Punished for poverty: Can child welfare stop removing kids from families who need housing?

I had heard the statistic years ago: About 10% of children removed from their families by child welfare agencies were taken due to housing. It stuck with me, and later I found a way to access some high-level federal data that proved that, in fact, this statistic was true and held remarkably consistent over the years. It struck me as almost absurd — punishing a family for being too poor to afford decent housing and instead spending money on foster family placements rather than a better housing arrangement that could help them stay together.

But I knew this statistic, while somewhat shocking on its own, would mean little without the ability to explain how and why this happens and, most importantly, show the human toll such removals exact on actual families. I have long covered economic insecurity—including unaffordable housing, eviction, and homelessness, but I had never before written about the child welfare system, a system that is complex and often opaque. I needed the help of a fellowship in order to access the full data I would need to describe this phenomenon. It would also allow me to travel to a particular jurisdiction so that I could home in on one example of how the child welfare system operates, and — by far the hardest task — invest significant reporting time connecting with families who have experienced housing-related child removals firsthand. 

In the end, my USC Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship allowed me to do all of that. I was able to build a new roster of expert sources in the child welfare space, including one who had access to all of the data I needed and was willing to share it. I spent months reaching out to dozens of people on the ground in the four states with the worst records for removing children over housing, building relationships, and asking for introductions to families with firsthand experience. That preliminary reporting effort led me to Missouri, a state where an average of 18% of all child removals have to do with housing. In 2019, 138 kids were taken from their families in the state solely because their caregivers couldn’t afford a decent home.

My print story for The Nation magazine focuses on Missouri as an example of a state that takes children from their parents due to housing concerns at a particularly high rate. The fellowship grant paid for a weeklong trip to the state, allowing me to sit in the living room of a mother whose son had been taken while she was working a hotel housekeeping job because she couldn’t afford air conditioning. And it allowed me to meet another mother in family housing court whose son was taken because she was living in an extended-stay hotel with him. I built trust with them and bore witness to their tears and anguish in a way I could never have done over the phone.

I didn’t want to just describe the problem, however. One thing I kept hearing as I talked to experts in the child welfare system and learned more about its history was that there is a nascent but growing movement to change how the system works. The goal is to address the causes of child removals and prevent them from happening in the first place. In 2018, Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act on a bipartisan basis, dedicating a potentially unlimited sum of money to this very goal. But I also came to understand all of its details and nuances, many of which have kept money from actually flowing to states and meeting families’ economic needs. Still, it was clear that there are people in the child welfare system trying to do things differently, so I wrote a companion story about what those efforts look like and what jurisdictions that want to help families with housing can do right now to change their practices and prevent more removals.

One lesson I learned in working on this project is the power of simply asking for what I was looking for. Rather than attempting to wrest foster care and adoption data from the federal government via FOIA, I asked a professor who uses the data for his research projects if he would share it with me and he willingly obliged. Another one of my goals for the project was to examine the rules and procedures that govern child welfare caseworkers and might push them to decide to remove a child over housing concerns. I wasn’t particularly optimistic I would be able to get my hands on something like this; the caseworkers themselves would likely be fearful to talk to me, let alone leak documents to me, and government officials are typically tight-lipped with reporters. But it turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. I asked for an interview with Missouri’s child welfare director, and her office eagerly agreed. She candidly answered each of my pressing questions and then agreed to share the rubrics and guidance that Missouri hotline staff and child welfare caseworkers are given to guide their decision-making. No document leaks or records requests were required, and both her answers and the documents were incredibly revealing.

My project is now completed, but my coverage of child welfare isn’t. These are, I hope, the first of many stories I’ll write on the intersection of this system with economic hardship. I now have a robust roster of sources for future reporting. And I already have story ideas that emerged during the reporting process that I hope to pursue and a few unanswered questions I still want to investigate.