More than 15,000 of Michigan’s very young children, from newborns to 4-year-olds, are homeless. There are Michigan babies living in cars; toddlers sleeping on blankets on floors; and preschoolers being shuttled from one relative’s, or friend’s, or total stranger’s couch to another.
Expand the age range and the tragedy only grows larger. According to the University of Michigan’s 2018 “Child Homelessness in Michigan” study, more than 36,000 of Michigan’s elementary-, middle-, and high-schoolers don’t have “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.”
And while the word “homeless” tends to bring up certain assumptions about what the people involved look like or the neighborhoods where they’re fighting to find a stable home, childhood homelessness defies many of those stereotypes. In wealthy Oakland County, for example, 1% of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers—more than 3,000 children—don’t have a place to call home.
According to the Michigan League for Public Policy’s June 2019 “Homelessness in Early Childhood” report, it’s true that more than 75% of Michigan’s very young homeless children live in urban areas. “However,” the report continues, “children are about twice as likely to experience homelessness during their first four years of life if they are living in a rural or midsize county.”
In three very rural (and very white) Michigan counties (Alger, Arenac, and Lake), from 11% to 13% of very young children are without a home. The University of Michigan’s study of school-age children facing homelessness found that “In 12 school districts serving fewer than 1,400 students, between 1-in-7 and 1-in-4 students experienced homelessness during the school year.”
The problem is also much larger than the League’s report suggests.
Sarah Ostyn, who authored the report, told Daily Kos that the researchers who collaborated to produce it know that their estimate of the number of very young children without homes represents “a significant undercount, because children are way more likely to experience homelessness from birth to age four” than they are when they get older. The University of Michigan’s child homelessness study states that Michigan ranks sixth among states in the U.S. for the most homeless children of school age.
According to the League’s report about younger children, “An accurate picture of early childhood homelessness is difficult to capture, as many children are not engaged with agencies that collect this data.”
To calculate their estimate that 15,565 very young children in Michigan are homeless, Ostyn and researchers from the League, Kids Count Michigan, and the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions Program extrapolated from the percentage of first-grade Michiganders who are known to be without a place to live. “There’s not one single system that captures [the data about] this issue for this age group,” Ostyn explained. One thing the researchers do know, though, are the factors that come together to cause a situation where babies are sleeping in cars or on couches. Those issues range from jobs that don’t pay a living wage, to the lack of affordable housing in many areas, to overtaxed and underfunded public services that can be spread out over a wide area and difficult to access in communities without public transportation. (Michigan ranks a dismal 27th out of all 50 states according to the 2019 AllTransit Performance Score, judged on a combination of public transit connectivity, access to jobs, and frequency of service.)
Patricia Downs, the executive director of the Munising Housing Commission in rural Alger County, said that it can take anywhere from six months to two years for people on her agency’s waiting list to either be placed in housing or receive a voucher that can be used for rental from a private landlord.
The Munising Housing Commission, Downs told Daily Kos, doesn’t have a “preference point” for people who are homeless. “I don’t even know if someone’s homeless until I pull their application to get them a unit,” she explained. Downs added that her agency has only 16 public housing units for families, and there are approximately 24 units in properties that receive tax credits for accepting the agency’s housing vouchers.
Nicole Hill knows how hard it can to find a place to live when you find yourself homeless in Michigan. After being driven from their home in Louisiana in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, a pregnant Hill and her three children were eventually transported to a domestic violence shelter in Detroit in September 2005. Her husband at the time wasn’t allowed to stay with the family but instead found himself bouncing between shelters and “friends or family that he knew,” Hill told Daily Kos.
The family faced even more stress when they were asked to leave the domestic violence shelter in January because the shelter had received a wave of requests from actual domestic violence victims. After spending five months shuttling her children—then 13, 5, and 3 years old—among homes belonging to extended-family members and friends of her deceased grandmother, Hill finally found a permanent home with help from the Travelers Aid Society. By that time, the stresses of being homeless and living apart had contributed to the end of her marriage.
Hill, who holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal science, told Daily Kos that housing wasn’t the only issue. Finding a job as a pregnant woman was also a tall order. “We’re not even going to get 90 days out of you” before she would leave to give birth, Hill said she was told.
Hurricane Katrina and the family’s temporary homelessness contributed to Hill’s children being held back at school. While her younger children needed treatment for aquaphobia, Hill said that her 13-year-old daughter experienced a lot of shame about the family’s situation. “She was very distraught over not being with her friends [in Louisiana] and very worried about the image of being homeless,” Hill recalled. “It took meeting another child at her school who was homeless” for Hill’s daughter to realize “there’s nothing wrong with you, [and being homeless] is not your fault.”
Hill’s children are far from the only ones who have had trouble in school due to being homeless. According to the League report on homelessness among very young children, “By age 17, half of children who were formerly homeless have repeated at least one grade, and over 21% have repeated two grades, a rate almost three times higher than their housed peers.”
Hill, who currently serves as a member of the Michigan Poor People’s Campaign’s coordinating committee, said that her encounter with homelessness opened her eyes to the difficulties facing others in that situation. After struggling for months and finally receiving help through the Travelers Aid Society, she said, “I also had it in my mind I’m a person that was in a natural disaster. If I’m having this much difficulty, when you think they would pull out all the pomp and circumstances for someone in that situation … what’s happening to the everyday person who’s homeless?”
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.