Homelessness Rates Spike for Families, Putting Young Children at Risk

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In early February, Tateona Williams suffered the unthinkable. Around 1a.m. on a freezing cold Monday, she parked her van in a Detroit parking garage and kept her vehicle running so that she and her four children, plus her mother and her mother’s child, could stay warm. At some point in the night, the engine turned off. Her 9-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter stopped breathing and later died, apparently freezing to death. 

Williams and her children had been living with relatives, but in late November were told they had to find somewhere else to live. She called the city’s homeless response team at least three times seeking help, but her situation wasn’t deemed an emergency, and she never received assistance in finding somewhere to stay; in November she said she was told no family rooms were available. So they began living out of a van, frequently parking in the casino garage where her two children died. It was only after that tragedy that she was finally given a spot in a shelter.

Homelessness has seen a sharp uptick across the country in recent years, but the increase has been the most dramatic for families with children age 5 and younger, multiple data sources suggest. “The most common age that someone is in shelter nationally is under the age of 5,” said Henry Love, vice president for public policy & strategy at Win, the largest provider of family shelters in New York City. This trend means more and more families with young children are scrambling to find somewhere to live.

This housing instability can have a lasting impact on children, affecting their cognitive and social-emotional development and leading to learning delays and academic challenges. Those challenges are likely to follow them throughout their education and even later into their lives.

In its most recent estimate of homelessness in America, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that the number of homeless people increased by 18% last year, reaching the highest level ever recorded. The problem is even more acute for families with children: They experienced the largest single-year increase, with a rate that climbed by 39% between 2023 and 2024. That came after a 16% increase in homelessness for families with children in 2023.

Those numbers are alarming, said Donald H. Whitehead, Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, even as he noted that the department’s data is an undercount due to challenges with identifying homeless people and how they’re classified.

HUD doesn’t break the data down further by children’s age. But other sources indicate that the youngest children are increasingly at risk of living in homelessness. “What we know to be true is more young kids are experiencing homelessness,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit focused on homelessness and education.

According to an estimate generated by SchoolHouse Connection and the Poverty Solutions initiative at the University of Michigan, there were 681,180 children nationally under age 6 experiencing homelessness in the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent data. That represents an approximately 23% increase over the 2021-2022 school year, “twice the increase for school-aged children,” Duffield said in an interview. The nonprofit expects to publish the data in April.

In January, SchoolHouse Connection released data for the 2022-2023 school year, showing that 451,369 children ages 3 and younger were experiencing homelessness that year. That represents about a 24% increase over the 2021-2022 school year. 

The same trend appears in more recent data for children attending Head Start, which provides free early childhood education to low-income children below the age of 4. Homelessness among those children rose nearly 13% between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, the largest increase since the start of the pandemic. Overall, the figure for children attending Head Start is up 28% since the 2021-2022 school year. 

The increases are “unfortunately consistent across data sources,” said Erin Patterson, director of education initiatives at SchoolHouse Connection.

The higher numbers could reflect better efforts to locate children experiencing homelessness. The American Rescue Plan provided $800 million in pandemic-relief funding that allowed K-12 schools to identify more children in unstable housing. Head Start’s former director, Khari Garvin, was particularly focused on increasing enrollment among homeless children. “If it’s about finding and enrolling and identifying, that’s a good thing,” Duffield said. 

But the increases are also driven by troubling forces. Pandemic-era protections and funding that helped keep people housed have come to an end. Until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in August 2021, a federal eviction moratorium barred eligible tenants from being kicked out of their homes; state and local eviction moratoria lasted longer, with Oakland, California’s expiring in July 2023. Some cities converted empty hotels to housing for homeless people. States used funding from Congress’s CARES Act to offer rental assistance, and then Congress passed two rounds of rental assistance totaling $46.5 billion. All of those measures have now expired.

In the meantime, the cost of housing has climbed dramatically nationwide. Rents rose 29% between 2019 and 2023, far outpacing income growth, and last year a record number of American households spent more than 30% of their incomes on housing. Such increases often trigger evictions, and the people most at risk of eviction are families with babies and toddlers. 

Homelessness among young children may also have risen with the arrival of migrant families, many of whom had nowhere to stay except shelters. Domestic violence often forces victims and their children to flee their housing situations and enter shelter systems, and there was an increase in such incidents during the pandemic. Many families have also recently been pushed out of their housing by natural disasters, from the flooding in North Carolina to the fires in Los Angeles. “Those have lingering effects,” Duffield said. “People don’t get their feet right away and the more vulnerable you are the longer it takes.”

Having children is also expensive and can tip families into poverty. Research has suggested that a quarter of all poverty spells start with the birth of a child. “People who are on the cusp can quickly slide into homelessness,” Patterson said. 

Even as homelessness among young children and their families is on the rise, they often get left out of homeless counts and homeless services. The vast majority of these families don’t live on streets or in shelters, but instead double up inside friends’ and families’ homes, which HUD doesn’t count as technically homeless and may be harder to identify. Others live in motels and hotels, which again doesn’t count for HUD’s purposes. 

“The homelessness system itself doesn’t see families with young children and it doesn’t prioritize them,” Duffield said. “They’re often an afterthought.” As Williams’s story showed, they can get turned away if they technically have somewhere to sleep, like a car or a couch.

By contrast, the federal McKinney-Vento Act, which provides school districts with money to support students experiencing homelessness, includes in its count those who are living with other families, in hotels and motels, or in substandard conditions. 

The difference shows up in the data. The U.S. Department of Education’s estimate of the number of homeless students has mostly risen since 2004, with a spike during Hurricane Katrina and a dip during the pandemic. And yet the number of homeless families reported by HUD has remained relatively flat in comparison over all of those years. 

One thing is clear, though: Homelessness has huge ramifications for young children. “It is a traumatic experience,” Whitehead said.

Research has found that children who experience homelessness are much more likely to have developmental delays. It can even interrupt such basics as potty training. Housing instability means many families move frequently between schools, disrupting a child’s education. “As a former teacher, if a child can’t feel safe and is not stabilized, they can’t learn,” Love said. 

Children who experience homelessness are more likely to get sick and suffer from health conditions. Once they reach school age, homelessness is tied directly to higher absenteeism rates and lower test scores.

“Any experience of homelessness, even short-lived, can impact a child’s development even after the family has been stably housed,” Patterson said. But, she added, “The younger and longer a child experiences homelessness, the greater the cumulative toll of negative outcomes.”

Enrolling children in safe, high-quality early education programs can mitigate those issues and “help create a sense of normalcy and calm in otherwise tumultuous and toxic circumstances,” Patterson said. But just 7.4% of Head Start eligible children who were homeless in 2023-2024 were actually enrolled in Head Start or Early Head Start. Young children in public pre-K classrooms or Head Start programs run by school districts can receive help through the McKinney-Vento Act with transportation, food and other priorities.

Other solutions range from the specific to the systematic. Prioritizing homeless families for services, including early childhood education, could help. More accurate counts would also give a clearer picture of who is homeless. Another solution would be to offer more housing vouchers targeted for this population, similar to those offered to veterans or unaccompanied youth, or simply to provide cash without strings attached.

“Give people money,” Love said. “That’s really the crux of it. People are under-resourced.”

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