Plight of Kids Without Homes

In Los Angeles, there are more than 8,000 children who are homeless every night, living with their families in emergency shelters, transient hotels, sometimes sleeping in their cars, or, if they are lucky, sleeping for a few days at a time on the floors of family and friends. The majority of families that become homeless are headed by single mothers, surviving on incomes as low as $600 per month for a family of four if the parent is unemployed to about $900 per month if the parent is working. Many families must pay for both housing and food with even less monthly income.

Homeless families are generally "invisible" to the public. Their numbers are growing, however, faster than the homeless single people we see every day on the streets. In Los Angeles, the high cost of housing, coupled with declining real incomes of the very poor, have resulted over the last few years in an epidemic of family homelessness, causing formerly stable families to lose their livelihoods, their connections to community and ultimately the places where they lived. As a result, the current emergency shelter system -- with about 2,500 beds for families -- is stretched well beyond its capacity.

Until last month, the most viable way out of homelessness for families has been the Section 8 housing voucher program, created and funded by the federal government under President Nixon in the 1970s. As a result of local leadership over the past decade, more than 6,000 homeless families and disabled individuals in the city of Los Angeles alone have been able to secure permanent, affordable housing, for which they pay about 30% of their income for rent.

With help from a network of dedicated nonprofit agencies, whose goal has been to end family homelessness in Los Angeles, families have been able to move back into neighborhoods and communities, where children can enroll in school and parents can begin the process of rebuilding their lives.

A confluence of new federal laws and a change in local housing market conditions, as well as a two-year hiatus in federal funding, have resulted in "suspension" from the program for more than 1,500 very low-income families that have been approved for Section 8 subsidies but have not yet signed rental contracts. Of these, 400 are homeless families with children and disabled individuals, who now have few options.