Connecticut Pilots a Better Way for Unhoused Kids and Caregivers to Access Homes

Connecticut resident Stacey Duran’s youngest daughter was 3 months old when she fled an abusive partner in 2023. Along with her two other children — a then-7-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son — the family spent more than a year bouncing between friends, relatives, and their car.

“Most of the time we were in the car,” Duran told Truthout. “After my son’s father pulled his arm so hard that it was almost out of the socket, I knew I had to leave if I was going to give my kids a future. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to be out of the situation; I didn’t think about where we could go or what I would do. My only concern was getting away.”

At the time, no one she knew could shelter the family for more than a night or two. “The most they could do was give us blankets to keep warm in the car,” she said.

Duran then pauses for a few minutes before continuing. “It’s hard for me to talk about this,” she continues. “We were struggling. I was trying to get my life back together, but it was really difficult.”

Fast forward 18 months, and Duran and her kids are in a much better place, both materially and emotionally. She attributes this to the staff at the Alliance for Community Empowerment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where her son was enrolled in Early Head Start. The program case manager who was assigned to help her family played an important role in helping her find employment as well as stable housing. Staff also helped her address the behaviors that were interfering with her son’s ability to learn. “My son just graduated from kindergarten,” she said, “and is learning to read and do math. He’s now happy and healthy.”

Duran, too, is thriving. “Staff at the Alliance knew that I love children and they helped me enroll in a 15-week training program to work with babies and preschoolers,” she says. Since December 2024, she has been employed as a child development associate at the Alliance and currently works 28 hours a week at a pay rate of $16 an hour. Moreover, she and her children are housed thanks to an innovative program called Head Start on Housing, which links unhoused families, or families at risk of homelessness, with Section 8 vouchers, streamlining an often lengthy bureaucratic process.

Although Duran says that finding a landlord who was willing to accept the voucher was not easy, she eventually prevailed. “The landlord I found is really nice,” she reports. “She’s a single mom herself and lets us use the backyard so that my kids can be outdoors and be safe. We have a three-bedroom apartment in a three-family house. The full rent is $1,900 a month. My share is $280, which is manageable.”

Connecticut is the first, and to date, only, state with a Head Start on Housing program, and despite budget-slashing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which funds the program, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has indicated that the state will continue to provide annual funding for 50 unhoused families with children enrolled in Head Start (HS, which accepts children between the ages of 3 and 5) and/or Early Head Start (EHS, which accepts infants and toddlers to age 3).

The Head Start on Housing program began as a pilot in 2022, with HS/EHS projects in Bridgeport, Enfield, Middletown, New Haven, and Vernon providing a small number of families with vouchers. In 2024, the state made the housing program permanent and expanded it to include all 22 state Head Start programs.

As a partnership between the Connecticut Department of Housing, the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood, and the Connecticut Head Start Association, the program has secured shelter for 144 families, including 317 kids, since it launched. While admittedly a tiny drop in the bucket for those experiencing homelessness (at last count, there were more than 5,000 unhoused people in the state, including 694 families with 521 children) supporters nonetheless tout it as a small first step in addressing the needs of unhoused families.

Shanté T. Hanks, senior adviser and director of Head Start on Housing, told Truthout that while the program was initially funded by the state, its financing quickly fell under the auspices of HUD. State officials hoped that the program would quickly become a model for other states. Although this has not yet happened, Hanks calls the state’s commitment to the program “unprecedented.”

“For families that have secured vouchers, it’s like they won the lottery,” she says. “We’ve assisted families in every corner of the state and have helped move things along so people get housed far more quickly than they would otherwise.”

“Rents are skyrocketing,” she adds, making clear that the state feels a responsibility to assist those who lack the resources to pay what is being charged. (According to RentData.org, Connecticut has the seventh-highest rents in the country. The average fee for a studio is $1,276. The average is $1,471 for a one-bedroom, $1,824 for a two-bedroom, and $2,288 for a three-bedroom.)

Improving Child Health and Educational Outcomes

The impetus for Head Start on Housing came from the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, a Maryland-based group that reached out to Connecticut state officials during the summer of 2021 to suggest making Head Start a bridge to housing for those facing economic precarity and eviction. They chose the Nutmeg State because of its small size, relatively small unhoused population, and contact with legislators who had shown an interest in doing something to stem the housing crisis.

“Early childhood professionals continue to struggle to maneuver successfully through existing channels to access a variety of emergency and permanent housing solutions to move parents toward housing stability,” the center wrote to the Connecticut Department of Housing staff. “Children in owned or affordably rented homes consistently fare better on health, development, and academic variables.”

Barbara Baldwin, assistant director of the Alliance for Community Empowerment in Bridgeport, told Truthout that her experience confirms this. “Back in 2016, we worked with Chapin Hall to develop a tool to assess the situations of families in our Head Start and Early Head Start programs,” Baldwin said. “We found that of the 1,000 kids who were then enrolled, 30 percent lived in families that were dealing with housing insecurity.”

Staff, Baldwin said, saw the impact of this directly.

“The children often acted out in class. I remember seeing a little girl tell her doll, ‘I told you you can stay here, but your mama cannot.’ Another child turned his classroom into total chaos. It was like a tornado hit,” she said. “He later shared with me that he wanted to go back to the red door. When his grandmother came to pick him up, I told her he’d had a bad day and asked about the red door. At that point, she started to cry and told me they’d been evicted from an apartment with a red door and had been jumping from couch to couch for weeks.”

Head Start on Housing, while no panacea, has been helpful to families like these, Baldwin says. Staff assist unhoused families in completing the necessary paperwork and assembling needed documentation; once accepted for Section 8, they then work to help them find suitable housing. But it can still be a frustrating, time-consuming, and bureaucratic process.

Crystal, who asked that her surname not be used to protect her privacy, told Truthout that despite working full time as an in-home health aide, she and her twins were evicted from their $1,700 apartment in late 2022 when she fell behind in the rent. “After we were put out, I spoke to the family advocate at my children’s Head Start program,” she said. “The family services manager met with me, and we started the tedious application process for a Section 8 voucher through Head Start on Housing. It took about two months, which I’ve been told is quick, to be approved.”

But Crystal, who was staying with relatives following the eviction, quickly faced another hurdle. “A big issue when you have an eviction on your record is finding a landlord who will rent to you. Owners make a lot of assumptions about you. It doesn’t matter that a person with a perfect credit score can be a horrible housekeeper and not take care of the property. They see an eviction and assume you’re going to be a bad, irresponsible tenant. There’s also prejudice against people with young kids. I was rejected for a second-floor unit because the landlord, who lived on the ground floor, assumed there would be a lot of noise and running around in the apartment.”

Although Crystal and her children eventually found a place to live (the full rent is $2,000 a month; her share is $395), she says that she felt forced to take something in a Bridgeport neighborhood experiencing a lot of visible drug use.

Her frustration is audible. At the same time, she tells me she knows she’s lucky, and that many people are languishing on Section 8 waiting lists — awaiting word about whether the federal funding stream will continue and, if not, when state financing will kick in — as the government’s fiscal 2026 budget is hammered out by Congress.

Carmella Galipault, who directs EdAdvance Head Start in Torrington, runs one of several Head Start pilots that provide home-based services to families with infants and toddlers, many of whom need housing assistance. “When home visitor staff go into people’s homes for a weekly visit, they help parents understand developmental stages and health concerns. They also see who is living doubled or tripled up. Sometimes they see people living in a house that is in foreclosure, and they’re simply staying put for as long as they can. It’s a crisis,” she tells Truthout. “Many people have been waiting for a voucher for more than a year. Some end up moving away and trying their luck elsewhere. And even though we provide the kids in Early Head Start and Head Start with three meals a day, five days a week, it’s not enough. Many of the kids come to the programs with emotional trauma, and being unhoused adds another dimension to this.”

Add in worry about immigration status and potential cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and other social supports, and it’s small wonder that Head Start-eligible families living at or below the federal poverty line are stressed and fearful.

“All people, including young children, need a place to feel comfortable and secure,” Baldwin of the Alliance for Community Empowerment says. “Head Start to Housing is an important state effort and a small step forward.”

Nonetheless, she says that much more is needed to make a dent in ending the affordable housing crisis.

Crystal agrees. “There are so many barriers to getting permanently and affordably housed,” she told Truthout. “There is still a lot of ignorance in the general population and among policy makers about eviction, poverty, single parenthood, and what real help should look like.”