Mom, Kids, and Nowhere to Go

This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

Families are one of the fastest-growing segments of the homeless population, but they are rarely acknowledged in the larger policy conversation about homelessness in the U.S. Instead of living on the street, they’re often out of sight, staying with other family members or living in their cars. People don’t truly notice them the way they see chronically homeless individuals living on the street, people who work with homeless families say.

“You often see the chronic street homeless who suffer from mental illness because it is more in your face … [Families] end up doubled up in situations and we just don’t end up counting them as homeless,” said Peter Jacob, executive director of Family Promise Union County in New Jersey.

Unhoused families, like everyone else who is unhoused, are facing renewed financial pressures as social programs and housing support that was already woefully insufficient is stripped down under the Trump administration and wages fail to keep up with the hefty cost of apartments. But they also have to contend with the higher costs of supporting kids, like finding an apartment with more bedrooms or paying for child care. Families who can’t afford child care are often penalized with underemployment and financial instability that also puts them at risk of eviction, workers at groups serving homeless families explained.

Jacob said it’s time that policymakers prioritize family homelessness as much as other forms of individual chronic homelessness.

During the 2022-2023 school year, public schools identified nearly 1.4 million homeless students, which was a 14 percent rise from the previous school year. But schools are likely under-identifying the number of kids who are homeless. From 2023 to 2024, families with children had the biggest year-over-year increase in homelessness compared to any other group.

Research completed in 2023 from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, which used Census Bureau data from between 2007 and 2016, found that kids represent 4 out of every 10 people who face eviction each year. More than 10 percent of kids under five who live in rental housing are threatened with eviction annually, and 5.7 percent actually get evicted from their homes.

Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager at Eviction Lab, said that evictions fall disproportionately on Black single mothers and that the data on eviction characteristics tends to be pretty stubborn. “Even though in New York City and Philadelphia we’re seeing positive changes, in general, this data from a few years ago is likely to stay the same,” he said.

HOMELESSNESS APPEARED TO FALL in the final year of the Biden administration, based on samples of the January 2025 homeless count. But while the Trump economy is not cratering, it has been stagnant, particularly at the lower end of the income scale. The economy added very few jobs last year, electricity prices are out of control, and GDP growth in the first half of the year was driven almost entirely by data centers and information technology.

In the longer run, homelessness remains historically high, as Americans have been watching the dream of even a modest life slip away in recent years. The median age of a first-time homebuyer rose to 40, an all-time high since the National Association of Realtors began its annual survey. Nearly half of the 42.5 million renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs in 2023. And the growth in health care spending from 2023 to 2024 has outpaced the growth rate of the 2010s. The cost of child care is more expensive than rent for many families.

Families are also being hit by cuts to poverty programs. Expanded work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) enacted by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law last year, will put 1 in 8 SNAP recipients at risk for losing at least some of their benefits. The law also expanded restrictions to parents whose youngest child is at least 14. The bill also contained $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts.

Melita Corselli, a mother of four kids living in North Salem, New York, experienced homelessness five years ago. She clawed her way out with housing assistance and a lot of hard work, but she is worried she and her family could lose housing again.

After her children’s father went to prison, she lost the additional income. She had a job that paid $50,000 a year, but it wasn’t enough to support her kids and pay the rent. She doubled up for several months with her mother, but said that once one of her children started walking, one of the neighbors made noise complaints and racist comments about the family staying there. Her mother’s landlord eventually found out and Corselli made the tough decision to leave.

It’s a familiar story for many caseworkers the Prospect spoke to. When families double up in rented apartments, they risk not just one but two families becoming homeless.

Corselli went to a family shelter in Westchester County, but was told that her income was too high. If they let her stay for longer, she would have to pay a bigger monthly fee than her previous rent. She said the conditions of the shelter were very poor.

“I held my kids, trying not to let them be on the mattress. The mice were running all over across the floor,” she said.

Corselli eventually went through the PATH intake center in New York City and received temporary placement in an apartment for 56 days, with far better living conditions than the shelter, until she was able to find a new apartment back in North Salem. She had her rent, which was $1,200, paid for the first year. She’s been there ever since.

But Corselli and her family’s struggles are not over. After years of smaller rent increases, her landlord is increasing the rent to $1,700 a month, and Corselli is scared of having to potentially fight a return to homelessness again.

“I’m still the sole provider for my children,” she said. “I don’t make that much more money than I was back then and so there’s a fear of going back into shelter because everything has to get paid, and families start running out of ways.”

STEVE BERG, CHIEF POLICY OFFICER at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said he’s concerned about the impact of the Trump administration’s policy shifts on people who are housing insecure, including the effects of the expansion of work requirements in poverty programs. In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) proposed a time limit and work requirements for rental assistance for many adults, and a rule that would prohibit families with undocumented household family members from being able to live in subsidized housing.

“One of the things that coincided with family homelessness going up was the welfare reform bill that passed back in the 1990s, and there’s a lot fewer families that are getting support from state welfare programs that are funded by the federal government, which has made it difficult too,” Berg said. “I think that coincides with an increase in family homelessness, particularly in the states where the work requirements were most stringently enforced.”

There were hundreds of layoffs at HUD last year, including of investigators who work with people who believe they have experienced housing discrimination, which adds insult to injury. Tara K. Ramchandani, co-managing partner at Relman Colfax, who works on civil rights litigation in housing, told the Prospect that HUD consolidating its fair housing enforcement office represents a “pretty bleak moment for civil rights protections in our country.” She hopes that a network of fair housing groups will help fill the gap.

Landlords often practice familial discrimination with subtle approaches, such as occupancy restrictions per bedroom. Parents struggling to balance child care and other responsibilities may not have the energy to take on housing discrimination, so it’s important that they have assistance, Ramchandani said. “When you are grappling with the day-to-day of having young families and young kids, being able to step back and realize there is discrimination happening is tough.”

Brandi Tuck, executive director of Path Home in Portland, Oregon, said the high cost of child care and rent make it untenable for many parents to support their families on just the minimum wage. In Portland, it is higher than in many areas of the country at $16.30 an hour, but it still doesn’t begin to cover expenses.

“A lot of the families that we work with at Path Home are employed or highly employable but the employed people are either working minimum-wage jobs at places like Taco Bell and gas stations and are hotel housekeepers … They don’t have any paid time off,” she said.

Tuck gave the example of a mom she works with, a hotel housekeeper, who can’t afford child care, so whenever there is a school break, she has to take her kids with her to work. “She told us … ‘I take the kids to work until I get fired and then I stay home with them until they go back to school and get a new housekeeper job,’” Tuck said. “This woman who could be working 52 weeks a year full-time [who] ends up working less than 40 weeks a year because she has no child care and child care is about $1,100 per month, per kid … The math doesn’t add up for these families.”

DIRECTORS OF SHELTERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY said that it’s essential to get families housed as soon as possible after they’ve lost housing, when they haven’t yet exhausted their support networks. It’s very difficult for people who have been fighting for survival every day to take on the kind of work required of most people to regain housing, explained formerly unhoused people and people who work in rehousing programs and within family shelters.

Faithfully executing a “housing first” model, they said, where unhoused people are brought back into housing quickly, with rental assistance and long-term case management relationships to make sure they have everything they need to stay housed, helps keep people housed over the long term.

But the Trump administration took aim at housing first through an executive order last July that directed the Department of Health and Human Services and HUD to “increase accountability” for the provision and awarding of grants of assistance to unhoused people, which includes “ending support for ‘housing first’ policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.”

Johnnetta Mack, a mother who fled with her four kids from an abusive partner during the pandemic, said it was very hard for her to get back into housing because of the mental health impacts of homelessness. Once she received comprehensive services from Housing Up in Washington, D.C., and went through a rapid rehousing program, she could make real plans for her and her family’s future.

“They were open for those crisis resources I needed that affected my decision-making. I’m reacting when I’m not in survival mode. I’m not worrying about whether I’ll be able to find a peaceful and restful night … They will help me in that plan instead of being in panic mode,” she said.

Mack is now a full-time student at Howard University, where she is studying social work.

Although “affordability” is expected to be a big campaign buzzword for Democrats this year, for people like Mack, Corselli, and their families, affordability is the difference between cycles of poverty and generational trauma and a life that’s free of the mental distress of living in constant survival mode. Corselli and Mack emphasized the need for more truly affordable housing to prevent homelessness in the first place.

Corselli said that today, average families are being hit by the double whammy of high expenses and little government support.

“I think the ridiculous rise in utility costs is criminal,” she said. “We’re seeing the doubling of our bills on an already tight budget. The qualifications to receive SNAP stifles people who are trying to work and have an income. It’s really hard unless you make it to a six-figure [salary] because you’re not poor enough to receive services but you’re also too poor to really survive on your own.”

This article appears in Apr 2026 issue.