Unstable Housing, Insecure Families
The Relationship Between Housing Insecurity and the Child Welfare System
Folks, I know a thing or two (or three, or four, or five) about housing insecurity. I’ve written about it frequently in this newsletter: about being raised in a home bereft of running water, electricity, or intact windows; about sleeping in hotel rooms, park benches, and vacant buildings; and about the looming threat of homelessness that hung over my head for my entire decade in the foster care system. But, there’s many anecdotes I have yet to share, and as I prepared for this newsletter, so many sprung to mind.
One such anecdote involves my mother’s impossible struggle to find a homeless shelter that would take us all. Though I was quite young, I remember my mother’s anguish as she wrestled with a difficult decision: sleep on the streets as a family, or be split up across the various homeless shelters spread throughout the city. The issue was rather straightforward: the shelters we were trying to access at the time had gender restrictions. My mother was permitted to bring only my brother Doug and I into the all-women's shelter (since we were young), but my older teenage brothers were not allowed to stay there due to their age. She ended up opting for the streets. A few years ago, I spoke with my mother about this incident, and she explained her thought process as follows:
“What kind of mom would I be if I left my boys in a shelter on the other side of town, by themselves, with grown men? How would they feel seeing you and Doug staying with me, when they had to go sleep with strangers? Plus, I didn’t even know if they had space at the other shelter. If something would happen to them in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t even be able to get to them because the buses ain’t running and we didn’t have the money for a taxi. What kinda choice is that? Take two kids and leave two kids? That ain’t no choice.”
Though it likely won’t be reflected in any of the statistics or official court records for my family, in my opinion, our lack of housing stability was the primary reason my brothers and I went into the system. If my mother had a place to call home during that period in our lives, maybe she would’ve been able to find stable employment and possibly avoid the various pitfalls that would eventually ensnare her. Instead, she must’ve spent thousands of dollars (maybe even tens of thousands) on hotel rooms, dilapidated rentals, campground fees, and more. Perhaps symbolizing the centrality of housing insecurity in my family’s plight is the fact that my brothers and I were camping out in an abandoned home when the state came and took us into the system.
The most tragic aspect of it all is that this issue had an ostensibly ready-made solution: get a roof over our head. But, sadly, this solution has historically proven to be oh-so-elusive for so many, evident in the growing numbers of homeless families in the US, and specifically, in my beloved home state of California. If my family’s story is any indication, the direct consequence of having so many families struggling to find safe and stable housing is that more and more children will be funneled into foster care.
So, in this newsletter, I’ll dive into how housing insecurity intersects with the child welfare system. Specifically, I’ll be writing about how housing insecurity can send kids into the system, how it can impact a parent’s ability to care for their kids, and how it prevents a family from reunifying once a kid is in the system.
As a sneak peek, next week I will be writing about the housing issues that former foster youth must contend with as they age out of the system, another subject I have some familiarity with. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Housing and Homelessness: The Numbers
Let’s first get a little grasp on the issue of housing insecurity and homelessness for children and families. Spoiler alert: it’s a big issue. Here’s just a selection of statistics I stumbled upon, each of which communicate that there’s a crisis:
According to the Department of Housing and Human Services, approximately 1.2 million children under 6 years old experience homelessness in the United States.
Each year, an estimated 4.2 million children and young adults experience homelessness in the United States, including 700,000 of which are unaccompanied minors.
In one single night in January 2023, there were an estimated 57,563 family households that were identified as homeless.
This is a growing issue, as well. Last year, the Department of Education released a report and found that homelessness among public school students increased by approximately 10% since the 2021-2022 school year, and since 2006-2007, it has grown by about 77%. Furthermore, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that there has been a 16% increase in homelessness among families with children, and a 15% increase in homelessness among youth on their own. Whatever way you slice it, a growing number of children every night have no place to call home.
This is just homelessness, though; there are milder forms of housing insecurity that adversely impact families. For example, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, approximately 14% of children live in crowded accommodations. Not only do these types of settings contribute to a poor quality of life (a whole family packed into one room can be less than ideal, I can tell you from experience), but crowded housing is also linked to “slow growth in childhood, which is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.” In my beloved home state of California, 27.1% of children lived in these conditions in 2022, a staggering figure.
There’s also the question of low-quality and substandard housing. According to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, approximately 5.2 percent of all US households live in homes with “multiple structural deficiencies or lacking basic features such as electricity, plumbing, or heat.” Again, living in such housing is not without its consequences: children who live in homes with “leaking roofs, exposed wires, pest infestation, or other problems” are likely to deal with anxiety, depression, and outwardly aggressive behaviors.
Quality housing, for many families, comes at a significant cost. Literally, it's expensive. According to a 2024 report from the aforementioned Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 22.4 million Americans are housing burdened, meaning they spend over 30% of their income on rent. Of these households, nearly half spend over 50% of their income on rent.
All of this is to say: millions of children (and their families) are either homeless, packed into crowded or low-quality homes, or watching their parents spend more and more of their income on just keeping a roof over their head.
Now let’s look at what all this means for the child welfare system.
The Housing Insecurity to Foster Care Pipeline
To state the obvious: not having a safe and stable place to rest your head infringes on your ability to adequately care for your kid. Whether it’s living on the street or forking over 70% of your income to rent a dilapidated apartment, housing insecurity erodes a child’s well-being and is incredibly stressful for a parent, both of which are likely to draw the attention of the child protection system. This is borne out in the statistics: according to HHS, approximately 11% of all entries into the foster care system in 2022 was associated with housing issues. Put differently, nearly 20,000 children were funneled into the system as a result of their parents struggling, in some regard, with housing.
Aside from the very real maltreatment concerns — which I will discuss shortly — there is a simple reason why housing insecurity serves as a pipeline to the child welfare system: relative to other forms of deprivation, it can be very visible. This is especially the case for homeless families. Take it from me: folks notice when a family of five is sleeping in a small sedan, or worse yet, in a playground at 3 AM. This is likely why compared to children who have not experienced homelessness, homeless children are 34 times more likely to be placed in an out-of-home placement.
As a matter of fact, researchers have found that even when compared exclusively to other children who are low-income but have not experienced homelessness, homeless children have “significantly higher rates of child welfare system involvement, including investigation, substantiation, and foster care placement.”
Housing insecurity also distorts parenting in a way that might lead to maltreatment. For example, one study found that housing insecurity is directly associated with an increased risk of neglect and has some influence on the risk of abuse due to increased parental (the authors specifically state maternal) stress. Even if one were to quibble with their analysis, their findings do seem intuitive: parenting is stressful, and parenting while living in an overpriced apartment with a broken AC in the middle of summer (all while the threat of eviction hangs over your head) is almost certainly going to exacerbate that stress.
This type of stress is rampant, and a litany of research shows that it adversely impacts children. For example, a team of researchers systematically reviewed the academic literature on the association between housing stress and child maltreatment, and here were some of their findings:
One study found that among children with a substantiated CPS report, inadequate housing was associated with an increased likelihood of overall maltreatment death.
Another found that “more than one move every 3.33 years of life prior to age 18 years was associated with an increased likelihood of self-reported maltreatment.”
And yet another found that housing stress was associated with an increased likelihood of maternal self-reported maltreatment.
So, in short: being homeless is challenging, and being a homeless parent is infinitely more challenging. When these challenges are met by a patchy, insufficient social safety net and a child protection system incapable of addressing the material concerns of at-risk families, foster care becomes the only mechanism to house children. But even this heavy-handed approach to housing kids is flawed, because once a kid enters foster care, the specter of housing insecurity still haunts both children and families, in different ways.
The Problem Continues: Housing Instability as a Roadblock to Reunification
I’ve been meaning to write a newsletter on this subject for quite some time — and perhaps I still might — but reader, do me a favor: type into Google the name of your state, followed by “foster care hotels.” There’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon an article discussing how your state has been or still is placing kids in hotel rooms upon their entry into foster care. The examples are too numerous to cite, but here are just a few:
In recent years, Oregon has spent $25 million placing 462 kids in hotels, even after the state promised to end this practice following a legal settlement in 2018.
Between 2021 and August 2023, Texas spent $260 million placing hundreds of kids in hotel rooms and other unregulated facilities.
In Washington, there were 1,941 placements in hotels between September 2022 to July 2023.
While this particular issue is ostensibly the result of states having too few foster families — an issue I have very strong opinions about that will definitely be spelled out in a future newsletter — it is conceivable that at least some of these kids were placed in the foster care system as a result of their family not having stable housing, which is quite dystopian if you ask me. Imagine it: one night you’re living in a hotel room with your family (as I did with my family on too many nights to count), the next night the state comes, takes you away, and places you in a different hotel, where you’re ‘supervised’ by a caseworker. I should note that we don’t have data on this specific phenomenon, but again, there’s a dang good chance it has happened to a not-insignificant number of kids.
But the issue of housing is even more perverse than what I outlined above, because not only does inadequate housing serve as a conduit into foster care, it can also prevent kids from returning to their families. Take a quick look at the findings from a couple of studies:
Housing instability and homelessness can delay reunification, thus keeping kids in foster care for longer than they need to be.
One study found that even when “inadequate housing had not impacted the removal decision, unstable housing delayed reunification.”
Approximately 40% of families need housing support after their child was placed into foster care (and 16% needed it when they first came to the attention of CPS).
All these studies — and many others — conclude that housing issues continue to plague families even after they lose their children to the system. It gets worse.
One of the most infuriating and Kafkaesque articles I’ve ever read was published a few months ago by ProPublica. I highly recommend you read it yourself, but I’ll very briefly summarize it here.
The article discusses how one woman — identified as K. — fought tooth and nail to secure a studio apartment in a large basement, which she hoped would aid her in her quest to regain custody of her children, who had been in foster care for two years. But, the state said that her housing was inadequate because it didn’t have individual rooms for her children — one for her daughter and one for her two sons. This is particularly maddening because, as the article notes, the state “itself has resorted to housing foster children in hotels when the agency can’t find other placements.”
Worse yet, the basis for these requirements is flimsy at best, as illustrated in this excerpt below:
“[Georgia Division of Family and Children Services] spokesperson Kylie Winton didn’t provide explanations for any of these requirements, which aren’t written down in any statewide policy. But she noted that the agency designs its recommendations for housing based on the needs of each family. Ultimately, she added, judges decide what conditions are appropriate for reuniting children with their parents. But attorneys and advocates, who practice in counties throughout Georgia, said many judges are reluctant to return children to parents with housing that doesn’t win DFCS’ endorsement. They also said while the agency may not have a statewide policy, they've noticed a pattern of DFCS arguing for the same stringent housing requirements across many county courtrooms.”
These standards seem arbitrary to me, but even if they weren’t, a simple cost-benefit analysis would indicate that they are incredibly harmful: kids are being kept in the system longer because a family is struggling to secure what the state deems ‘adequate’ housing. It took K. four additional years to find such housing, meaning her children were in foster care for six years. In a country with a broken housing market — where landlords can refuse to rent to folks with criminal records related to drug offenses and where wages are woefully insufficient to afford an apartment unit with multiple bedrooms — it seems that the system is demanding too much of families and not demanding enough of itself.
Enough with all that, let’s talk about solutions.
Give People Homes
The way to address this issue is both extraordinarily simple and (apparently) exceptionally complicated. We need to get people in homes that are affordable, that are safe, and that are of good quality. Given the state of housing in America, that is far easier said than done. But still, we gotta try and do it.
First and foremost, in areas of the country where housing is least affordable, we need to build a lot more housing (yes, I am unabashedly a YIMBY, but that is a topic for another day and a different newsletter). We need more market-rate housing, more affordable housing, and more types of housing, all located near public transit. Just driving down the price of housing can have a substantive impact on families. One study, for example, found that housing affordability was associated with a reduction in psychological and physical abuse. With that said, this isn’t a housing newsletter, so I’ll leave the broader topic of the housing market to the experts.
As to what the child welfare system itself can do, it can ‘prescribe’ housing to families that need it. Put differently, it can just give families housing assistance when they require it, or collaborate with agencies that do. Again, this isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it's effective. For example, in 2019, the Urban Institute conducted an extensive study that looked at the effectiveness of supportive housing for families involved in the child welfare system between 2012 and 2018. It found that providing families with supportive housing and intensive services led to greater housing stability, lower out-of-home placement costs, and a greater likelihood of reunification for families with children in foster care.
In addition, an initiative by the Department of Housing and Urban Development — called, appropriately, the Family Unification Program — provided housing assistance to families at risk for parent-child separation. Those referred to the program had a reduced risk of homelessness and out-of-home placement, suggesting that “housing services offer an effective alternative to foster care.”
There are a ton of complex issues in the world, with no easy solutions to them. In many ways, this isn’t one of them. If we can just give folks housing, if we can find ways to put a roof over their head, so many families needn’t be broken up. Let’s find a way to do just that.
That’s all I have for this week! See you in a couple of weeks, where I’ll write about the various ways former foster youth struggle with homelessness and housing insecurity. Until then, please be well.
Current Read(s):
I’ve been working my way through a massive biography of Ulysses S. Grant, by Ron Chernow, but I am set to finish that tonight. Following that, I am excited to start on a book I’ve been waiting to read for several weeks: Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor Anne Kim.
Since I haven’t read a page of it yet, I’ll just drop a bit from the synopsis found on the publisher’s website, in case folks are interested:
“In Poverty for Profit, veteran journalist Anne Kim investigates the multiple industries that infiltrate almost every aspect of the lives of the poor—health care, housing, criminal justice, and nutrition. She explains how these businesses are aided by public policies such as the wholesale privatization of government services and the political influence these industries wield over lawmakers and regulators.”
I’ll let y’all know what I think!
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?:
Child Welfare Systems Are Trapping Innocent Families (Reason) — This article (published in a libertarian publication) highlights how one family in Georgia fought to regain custody of their children after a contested accusation of child abuse. Georgia’s DCFS has since dropped its case against the family.
State’s Move to Bump Federal Judge from Longtime Foster Care Lawsuit Caps Years of Battles (The Texas Tribune) — “Have you ever seen the inside of a jail cell?” This question was to the Commissioner of Texas’ HHS, and it was asked by a federal judge seeking to hold the state accountable for its dismal child welfare system. The state is trying to now boot the judge.
Legislation Will Help Volunteers Advocate for Children in Michigan’s Foster Care System (Fox47 News) — A new law out of Michigan will boost access to a critical resource for foster youth: Court Appointed Special Advocates.
Pivot and Oklahoma Human Services Announce Services to Open 15 More Tiny Homes for Young People (Oklahoma City Free Press) — Oklahoma City is providing additional housing options for young folks that have aged out of the foster care system.
Kansas Agreed Foster Kids Shouldn’t Sleep in Offices. But 4 Years Later, They Are (The Kansas City Star) — I don’t know what’s worse: sleeping in a hotel room or camping out in an office. Take a look at this article, which dives into how this issue is playing out in Kansas.
Mayor Unveils Program to Help Youth Aging Out of Foster System (Patch) — A new program Los Angeles will help connect former foster youth to education and employment opportunities.
‘The First Step’: Advocates Celebrate Minnesota’s Groundbreaking Child Welfare Law (Sahan Journal) — Very promising legislation out of Minnesota: instead of “reasonable efforts” to prevent family separation, the state must now deploy “active efforts,” particularly for children that are Black, disabled, or live in poverty.
‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’ (The Cut) — What a read. This article discusses Utah’s “exploitative” adoption system, known for “fast-track, high-dollar placements.”
In a country with a broken housing market — where landlords can refuse to rent to folks with criminal records related to drug offenses and where wages are woefully insufficient to afford an apartment unit with multiple bedrooms — it seems that the system is demanding too much of families and not demanding enough of itself.