How I came to appreciate the role of stable housing in keeping families out of the child welfare system

It’s a habit of years covering homelessness for Nevada Current that my ears instinctively listen for housing-related stories even in unlikely places. It could be a regular county commissioner meeting, a health board or another obscure meeting that no other reporter watches. The topic of housing will always pop up in some way, even if it's in a passing comment or a footnote in a presentation.

The first glimpse of this project came from a Clark County commission meeting in summer 2023, during a presentation on foster homes. The presentation highlighted efforts the county was making to increase the number of foster parents. In the presentation, the then-head of family services had a casual observation. “While neglect has gone down a little bit, we have also seen an increase in homelessness and inadequate housing and parental alcohol and drug abuse,” she said. My interest was piqued. I’d reported on homelessness, the eviction crisis and various aspects of housing policy for years. It was the first time I had thought about how it was affecting child welfare.

By the following spring, the problem had grown so much that Clark County officials devised a solution: they converted an older motel into temporary housing to divert families from the child welfare system. I immediately requested interviews about the hotel, known as La Quinta. My requests, including attempts to speak to willing families, hit some roadblocks.

The 2024 election went in full swing and my coverage priorities shifted to election coverage. But I couldn’t shake the idea of La Quinta. On top of that, I wondered how Nevada’s housing crisis (including skyrocketing rents, limited supply lightning quick eviction process, and little tenant protection) was impacting the child welfare system.

Reporting out the story

Stable housing leads to better education attainment, health outcomes, and economic prosperity. If students don’t have a safe place to sleep, if workers don’t have a reliable roof over their head, if the medically fragile populations aren’t housed, there is a domino effect. Our child welfare system is just one other system that is feeling strain from the foundation of housing. That is why I wanted to report on it.

I went into the project only thinking about the front end of the system. I wanted to find out if a family or parent lacked stable housing or was experiencing homelessness when they showed up on the radar of child protective services. My first question revolved around how often it was happening. County and state-level social service agencies tracking removals couldn’t provide much detail about the rare instances of placing a child in foster care. The nature of these cases and the fact it includes sensitive details about children made it impossible to obtain records. For part of the project, the lack of information or insight to removals for homelessness became part of the story.

As I began to interview social service agencies and organizations serving families in need of housing support, I quickly began to realize there was another crucial part of this story. Housing might play a role in people entering the child welfare system, even if their housing needs are compounded with another issue like substance abuse. The lack of housing also delays reunification in some cases, even if homelessness wasn’t the initial driver of the case. If a child is removed from a parent because of substance abuse or mental health issues, parents could seek treatment and successfully go through the rehabilitation process, which itself poses many obstacles. Some of those families then get stuck because they have no way to obtain housing or aren’t able to afford rent.

Challenges and future hopes

The biggest challenge in reporting this story — aside from limited data and lackluster explanations of the data — was finding families willing to speak. It makes sense. Stories on housing and homelessness are complicated and people’s lived experiences haven’t always been handled with care. I was thankfully able to find people who could share stories about La Quinta, which underscored the impact of that program and enabled me to write a solutions journalism piece.

Another challenge was letting go of my initial vision for the project. The story I had hoped for was narrative driven, with voices of those impacted by the system. During the writing process, I was stuck because I couldn’t see my path forward without their voices. However, when I began to write what I did have about the data, the lack of understanding from agencies, the perspective from social services providers, a family court judge, substance abuse providers, homeless outreach teams and nonprofits, I realized I could tell the story of this aspect of the child welfare system that is rarely written about.

The other two stories I reported focused on what we do and don’t know about the connection of the state’s housing crisis and the role it plays in children being removed from their homes and how referrals are common when resources are scarce. I believe this project will be a foundation for further reporting and will prompt me to go deeper on aspects of housing instability that I previously didn’t understand or report on. There is still plenty of thread left to pull. My ears are open.