The small one-bedroom apartment in Lynn was already cramped when Jose, Nicole and their parents squeezed inside with their bags.

For three days, they slept on the hard floor right beside the bathroom and kitchen stove.

Those June nights on the bare, wooden floor of the Lynn apartment, Jose, 16, and Nicole, 14, learned were only the beginning of a tumultuous summer as their family sank into homelessness, struggling to find affordable rent in Boston that the four of them could split.

Jose and Nicole, whose names have been changed to protect their identity, are among thousands of teenagers and families in Boston and Massachusetts who are homeless, bouncing from shelters to motels, friends’ couches and even under bridges as Hub housing prices become more and more out of reach.

The family, which had been living in their parents’ native Dominican Republic for two years, had returned to the United States after the father lost his job, hoping to find work here. Even though he was working as a mechanic and the mother was working in day care, it wasn’t enough to cover the rising rents of Greater Boston for a family of four.

Over the summer, Jose, Nicole and their parents spent nights on friends’ couches and living room floors, even taking shelter for several days in an emergency room, ending up in a crowded motel room eating microwaved meals.

“We stayed at our father’s friend’s house. It was one room. The kitchen, bathroom and living room were all together. We were all sleeping on the floor,” Nicole said. “My mom didn’t want to be there. We were in the middle of the way. We didn’t know where to go.”

After a three-day stint in Lynn, the family moved on to the emergency room of Boston Children’s Hospital, where they tried to blend in among the waiting patients and hospital staff.

“We went to go sleep at Boston Children’s Hospital,” Nicole said. “It was so embarrassing.”

“We sat down in the emergency room and didn’t say anything. I told my mom I felt embarrassed,” Jose said. “My mom went to the receptionist and talked to a social worker. They gave us a fake checkup and gave us two rooms to sleep in for only one night.”

The next day, Children’s Hospital helped the family find shelter at a motel in Brighton. For the next month and a half, they became one of roughly 300 families stashed away in state-funded motel and hotel rooms across Massachusetts.

“We had to cook in a microwave. We were eating a lot of unhealthy food,” Nicole said. “It was really weird.”

“Maybe twice a week, our dad tried to make rice and shrimp — frozen cooked shrimp,” Jose said.

“We never spoke to anyone at the hotel. Everyone was closed out in their rooms for the entire day,” Jose said. “No one talked. I didn’t sleep well. It was very uncomfortable. The room was very small. We did the dishes in the bathroom.”

Two weeks ago, the family moved to a scattered-site shelter in Dorchester. Scattered-site shelters house multiple families in one apartment building.

The teens said what got them through the summer was Action for Boston Community Development’s summer work program. Jose worked at Shaloh House in Brighton, prepping food for the kids’ summer camp, teaching youngsters basketball and cleaning up after the campers.

Nicole, meanwhile, spent her summer as a camp counselor at the Jackson Mann Community Center.

For a few hours each day, they would feel like normal teens and forget that their family had no home.

“I love it, we are distracted,” Nicole said. “Our minds are not on where we are going to live.”

The two siblings were among 82 homeless youths of the 1,000 total youths this summer in ABCD’s program. That number is up from last year when there were about 62 homeless teens in the program.

Homelessness among Boston families is becoming the norm, the teenagers said.

“It’s people who live in the projects, people whose parents don’t make a lot of money. They go through it a lot,” Jose said. “We were all planning to work to pay the rent together, but housing here is so expensive. We couldn’t afford it.

“I haven’t gotten to see my friends. I told them, they know. They don’t say much. They know their parents did it as well when they were younger, they think it’s normal,” Jose said. “I have friends who have gone through it while we were going to school together.”