Looking back, Evelyn freely admits that she made some rash decisions.
In the late summer of 2018, this working mother left a violent, stagnating neighborhood in Southern California’s high desert region. She moved with her husband and five children to a community just outside Los Angeles that was known for its well-rated public schools. They had almost $5,000 in savings and a modest vision for how the next passage of life would unfold but no true understanding of the real estate landscape they were entering. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles was nearly double a full-time minimum wage salary. Even with her job as a server at Applebee’s, she was overwhelmed by the city’s punishing disparity. Her husband’s subsequent descent into alcoholism and domestic abuse drained her bank account and cast her and her children into the urban wilderness. Less than three months deep in that school year, Evelyn (whose name is a pseudonym to protect her privacy) found herself to be a homeless single mother.
From Los Angeles to New York, Portland to Phoenix, Seattle to Washington, D.C., the broad arc of Evelyn’s story is a prevalent narrative in urban America: an aspirant working family pinned down by economic weights from which far more than resilience is required to rise. Homeless families in this nation—almost 260,000 total individuals and 145,000 children in 2024, according to HUD’s annual assessment—often require all manner of medical, educational, and housing support merely to survive. They also tend to possess virtually no assets to give back in return.
As a society, we carry a real aversion to this stark mathematical imbalance of poverty, including when it encompasses children, most likely because it contradicts national values of upward mobility based on work and merit. Such values are easy to oversimplify in our own personal narratives as well as in those of prominent figures ranging from Oprah Winfrey to JD Vance. We do so and risk losing the ability to imagine the obstacles for those hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals in circumstances of pure economic helplessness. Our generational failure to meaningfully address the housing crisis is rooted in this inertness.
Evelyn’s absolute priority throughout her long and brutal homeless saga was to keep her kids stably situated in the same public school that had originally drawn her to the city. They were thriving there. A corollary to this imperative meant ensuring that the people most capable and invested in helping them—employers, teachers, even family—remained ignorant of their homelessness lest they would be obligated to initiate agency interventions with the potential to uproot the kids from their school, place them in the foster system, and shunt them to the city’s physical and educational periphery. Instead, the family slept in motels or in their 2009 Toyota Highlander. They lived this way for five years.
In Evelyn’s Los Angeles and almost all American cities, the majority of homeless services are concentrated in marginalized areas far from healthy residential districts, as they have been nationwide for centuries Both common sense and academic research show that such an approach places hardships upon hardships for families striving to land a foothold. Long and costly commutes, lack of quality schools and safe play spaces, and exploitative landlords are just a few.
Yet leaders who promote more inclusive housing options for homeless families seem to be faced with disruption from many members of the housed, voting public. At least part of this antagonism is due to a psychology of conflation, by which a typical homeowner reflexively associates the notion of any homeless neighbor with the most dangerous depictions of the unsheltered: the addict desperate for a fix, the lunatic raging at unseen demons. This mental trickery accompanies the broader truth that most homeowners work hard for their properties and take pride in their neighborhoods and schools, all of which together represent status and asset value in the world. Homeless people—including those who are gracious and family-oriented—do not easily situate within this order.
Even in the context of vast government spending on housing and services nationwide (over $900 million per year in Los Angeles County, nearly $4 billion in New York City for the fiscal year 2025), the path of least resistance for city governments is to leave the most basic supportive provisions in poor, far-flung areas of rich cities. This is not so much a matter of managing resources so much as a passive, effective strategy to remove those who are in great need from the daily loops of those who are not.
In many cities, shelter capacity is maxed out and voucher systems are closed. The edgy status quo will worsen as continuing natural disasters, government layoffs, and tariff wars push more working families toward the precipice where stability drops into the abyss. We are living through an iteration of a very old cycle in America in which political leaders scramble for actual solutions long after the numbers have crossed the tipping point into humanitarian disaster.
The result, as in any true health crisis, is the kind of triage with which Evelyn and her children contended daily, for years, so that they could stay in school. While bedding down in her SUV on so many nights because the vehicle felt safer than any available alternatives, the kids designated the front seat of the SUV their dining room and the middle row of seats the living room. The storage space in the way back is made for the bedroom. Evelyn herself slept in the driver’s seat in case she needed to peel away quickly from a threat. Imagine what those nights looked and felt like for that family and for many thousands of others forced into the same set of decisions.
Then, try to imagine this: in one neighborhood that is close to decent schools and jobs, a compassionate group of residents chooses generosity over fear by approving the conversion of an empty home into a transitional housing facility that serves about six families at a time. These families are thoroughly vetted as mentally sound, safe neighbors and permitted to live there for up to a year. The parents receive counseling and job training while children attend local schools. Instead of doing what most homeowners in America currently tend to do and protesting the shelter’s existence, members of the surrounding neighborhood contribute to potluck dinners, provide childcare during adult education sessions, maybe help with school tutoring and job placement. This one location provides a platform by which a dozen or so families each year graduate into stable homes.
Imagine that another neighborhood follows the same model, and another after that, until this pathway of socioeconomic ascent becomes a part of the fabric of a city, then a region, then a state. Imagine the current and future poverty ameliorated by such a movement.
The details of this whole process—particularly the vetting aspect—would raise valid concerns for many. The great emotional, imaginative, and moral leap here involves understanding that although the causes of family homelessness are nuanced, the strategies for maintaining a safe residential space are simple. The intake process in such a facility begins with multiple reference points that measure a family’s desire and capability to be there. A rotation of staff ensures 24-hour onsite care of the shelter and its inhabitants while enforcing visitation rules and in-house policies. Those who can’t abide are placed elsewhere. The apparatus is ideally managed by local non-profits and faith-based organizations possessing some knowledge of the community and its rhythms rather than city or state agencies.
On a daily basis, this form of transitional housing carries per person costs comparable to emergency shelters, which are more expensive for families. Over time and taking into account the success rates for transitional housing graduates—up to 91% according to HUD’s most recent comprehensive study of regional factors—long-term costs for families who find permanent housing stability are almost certainly far lower. These structures can also be readied much faster since a house can be converted into apartments in a few months versus the years of zoning decisions and construction delays inherent to larger facilities. Most importantly, families who have already been traumatized and marginalized will be nurtured by communities rather than pressed farther away from them, deeper into despair.
While homeless, Evelyn’s children achieved a 98% attendance rate at their school. On weekends when she wasn’t working restaurant shifts, she took them to museums, the beach, the library—any nourishing place where they could be safe together. Through profound good luck, they eventually found transitional housing, job training, and school tutoring within a small shelter in a residential area. Most of their neighbors received them with grace. Evelyn now works at an accounting firm. Her oldest son is a freshman in college.
The proliferation of narratives like Evelyn’s could come to pass if stably housed Americans on a widespread scale begin to frame the incorporation of homeless families as an opportunity for absolutely altruistic largesse. If a movement to allot physical structures and school placements within communities were to become a new ethos, then many tens of thousands of working parents who possess neither assets nor hope would be furnished with roofs overhead as well as the gift of knowing that they are welcome here.
