New York Magazine
By Errol Louis, a columnist for New York Magazine | March 31, 2026
Many of the challenges Zohran Mamdani has encountered in his first 100 days as mayor — like ending street homelessness, halting the deterioration of public housing, or preventing the deaths in custody of jailed detainees on Rikers Island — are not just tough but essentially unsolvable.
But raising the abysmally low wages of emergency medical-services workers, New York’s fabled corps of skilled “street doctors” who staff fire-department ambulances and respond to every manner of health crisis, is not one of those problems. Even in a tough budget season, it will be a scandal if City Hall doesn’t fix this pronto.
“We have quite a few members who are homeless — either living in shelters, sleeping in their cars, sleeping at the station, sleeping on a friend’s couch,” says Oren Barzilay, president of FDNY EMS Local 2507, which represents most emergency medical technicians in the city. “They put on a uniform during the day, and at night, they’re homeless.”
You read that right. The first responders who answered more than 1.6 million 911 calls last year, often alongside cops and firefighters, get starting pay of $39,000 a year and top out at $59,000 after several years on the job. EMS is part of the Fire Department, but EMTs get paid far less than the $54,000 starting pay of firefighters, who can expect to make $110,000 after five years.
It’s a daily slap in the face of responders who show up within minutes when New Yorkers have a bad fall, a heart attack, or a bleeding cut. “I worked overnight, so I worked from 6:30 to 6:30,” Jasiah Canelo, a 23-year-old Astoria native, told me about his years as an EMT stationed in Washington Heights. “There’s no elevators, so we would have a six-flight carry down, you know what I mean? That would happen eight or nine times a night. You’re doing something, and it can get very physical.”
Taysha Soto, an EMT and single mother stationed in Staten Island, told me she works 16 hours every day to supplement her $39,000 salary. “We give our best, and we’re just not treated how we’re supposed to be treated,” she told me. “There’s people I’ve heard of that actually do sleep in their cars, that are actually facing eviction, you know, because they’re just so backed up with bills and everything. I had that problem not too long ago, where I was just backed up in bills and rent like three months. I just now got my taxes and I was able to catch up on bills and stuff, but I was backed up on everything, literally. And it’s just not right.”
The low pay leads to high turnover. “We’re losing almost 1,500 members by the end of the year,” Vincent Variale, president of Local 3261 of the Uniformed Emergency Medical Service Officers Union, told me. “So that’s a considerable amount when you talk about the size of our service being 4,500.”