A Shelter Is Not a Home: The Crisis of Family Homelessness in the United States.

Abstract

* Abbreviations: AAP — : American Academy of Pediatrics ACE — : adverse childhood experience NYC — : New York City Family homelessness in the United States became an egregious problem in the 1980s and was the reason that I, as a young pediatrician, discovered the importance of advocacy. In my hometown, New York City (NYC), because of increasing income inequality, neighborhood gentrification, and poor housing policies nationally and locally (all leading to dramatically decreased availability of affordable housing for low-income families), there was a growing number of children living in so-called “welfare hotels.” This number increased from 5000 each night in 1983 to 12 000 each night in 1988.1 Because many of these families were sheltered in hotels in midtown Manhattan, my program at Bellevue Hospital Center provided many of these children with health care within our hospital as well as in a clinic that we ran in one of the biggest hotels. I became active in my American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) chapter and started the Committee on Homeless Families in New York Chapter 3. My colleagues and I learned how to collaborate with community-based advocacy organizations to fight for better treatment of homeless families in the shelter system as well as for better housing policies, at least in NYC. The result of those efforts by many advocates was that by 1990–1991, the number of children without a home being sheltered each night was back down to ∼5000.1 The nightmarish conditions of the lawless hotels were gone, and instead, safer and better-resourced, city-run shelters housed these families. Today, however, there are more homeless families in NYC than ever, with 22 000 children in 15 000 families being housed … Address correspondence to Benard P. Dreyer, MD, Department of Pediatrics, New York University School of Medicine, 462 First Ave, NBV 8E-11, New York, NY 10016. E-mail: bpd1{at}nyulangone.org