lived, keep the lights on. But when she died of COVID in 2020, he couldn’t afford their shared unit. “I was on the street for about three days” after her passing, Marshall remembered, before he landed in a shelter.

And then, through some combination of luck, good sense and determination, things began to look up. He enrolled in Greater Miami Service Corps, a job-training program for out-of-school youth, and picked up some skills — painting, carpentry, pressure washing.

But it wasn’t until he landed at the Barrington Irving Technical Training School, where he trained to work as a ground support equipment technician, that his hopes for a stable present and future took off.

Marshall now works full time, earning $20 an hour. “This is the first time in my life where I can say that I’m actually feeling good about the situation I’m in.”

But he still makes less than United Way’s “survival” income for Miami-Dade. And he spends $950 — more than 30% of his monthly take-home pay — on a cramped, bathroom-less studio in Hialeah.

Miami-Dade lacks more than 90,000 affordable units for workers like Marshall, who earn less than 80% of the area median income — or roughly $70,000 for a single person — according to the advocacy group Miami Homes for All.

Targeted policies to address housing affordability for those earners is key to making Miami-Dade — where nearly a quarter of households earn less than $35,000 per year, according to Census data — a more sustainably affordable place, said Annie Lord, the organization’s executive director.

What about Live Local, Florida’s flagship housing affordability policy?

A good start, says Lord, but it’s unlikely to help much: “(Live Local) leans very heavily towards a middle-income population,” those earning between 80% and 120% of area median income. Per the state’s calculations, Live Local could have someone on an $87,000 salary paying $2,170 for a studio apartment in Miami-Dade.

“It does not contemplate addressing the (housing affordability) problem where it mostly lies” — with those like Phinzee and Marshall.

If not Live Local, then what? Lord thinks a county general obligation bond could raise billions of dollars to sustainably invest in affordable housing for workers who earn less than $70,000 a year. Her organization has already identified 14,000 units of housing in varying stages of predevelopment that, with funding, could be built.

But building takes time and, until units are up, “expanding the availability of housing vouchers” paid out by the federal government would be a successful strategy to make life more affordable, said Kim Johnson, senior director of policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

That’s unlikely to happen, at least this year. The organization noted in a recent memo that the 2026 budgets under debate in Congress would likely lead to a reduction in the number of housing vouchers issued.

But to help their lower-income constituents, Johnson said local governments could enact stronger tenant protections, especially around evictions. Likewise, local investments in affordable housing or community land trusts can help promote long-term affordability at the neighborhood level, she added.

For his part, Marshall’s saving what he can. He’s forgone a car and public transportation, electing to bike to work as he squirrels away money to move into a more spacious place. Still, he’s hoping to move up in the aviation industry and, critically, away from the brink of financial ruin.

“I’m fighting for my future,” Marshall said, looking up at the heavy clouds rolling in from the east. They scattered the remaining rays of sun that poked out from over the Everglades, bathing the hangars of Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport in a sepia tone.

Marshall turned to go inside, dragging his hand along the wing of a parked single-engine plane.

“When I decide to have kids, they won’t have to deal with the things I dealt with.”

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This story was produced with financial support from supporters including The Green Family Foundation Trust and Ken O’Keefe, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.

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