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More Housing Needed to Keep Children With Their Families
An increasingly inadequate supply of affordable housing is disrupting low-income families and sending their children into the child welfare system at an unnecessarily high cost to American taxpayers, according to housing experts discussing the issue at the National Housing Conference on Dec. 2.
Roughly 30% of the children who have been put into foster care have been separated from their parents because the family doesn’t have access to affordable housing, said Ruth White, director of housing and community development for Catholic Charities USA. All but a scant 1.5% of the households who lose their children after being cited for neglect earn less than $30,000 annually, she said.
There are currently about 500,000 children in the nation’s foster care system, the majority of whom will eventually be reunited with their families, according to White, but 25,000 age out of the program every year. Facing post-traumatic stress that is believed to be greater than that experienced by war veterans, and with poor educational backgrounds and a 50% unemployment rate, 12%-25% of the children who age into the mainstream will find themselves homeless within a year.
Providing foster care for the average 2.7 children in a homeless family costs the government more than $45,000 annually, she said. By comparison, providing the family with a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent and support services, which would allow the children to return, would cost about $13,400, suggesting the potential for saving $1.94 billion per year by moving from foster care to supportive housing.
Affordable Housing Matters
“Affordable housing matters,” said Debra Rog, director of the Washington Office of the Vanderbilt University Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement. “Subsidized permanent housing is the major predictor of residential stability.”
In a nine-city study of 1,500-1,600 families by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s, 88% of “multi-problem” homeless families receiving Section 8 certificates and services remained housed for 18 months or longer, Rog said. Sixty-two percent were able to have their children returned and 90% of those who were at risk avoided losing any of their children.
The study found that homeless families moved an average of five times over a year-and-a-half period, Rog said. They would typically spend seven months doubled-up with relatives or friends, six months in their own home and 3.5 months homeless. More than half had experienced prior homelessness.
Families comprise 34% of today’s homeless population, she said. Twenty-three percent are children and 11% parents. Over a year’s time, 1.8% of the nation’s families are homeless for at least one day, and 89% of them live in a poor household.
Homeless families are typically headed by a female in her late 20s with two young children under the age of six. The rate of homelessness increases among ethnic families, especially those that are African-American.
In a New York study tracking homeless families over a five-year period, 44% were separated from one or more of their children compared to 8% of poor mothers in housed families, Rog said. “Even if a housed mother was drug-dependent and experiencing domestic violence, she was less likely to have a child separated than a homeless mother.”
Foster care itself is a predictor of homelessness in adults, she said. And “homeless adults who experienced family separation as a child are more likely to be separated from their own children.”
Housing Is the Cheapest Solution
“There is a lot we don’t know about the intersection of child welfare and housing because the issue is so complicated,” said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
For instance, children aging out of foster care do face a higher chance of becoming homeless she said, “but homelessness doesn’t always occur immediately after what would seem to be a precipitating event. It can take a while to occur.”
Family violence, school and drug abuse all play a role in determining outcomes for children exiting foster care, Roman said, but “stable housing is essential for people to deal with all of these other issues.” The homeless are stressed, they have worse health and they don’t perform as well on jobs or at school.
“Housing seems to be the cheapest thing that can be done to solve the problem,” she said. “Foster care, corrections, institutions are more expensive,” and “there is no question that child welfare systems are a feeder into homelessness.”
Long Lines for Housing
Bob McKay, who has been most recently working in Massachusetts as a consultant to public and private housing and child-serving agencies, noted that “there is no waiting list at child welfare agencies, but long lines at housing agencies.”
He said that HUD’s Family Unification Program has been able to make a small dent in the problem by setting aside Section 8 units for families with children in the welfare system. About 40,000 units have been allocated to unify families since the program’s inception eight or nine years ago.
Once a child welfare agency discharges a child, a Section 8 certificate is given to the family, which then goes through orientation.
“The service piece is so important,” McKay said, and it requires hard work and people who have been trained.
“The child agencies want to pull the plug after a few months so they can close the case,” he said, “and then the services are gone,” so there is now a requirement for the support to be provided for six to 12 months.
Some of the 40,000 units have been slipping away, at an annual rate of 5%-7%, when the housing authority gets the unit back and is not ready to return it to a reunification family, he said.
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