Families in Homelessness

Homelessness discriminates no one. It can affect anyone at any age and in some cases entire families. According to Central Oregon, the State of Oregon had rank one of the worst in homelessness cases in America in 2022 with families including children who were living unsheltered at 59%. One of the realities that homeless families face is not only the worry of shelter for them and their small ones but also the fear of a safe place to spend the night and well as fearing the thought that if caught they would most likely be separated.

 

In May of this year, the Multnomah County in the Portland Region released their annual “point in time” count, an annual survey conducted by different agencies called Continuums of Care on behalf of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and found that children without shelter accounted for roughly a third of the total increase in homelessness within the county, as reported by KGW8 (NBC News).

 

Because of the concerns in safety and the fear to be separated, families (in their entirety) often go unnoticed either living in their cars, deep in the woods or never spending the night in the same area or spot. But for one case in particular a single mother identified as “B” said she lived at a DV (domestic violence) shelter for more than a year and there was drug use in the shelter and her and her children were surrounded it by every day, so instead she set up her tent deep in the woods near Gresham.

 

Her kids learned hypervigilance early on, she homeschooled them for about a year, she states “we lived in a little wooded area away from all the drug addicts and we always got to run around," one of her children also states, "I used to play my little imagination games in my own little world, it was really fun." They also spent some time camping under the Hawthorne Bridge, a common hotspot for homeless people seeking for shelter.

 

Fast forward a year later, “B” and her two children or "outside kids" live inside, in affordable housing. But their mother thinks the complex is unsafe. According to “B” she noted for the reporter for NBC News "Taking my kids from me and putting them in foster care is not what's going to keep them safe," said B. "Putting us in shelter situations where we can't regulate who's around us that's not going to keep us safe."

 

Furthermore, according to a recent statement from Brandi Tuck a director at Path Home a homeless shelter for families, he states “when you drive around Portland and see tent villages and RVs everywhere, you don't realize that there are thousands of kids with their parents without homes too. They're the invisible homeless population that hide for fear of something happening to their kids or the state taking their kids away."

 

Right now, there are 800 homeless families with children on housing waitlists in Multnomah County. Last year Path Home served 1,800 people, and more than half of them were children. Most of the children were under the age of five.

 

"The children that experience homelessness today can turn into the chronically homeless adults of the future, so unless we do something now to help these kids, we'll never be able to solve the issue of homelessness in Portland," - Brandi Tuck.