Why this widespread form of homelessness is often overlooked and unsupported

Imagine a person experiencing homelessness. You might picture someone sleeping in an overnight shelter or living in a tent encampment in an urban area. That image isn’t wrong, but that common perception overlooks a less visible, potentially larger group, advocates and researchers say. People experiencing “doubled-up” homelessness live in temporary situations in the homes of friends or family when they would otherwise choose not to. In fact, the vast majority of schoolchildren experiencing homelessness are in doubled-up arrangements.

People living doubled-up often move between houses frequently and could be asked to leave at any moment, said Julie Dworkin, director of policy at Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. That challenges the notion that people experiencing literal homelessness are more vulnerable than people living doubled-up, she said.

READ MORE: ‘The country is entirely unprepared.’ As more unhoused people age, where will they die?

“They don’t have access to the kinds of supports and social services that you have when you’re in a shelter,” she said. “It’s not like a better, more safe or stable situation.”

It’s also hard to separate the population of people experiencing literal homelessness from those at risk of becoming homeless or those living doubled-up, because often they’re the same population at different points in their lives.

But people who stay with others because they don’t have their own place are not considered homeless by most jurisdictions, including the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds local programs combating homelessness and managing low-income housing.

In recent years, some local and state governments have changed their definitions to include doubled-up living, with the express intent of expanding resources to more people.

One of those places is Chicago, where local advocates have worked for years to convince the city that the population of residents experiencing homelessness is greater than those living on the streets or in shelters.

Experts at Chicago Coalition for the Homeless helped write a new ordinance that will expand Chicago’s definition of homelessness to include people living doubled-up, people being released from prison, and people leaving rehab or mental health facilities. Funding will come from a proposed real estate tax increase, which would change the city’s flat tax rate to a graduated one, with the sale of buildings over $1 million taxed higher.

Broadening the criteria for homelessness could get much needed help to Latoya Wofford, a 41-year-old mother in Chicago.

Ten months ago, Wofford and four of her children were living in transitional housing in Indiana. As her job cut her work hours, she grew increasingly unable to pay utilities, and they were kicked out of that residence. The family was split up, with two children moving to Texas with one of their older siblings and two others staying with her. Since then, they’ve cycled through various situations, including living with friends and family and staying at a shelter. Now, her family has splintered again, with Wofford’s 18-year-old son, a senior in high school, mostly living with a relative, while she and her 9-year-old daughter regularly stay at a different family member’s house.

She’s been looking for her own place for months and nothing has panned out. Wofford said she was recently rejected from a low-income housing voucher program because she had found a job a few months ago. (She also has an online ministry, and sells books she has written, though the proceeds aren’t as much as she’d hoped.)

When she stays at one house, she and her daughter sleep on an air mattress in the dining room; at another house, where they stay infrequently, they sleep on a folded pile of blankets on the floor. Neither lends itself to a good night’s sleep, she said. But she feels like she has no other choice.

“It’s definitely not comfortable — the whole situation is not comfortable,” Wofford said. “It’s not comfortable at all for us to live like that when we’re not used to living like that.”

A poorly defined population

There’s no one agreed-upon definition of doubled-up homelessness. Some studies include all adult children living with parents. Others only count those who are older than generally accepted thresholds of young adulthood, or those who are also living with children of their own.

There’s even disagreement about whether people who double up qualify as homeless, with some older research labeling them as “marginally housed” or “precariously housed.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development does not consider people living doubled-up as experiencing homelessness.

There’s also no federal count of people living in doubled-up situations, unlike the annual January point-in-time count, which estimates the number of Americans living on the streets or in shelters. So Molly Richard, a researcher at Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Science, set out to quantify the number of people living doubled-up using American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census.

Richard and her colleagues determined people were doubled-up if they met certain conditions related to poverty level, relationship to the head of household and whether they shared household costs. They found that on average, at least 3.7 million people experienced doubled-up homelessness on any night in 2019 — more than 1 percent of the entire U.S. population. That’s substantially more than the estimated 580,000 people living on the street or in shelters reported by the latest point-in-time count.

READ MORE: More seniors are becoming homeless, and experts say the trend is likely to worsen

That analysis is not a cumulative count over the year of people experiencing doubled-up homelessness, since people can drift in and out of being housed and experience various forms of homelessness, Richard said.

Minnesota is one state that recognizes this form. There, the definition of homelessness since at least 2004 has included people living doubled-up, as long as those circumstances have been ongoing for under a year, said Cathy ten Broeke, assistant commissioner for Minnesota’s Interagency Council on Homelessness.

That opens up access to funding from the state – and potentially other federal agencies – for a broad swath of housing insecure people.

Why many people double up

Some demographic groups are more likely to live doubled-up than others, even accounting for the fact that those groups are also more likely to experience poverty, Richard’s study found.

Hispanic and Latino Americans, American Indian and Alaskan Native Americans, as well as Black Americans are more likely than white and non-Hispanic people to live doubled-up. Among individuals at or below 125 percent of the adjusted poverty level, more than 10 percent of Hispanic or Latino Americans and more than 12 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native Americans were estimated to be doubled-up. That’s compared with 9 percent of Black Americans and 7 percent of both white and non-Hispanic Americans.

A 2023 report by Chicago Coalition for the Homeless found that more than 90 percent of homeless Hispanic and Latino Chicagoans lived doubled-up.

In Minnesota, winters can be brutal, said Tammy Moreland, chair of the Minnesota Tribal Collaborative to Prevent and End Homelessness. As a result, people often couch-surf during those months to stay out of the cold.

Native Americans are disproportionately homeless in Minnesota. A 2018 study in the state found that while Native Americans represented about 1 percent of the overall population, they comprised 12 percent of the people experiencing homelessness.

“As a Native American person, I will open up my home to a relative that doesn’t have a place to stay,” Moreland said.

Doubling up can sometimes be a positive experience, researchers note, since people can share costs and responsibilities, like parenting and chores. And experts also caution against imposing Eurocentric views of single-family households on the experiences of different cultures.

READ MORE: Massachusetts to begin denying shelter beds to homeless families, putting names on a waitlist

But many people who lived doubled-up say that if given the choice, they would rather live alone.

“There is that conception of people who are outside of the culture that I live in that they’re like, ‘Oh, they just like to live that way,'” Moreland said. “And the honest truth is, people don’t want to have three families living in a two-bedroom house.”

In a 2018 study by the Wilder Group that looked at homelessness on Minnesota reservations, 70 percent of respondents were living doubled-up, but 99 percent said they would prefer to live alone.

The study also found that respondents’ living situations were unstable. Nearly 90 percent had lived in two or more places over the previous year, and nearly half had lived in four or more places. One quarter felt they could not stay where they were living for another month.

People living doubled-up sometimes endure crowded or unsafe conditions. In a 2018 study conducted by Vanderbilt University and published by HUD, researchers noted that instability, crowding, interpersonal tension and chaos are all potential negative effects of living doubled-up.

“Poor quality housing, which is more often found in low-income neighborhoods, increases the effects of crowding on psychological distress,” the researchers wrote. They found that a lack of quiet space can harm children’s ability to concentrate on schoolwork and that “children in crowded households may be viewed as a burden or nuisance, leading to toxic family environments.”

Wofford, the Chicago mother searching for an apartment, lived without permanent housing once before, when she was 16 years old and pregnant with her first child, she said. But since then, she’s had stable housing, except for periods when she was moving and would stay with her grandmother.

Staying at other people’s homes is difficult, Wofford said. She rarely has a set of keys, and often has to call someone to be let in late in the evening after she’s done with her shift cleaning a bank. Wofford said she often feels that her presence is unwelcome, or at least intrusive. She’s thankful for the families she’s staying with now, but other times that she’s stayed with relatives, her relationships have suffered.

Before her current situation, “I was uncomfortable at every house I was at,” Wofford said. “I was uncomfortable, and when you just get so uncomfortable like that, you feel unwelcome. Even though you don’t have anywhere to go, you want to leave.”

Limited resources, difficult decisions

Some people who are living doubled-up may fall under HUD’s definitions for homelessness — for example, if they’re at risk of losing their housing within 14 days. Since the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, children living in doubled-up situations have been explicitly categorized as experiencing homelessness and are eligible for certain resources, such as transportation services, under the U.S. Department of Education. But many don’t qualify for homelessness programs.

Activists and researchers believe one reason the federal government is reluctant to include doubled-up living in broader definitions of homelessness is because agencies often feel there is more need than can be supported with scant resources.

“Federal agencies or local jurisdictions or even service programs want to be more flexible with their funding. They really want to meet the needs of anybody who’s experiencing homelessness,” Richard said. “But when they already have such limited resources, it can feel very difficult to make the decision to help someone who does have a couch to stay on with their family, versus [people who] are living on the street or in a car.”

READ MORE: NYC enacts ‘Homeless Bill of Rights,’ but doubts arise over key provisions

Some experts in homelessness work say that people experiencing doubled-up homelessness may not need the kind of wraparound care and case management that people experiencing literal homelessness often need, but others disagree.

“I just don’t think that looking at where someone is living is the best way to figure out who has the greatest need,” Dworkin said.

Chicago Coalition for the Homeless worked for years to expand the city’s definition of homelessness to include doubled-up living, following the footsteps of other state and local jurisdictions like Minnesota and Portland, Oregon.

Portland’s move to include doubled-up homelessness in its definition was a pushback against HUD’s narrower definition, said researcher Marisa Zapata, director of Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative.

“The push was to say, if we actually want to end homelessness, we have to actually understand the complexity of homelessness,” Zapata said.

That freed up local funding to help people living doubled-up where federal money wasn’t available, Zapata said. But there isn’t good research on the impact that money has had, she added. In fact, there’s very little research anywhere on how financial assistance helps people living doubled-up.

Wofford says she’ll continue searching for housing, but is frustrated. At one place, she was told she needed more income, so she’s looking for another job.

This year, she’s planning a Thanksgiving meal at someone else’s house, which is a new experience for her.

“When you’re living with someone, you can’t do everything you would do in your own place,” she said. “So, it’s definitely going to be different.”