The Hidden Cost of Waiting

                                            Photo Credit: Image by anncapictures from Pixabay

By Joselle Monyette

 How much of our lives do we spend waiting? Waiting on news, waiting on applications, waiting on emails? What if we could use that time for something else? Wouldn’t we be more productive? For many individuals experiencing homelessness, waiting is not optional. The time required to retrieve and process applications for housing, medical care, or insurance delays access to essential resources and prolongs homelessness. Administrative processing times place individuals in a holding pattern, where progress depends not on effort, but on approval.

Unlike financial costs, the cost of time is less visible but equally restrictive. Application reviews, background checks, document verification, and appointment scheduling require individuals to wait before they can access housing, employment, medical care, or public benefits. During these waiting periods, income is not generated, stability is not secured, and opportunities may pass. Delays in approval do not simply postpone progress; they suspend it. When access to essential resources depends on processing timelines rather than effort, time itself becomes a barrier to exiting homelessness.

A common assumption is that individuals experiencing homelessness are idle or unmotivated, as though their time is unstructured or unproductive. However, navigating administrative systems requires persistence, repeated follow-ups, transportation to appointments, document retrieval, and compliance with strict timelines. Waiting is not inactivity; it is often mandatory participation in bureaucratic processes. The perception of idleness overlooks the labor involved in attempting to secure stability through systems that operate on delayed timelines.

When time is required to navigate applications, appointments, and verification systems, waiting becomes a form of unpaid labor. It demands attention, transportation, documentation, and compliance with processes that individuals do not control. Yet this labor is rarely recognized. Instead, delays are misinterpreted as inactivity. If we redefine waiting as participation in administrative systems rather than idleness, it becomes clear that the barrier is not motivation, but time itself. To learn more about how flexibility and ease of access in service design shape people’s ability to use support systems, click here.