Family Homelessness

Despite the best efforts and intentions of elected officials, shelter and affordable housing programs are budget driven and funding for social services suffers monumentally in the current economic climate.

Federal Section 8 vouchers have historically bridged the gap between the fair market value of apartment rentals and the amount of income that low-income families can afford to spend in rent. Recently, federal rental vouchers have been unavailable to Massachusetts residents because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development froze the program. In addition, McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants have taken a $19 million cut. This is the first time a Congress has decreased funding for the program since the 1996 budget.

Never in our history has there been a greater need for services for homeless families.

 Homeless Children

The effects of homelessness on children and youth are enormous and pervasive. Research has proven homeless children far more susceptible to mental health problems than the norm. While we can site studies and statistics for children in general in homeless families, there are no studies on teens within families. Research on homeless teens is virtually exclusive to adolescents on their own. This could be due several factors including the inability of shelters to accommodate males over the age of 12 or the broader options available to teens as an alternative to shelter; e.g. staying with friends or relatives more willing to accept a child whose age no longer demands constant supervision. Whatever the reason, homeless teens have become the most invisible of an already invisible population - homeless families. This is profoundly sad when considering that one of the few documented trends found for homeless teenagers is that teens on their own are likely to have come from families that have been homeless, and likely to become homeless parents themselves.

One of the discouraging facts of family homelessness is that the adults in our families are far more likely than others of the very poor to have been homeless as children.  Further, homeless teens on their own are also likely to have been homeless at other points in their childhood.  We hope to break this pattern by connecting our teens to jobs, educational supports, healthy, positive activities and caring adults in the neighborhoods that they live in order to give them a sense of stability and support, and to improve their self esteem and ability to solve problems on their own.  We feel that this stabilization of the teens will help to stabilize the family as a whole and to more effectively assure permanent housing and to prevent the family from sliding back into secondary homelessness.