One Sacramento Mother’s Struggle With Health and Housing

When Tytinisha Mitchell, 26, lost her apartment at Woodlands in March 2024, she was several months pregnant and already struggling to stay afloat after aging out of a foster youth housing program.

Mitchell had been connected to the Next Move program, which offers transitional housing support to former foster youth. She said she was phased out after three years.

“I aged out because it’s like a three-year program,” she said. “They helped pay for the rent. They helped me get into the place. But then, in October, once I aged out completely, I was getting into Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency  because that’s the next program they helped me get into.”

A few months before she lost her apartment, the leasing office at Woodlands received a letter from SHRA saying they would no longer send rent payments for Mitchell’s unit. She said she was never told directly about that decision.

In an email, SHRA public information officer, Angela Jones, wrote that one of the most common reasons that a family's participation in the Housing Choice Voucher program is terminated "is failure to comply with program rules, such as missing deadlines for verifying eligibility to receive and maintain a voucher." Some other reasons Jones mentioned were "failing to report changes in household members or income changes, or violating their lease." She added that they "work closely with families and make every reasonable effort to gain compliance to avoid withdrawing their voucher."

However, according to Mitchell, the reasons for her termination were unclear. “They kind of told me there’s not very much they can do with going back to what the case was," she said.

Losing her home

Without the housing support, Mitchell fell behind on rent. She was evicted in March 2024 and forced to live in her car.

Mitchell described a cycle of temporary shelter and exhaustion since then.

“I’ve been homeless for about seven months, so it’s been in and out,” she said. “I can’t really calculate how long we’ve been in the car exactly, but probably a good total amount of nights, maybe a month. We’re going in and out of people’s apartments, back and forth, sleeping. I have, like, probably four friends’ houses that I’ve slept back and forth at.”

She stayed with her daughter’s father and his mother for about three months but said they asked her to leave when she became pregnant again. After that, she and her daughter alternated between nights in the car and brief stays with friends.

Health consequences

The instability has taken a toll on Mitchell’s mental and physical health. She said she is in the process of being diagnosed with anxiety and depression, conditions she connects to the stress of housing insecurity and her learning disability, which makes it harder to navigate assistance programs.

“I felt like in the beginning I was taken advantage of because I was rushed into something, not knowing what I was really getting myself into,” she said.

The effects worsened during her pregnancy. She was hospitalized once for high blood pressure and later developed pre-eclampsia, a condition marked by dangerously high blood pressure during pregnancy.

“I was dealing with the hardship of housing, wondering where my child’s going to live,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell also said she lost weight and struggled to eat.

“Definitely not eating, losing weight, being pregnant has been a problem,” she said. “I had to get iron infusions due to the fact that I don’t have the medication money to do that. Now they [doctors] are discussing infusing me with food because I’m not being able to properly get my intake for the baby and me. Yes, that’s due to depression because I don’t have an appetite.”

Her daughter’s health has also suffered.

“She had pneumonia for two weeks because we were outside, and it was cold at night,” Mitchell said. “She has asthma now because we’ve been in the air, having to be outside.”

Evictions, homelessness and health risks

Research shows that homelessness during pregnancy is associated with adverse perinatal outcomes. The physical toll of homelessness can be severe including increased odds of preterm delivery and low birth weight independent of preterm delivery. The study followed 672 women who were homeless at the time of delivery, and concluded that safe and long-term housing of expectant mothers may alleviate some risk factors for both the mother and the child.

A report from the Benioff Housing and Homelessness Initiative at UCSF found that most people (72%) of pregnant women who are homeless had at least one chronic health condition and more than one out of ten had three chronic conditions. Further, nearly half (41%) said that despite having health insurance, they did not utilize healthcare services.

These findings highlight the reality that eviction and homelessness are not just housing issues — they are public health crises that shorten lives and deepen inequality.

A broader policy failure

Mitchell’s story, housing advocates say, reflects a larger failure in California’s housing policies — one that continues to push low-income families toward homelessness and instability.

Herman Barahona, co-founder of the Sacramento Environmental Justice Coalition, said the state’s economic strength makes its housing shortfall especially troubling.

“California, being the fourth-largest economy in the world, could have done better to build affordable housing that the state had promised for years, and they failed to build them,” Barahona said. “I think it was like a million homes they were promising to build affordable homes, and they didn’t do that.”

He said many local governments have also resisted policies that would expand affordability.

“A lot of city councils and county boards really don’t like inclusionary zoning policies, which would mandate at least a 10 to 15 percent affordable housing construction rate from developers,” he said.

Barahona connects these decisions directly to the growing number of residents living without stable shelter.

“So this is why we’re seeing people who just can’t live indoors,” he said. “These are policy positions that affect the poor.”

While advocates like Barahona focus on the policies that create housing scarcity, legal organizations are working on the ground to keep families from losing their homes.

Adam Murray, CEO of the Inner City Law Center, said his organization assists people facing housing instability at every stage — from those already living on the streets to families on the brink of eviction.

“We focus on assisting folks who are struggling with housing instability,” Murray said. “That could be people who are already on the streets or in shelters trying to find a pathway back into housing, or it could be families that are pretty precariously housed and trying to hold on to that housing to keep their family together and, you know, stay in the neighborhood when they've got their relationships and their jobs, et cetera.”

Last year, the center handled more than 3,200 cases and recovered over $20 million for clients. 

“Every day I hear about folks who are facing eviction and need to stay in their home because they get legal representation that helps them navigate the eviction process,” Murray said.

He added that reducing the long-term stigma of eviction could prevent many families from falling back into homelessness.

“I think that limiting or eliminating the ability of landlords to rely on past evictions, or even have access to that information, would be extremely helpful for the people who are most likely to become homeless being able to find housing,” Murray said.

His organization handles 700 to 800 eviction cases each year, and for nearly all of those tenants, the records are sealed once the cases end.

“Even if they are moving out — even if they, you know, most of our tenants are able to stay in their homes, but we have a substantial number who ultimately are moving out — at the end of that eviction, the record is sealed,” he said. “It does not follow them. It does not have an impact when they’re out there looking for their next home.”

“The many advantages that come from having a lawyer represent you in the eviction defense process,” Murray added, “but that ought to be automatic for everybody.”

“Just trying to be somewhere safe”

In late August 2025, Mitchell contacted 2-1-1, the city’s referral line for housing and social services. The call connected her with a city program that provided a motel voucher. She and her daughter have been staying at a Motel 6 for the past two weeks.

Mitchell said she called 2-1-1 months earlier, when she was still living with her daughter’s father between April and June 2024, but the motel placement didn’t come through until this summer.

“Yes, it happened perfectly,” she said of her recent motel placement. “Because right when I really started being hardship my friends started backing up and not letting me come in and shower — it became a little problem.”

For now, she said, the voucher provides a brief reprieve from months of uncertainty — a chance to rest, shower, and prepare for her new baby.

“I just want to be somewhere safe where my baby can sleep,” Mitchell said. “That’s really all I want right now.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is being reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2025 Ethnic Media Collaborative, Healing California.