Donnell Harris’ story begins like those of so many other victims of the recession. In 2011, with the national economy slowly recovering but unemployment still near its peak, the 32-year-old Washington, D.C. resident lost his security job amid widespread layoffs at his company.

“Once I lost the job, bills started stacking high,” he says. “The rent was getting backed up.”

Harris, his wife and their two children were evicted from their apartment in the working-class neighborhood of Anacostia. For a couple of years, they bounced between friends and relatives who were willing to put them up. Then, in February 2014, a friend they were staying with was himself evicted. With nighttime temperatures in the District falling into the single digits, they had nowhere else to go.

Unfortunately for the Harrises, they became homeless at the wrong time. Through the end of January, D.C. experienced an unprecedented spike in family homelessness, with the number of families placed in shelters more than double what it had been the previous winter. Its shelters filled to capacity, the city started placing families in motels in D.C. and Maryland. Soon there were 10 times more homeless people living in motels than there had been a year earlier, and those rooms ran out too.

So when the Harrises arrived at the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, where families apply for shelter, they were placed not in a standard shelter or motel room, but in a small, partitioned space on the basketball court of a recreation center. The makeshift space offered little privacy and no shower, and each day the Harrises were forced to make a daily trek to Virginia Williams to re-apply for a cot for the next night. The practice came to an end in March, when a judge found that the use of these rec centers violated city law and ordered the District to move the families to private rooms until the spring thaw set in, at which point the families would be left to fend for themselves.

Donnell Harris, his wife and their two children became homeless last winter after Harris lost his job. Photo by Darrow Montgomery/ Washington City Paper

The timing of D.C.’s spike in family homelessness this winter might seem counterintuitive. After all, the recession officially ended five years ago, and the economy has been growing and unemployment declining — slowly, sputteringly, but unmistakably. And yet, since the recession’s end, the family homelessness crisis has only intensified. Between 2010 and 2013, the number of homeless families in D.C. increased by 23 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The District is hardly alone in this regard. Across the country, major cities have experienced a sharp increase in family homelessness over the past few years. In Los Angeles, the number of homeless families increased by 21 percent between 2010 and 2013. In Boston, it was up 23 percent. In San Francisco, it rose by 29 percent. In San Diego, it more than tripled.

Unlike chronic homelessness, family homelessness is often hidden. Its victims aren’t out on the street, but live doubled up with friends or relatives, or in cars or public buildings. And perhaps more than any other type of homelessness, it’s carried by macroeconomic tides, meaning that even as the wave of economic growth carries some Americans back to prosperity, low-income families can find themselves particularly vulnerable to an undertow caused by shifts in the housing and job markets.

Even the statistics can be ambiguous. There’s actually some question as to whether family homelessness in the country overall has gone up or down in recent years. U.S. Department of Education data show the number of homeless children attending public schools increasing steadily, from about 940,000 in the 2009-2010 school year to nearly 1.2 million in 2011-2012. By contrast, HUD’s annual point-in-time count — a measure criticized in some corners for counting only homeless people on the street and in shelters on one particular night — recorded an 11 percent decline in the number of homeless families between 2010 and 2013.

Nonetheless, even the HUD count makes clear that in the cities with the most expensive housing, the number of homeless families is on the rise, often strikingly so.

One measure of housing cost is the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. The cities with the highest housing cost in last year’s index were Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Miami, Boston and San Francisco. All experienced an increase in family homelessness between 2010 and 2013 in the HUD point-in-time count.

Another way to measure housing costs is by the balance between rent and income. According to an April study for The New York Times by the real estate website Zillow, the cities with the highest ratio of median rent to median gross income are Los Angeles; Miami; College Station, Texas; Santa Cruz; San Diego; San Francisco; and Salinas, California. The point-in-time count showed an increase in the number of homeless families in all of these cities.The boundaries of these jurisdictions don’t always line up perfectly — the Case-Shiller index refers to metropolitan areas, while the Zillow study concerns cities, and the HUD count varies — but the trend is indisputable.

At its core, the cause of rising family homelessness is simple: Homes, for these families, have grown unaffordable. Yet the problem has been excruciatingly complex, and America’s wealthiest cities are the ones that have struggled the most to solve it, creating a crisis of unseen proportions even as the national economy is supposedly on the rise.

No More Fallbacks

As a significant national phenomenon, family homelessness is a relatively new problem. It was only during the recession of the early 1980s, when overall homelessness began its rapid ascent, that families with children became homeless in substantial numbers. A 1986 congressional report found that the number of homeless families, previously a “negligible portion of the overall homeless population,” had grown through the first half of the decade to constitute 28 percent of the country’s homeless residents.

“Before the ’80s, homelessness was largely a phenomenon limited to cities, to white older males who tended to be alcoholics, the stereotypical type of person on skid row,” says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. “And then in the early- to mid-80s, there was this explosion, when a lot of families, younger people, working people, became homeless.”

Foscarinis cites Ronald Reagan-era cuts to social welfare programs and public housing as one cause of endemic family homelessness. The ’80s also brought a sharp rise in income inequality, with real incomes for poorer Americans dropping in the first half of the decade, even as housing costs continued to rise, making it more difficult for many families to afford homes.

Theresa Muller prepares to move out of her motel room she shares with her boyfriend, father and three children in Kissimmee, Fla. Muller and her family have been homeless but plan to move to a home in a neighboring county. (AP Photo/John Raoux). (AP Photo/John Raoux)

This divergence between incomes and rents has replicated itself in recent years. A December report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that rents in America stayed relatively flat in real dollars through the 1990s, before rising 6 percent between 2000 and 2012. In the latter time period, the median real income of American renters declined by 13 percent.

As a consequence, the study concluded, a full 50 percent of renters are now in homes they can’t afford, defined by the federal standard that puts the maximum affordable housing cost at 30 percent of income. That’s up from 38 percent of renters who were spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent in 2000. Meanwhile, the percentage spending more than half their income, a so-called severe cost burden, jumped from 19 percent to 27 percent.

These converging economic trends have ensnared families who hadn’t seen themselves as being in danger of homelessness. “In these past few years, with the recession and the foreclosure crisis, there’s been a second wave of that pretty dramatic increase that has affected a lot of families,” says Foscarinis. “A lot of people are becoming homeless for the first time, people who never imagined they would be in this situation, finding themselves looking for shelter or going to food banks.”

Harris is among them. He’d never been homeless before, but his struggle exemplifies the surprising pattern of increasing family homelessness during a period of economic growth. The delayed reaction to the recession makes sense, considering the route families like the Harrises take. Many lost their jobs and their homes at the economic nadir, then stayed with friends and relatives for a couple of years. Now they’ve exhausted their fallbacks and are finally seeking shelter.

At the same time, the cost of housing, which dropped in some cities during the recession, has climbed steadily since — creating a shortage of the affordable housing that could help families avoid homelessness in the first place. In cities like D.C. that weren’t hit as severely by the recession and didn’t see housing markets crash, the crisis is especially dire. A report by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute found that the city lost more than half its units renting for less than $750 a month last decade.

The loss of affordable housing has been compounded by the fact that the economic recovery hasn’t benefited everyone evenly. An April report from the National Employment Law Project found that while low-wage jobs in industries like fast food have expanded considerably in the past few years, there are still about a million fewer middle-income jobs than there were before the recession. As a result, even people with jobs have struggled to pay their rent, creating, in HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan’s words, “the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known.”

A Roof Overhead

No one knows that better than those working to find housing for those who desperately need it.