At the end of a long day at school, 14-year-old Na’Kaya Godfrey, and her 12-year-old brother, Junior, returned home to a dark, empty house in Stone Mountain, Georgia, outside Atlanta.
On this dreary winter afternoon, she turned on the space heaters that provide the only warmth in the unheated house, the latest in a long succession of homes the family has occupied during her short life. An inspirational sign on her dresser read “Home, Sweet Home”. But it doesn’t mean much to her. Asked how many places her family has lived, Na’Kaya guessed: “At least 25.”
The Godfrey family has been forced to quickly vacate two houses and were evicted from a third. They have couch-surfed with acquaintances. They have lived in basements and bounced around the gritty extended-stay hotels that line the nearby interstate, living out of trash bags and cooking their meals on a hot plate.
They have slept in their car, before it was repossessed, and washed up at the QuikTrip gas station. They have crammed into one bedroom of a grimy rooming house with a shared bathroom down the hall. They have had all their worldly possessions dumped on the curb and lost the contents of three different storage units.
Mother Jaimie, 35, adds that Na’Kaya, nicknamed KK, probably doesn’t remember the homeless shelter where they stayed when she was a toddler. That would make this place in Stone Mountain their 26th home. “KK asks me: ‘Why do we move so much? Do they not like us?’” Jaimie said later. “I tell her: ‘Mommy’s just having a hard time.’”
The family has struggled to find a stable home as Jaimie has struggled to find jobs and side hustles that will cover the rising costs of living, rent and childcare. And as a single parent with no family help, that economic struggle is compounded by the often impossible demands of competing work, school and childcare schedules.
The Godfrey children – Na’Kaya, Junior and one-year-old Kylie – have experienced how with one illness, one unexpected bill, one missed payment or one mishap, everything you thought you could count on can quickly unravel. And they have experienced the heavy toll that instability can take on the lives and futures of children like them.
Na’Kaya often shuts herself in her room, decorated with pink unicorn sheets. She dons her headphones and listens to music or watches TikTok videos. That calms her nerves until Jaimie gets home, with Kylie in tow, from working the late shift as a childcare teacher.
Na’Kaya tries hard not to, but she usually reaches for her phone and starts dialing her mother every 15 minutes or so. If Jaimie can’t pick up the phone at work, which she often can’t, Na’Kaya looks at Jaimie and Kylie’s photos on her phone as it rings. That helps keep the eighth-grader from biting her nails and, lately, her lips.
She can’t eat when Jaimie’s not home, so she often goes to bed hungry. Na’Kaya has been told she has separation anxiety. She has medicine, but she doesn’t like to take it. “Mommy says I have to stop calling her, but I can’t help it,” she said. “I just need to hear her voice and know she’s safe.”
Feeling safe is key to the healthy development of any child. Yet that’s something neither Na’Kaya nor Junior have felt in any place. They talk of the scary man in the rooming house, how frightening it was to sleep in the car and the noises that kept them up at night on their many moves. Both have recurring nightmares that their family is under attack or that something bad happens to Jaimie, the one constant in their lives.
Just as the instability has made Na’Kaya overly anxious, Junior struggles with his behavior, disrupting class or fighting with other kids. “I haven’t really seen anything that makes me feel, like, safe,” Junior said. “When I’m with my Mommy, Sissy and baby sister, I feel safe. That’s the only time. When all of us are together.”
The high risks of housing insecurity
Children like Na’Kaya, Junior and Kylie are missing from most of the headlines of the deepening housing affordability crisis in the United States. But they are uniquely vulnerable as eviction rates have spiked in a number of cities, including Atlanta. Rents and housing prices continue to rise sharply, jobs have become increasingly insecure and wages haven’t kept up with the increasing cost of living.
Because they are not in a shelter or out in the street, the Godfrey children are not counted in the official tallies of homelessness, which in 2024 reached an all-time high since such statistics have been collected. Homelessness has also risen sharply for families. Although families with chronically unstable housing, like the Godfreys, are largely invisible, their lives are no less chaotic and traumatic, with serious and potentially long-lasting consequences on children’s lives.
Having no set address or the experience of being evicted can lead to high rates of absenteeism and school switching, triple the risk of behavioral issues and lower cognitive test scores. Evicted children can lag in reading and math by as much as one year and are less likely to graduate from high school, particularly boys.
Both Na’Kaya and Junior have been chronically absent and struggle in school. Their grades drop and absences increase as the instability rises. Jaimie worries that Na’Kaya still reads slowly, following the words with her index finger, and that Junior spends hours in in-school suspension. “Nobody likes me at school,” he said glumly.
Infants without a stable place to live are at greater risk of being underweight and suffering more severe and persistent health challenges for years. Preschoolers without stable homes show major developmental delays at three times the rate of their housed peers. The stress of being evicted can lead to depression and anxiety, even in children under age nine.
“You can see these children’s not just present, but future being strangled,” said Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the recent book There Is no Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.
Running in place
Jaimie is no stranger to housing insecurity as a child, having herself bounced around between now-estranged family members in Georgia and Florida. She hated changing schools. So she’s sought to keep her children in the same schools even as they have moved from place to place to place.
That’s made for complicated logistics. Instead of joining after-school clubs or playing sports like many kids, Na’Kaya and Junior have spent years after school sitting in the back rooms where Jaimie worked or in the parking lot in the car, when they had one, waiting for their mother’s shift to end. They have whiled away afternoons at neighbors’ houses or watching TV alone in hotel rooms they were told not to leave.
For nearly one year, Na’Kaya and Junior rose before dawn to catch a 5am bus to their old school, even after they had moved miles away, returning home long after dark. Sometimes, coordinating overwhelmed Jaimie and cost her jobs. “I feel like such a failure sometimes,” Jaimie said. She said she had made mistakes, and there were days when the heaviness makes it hard for her to get out of bed: “But the kids aren’t mistakes. They’re blessings. I just want something better for them than I had for myself.”
In the face of the growing housing crisis, the Trump administration is slashing rental and permanent housing assistance, and overhauling housing and homelessness policies to focus on what administration officials call the “root causes” of homelessness: mental health issues and drug addiction, a determination many housing experts dispute. The administration is also proposing stringent work requirements before “able-bodied adults” receive any housing assistance.
Jaimie Godfrey has been waiting to get housing help since 2017. Like in many fast-growing and gentrifying cities where landlords can get higher rents than public housing subsidies will pay, in Atlanta, the voucher list has been effectively closed since 2018.
And, in contrast with assumptions that those who are housing insecure don’t have jobs, Jaimie has always worked. She’s managed a Cricket mobile phone store. She’s worked customer service at AutoZone, coming home on her lunch breaks to make dinner for the kids before working a second job as a homecare aide in the evenings. She’s baked and sold sweet potato pies and set up a pasta-delivery service. She’s worked at car auctions and highway construction sites and taken odd jobs through a staffing service. She’s worked at McDonald’s and a clothing store. She’s started GoFundMe campaigns and tried to become a TikTok influencer. She braids hair. But, at every turn, she’s struggled.
Sherri McCoy, a church friend who runs the local non-profit mutual aid society Blessing Bags of Warmth, has been helping the Godfreys pay the $1,275 monthly rent on the Stone Mountain house and bringing food to help when Jaimie’s food stamps run low.
When Jaimie lost a job after a difficult pregnancy and birth with Kylie and had no paid time off to recover, McCoy tried to help her apply for a childcare subsidy so she could look for another one. But to qualify, the state of Georgia, like others, requires that parents prove they are working 30 hours a week first – something most parents are unable to do without childcare. McCoy finally connected Jaimie with the $12-an-hour childcare job that allowed her to bring Kylie along.
“There are so many impossible catch-22s before you can get any help,” McCoy said. “It gets to a point that it’s a catch-44.”
Although the Trump administration promised this month to focus on housing affordability, experts like Goldstone say its actions to date have only made matters worse for low-income families. “The reason we’re seeing record-breaking homelessness is because of a basic mismatch between people’s incomes and what it costs to have a place to live,” Goldstone said. “That chasm is growing wider and wider. And as it grows, we’ll see more families losing their homes.”
Unlike the picture of adult addiction and vagrancy painted by the Trump administration, children are the population in the United States most likely to become homeless, spend a night in a shelter or be at risk of eviction. Black families and Black children face higher risks of eviction than any other racial group, regardless of income. Black women like Jaimie Godfrey face the threat of eviction at twice the rate of white women. One study found that nearly half of all the cases that wind up in eviction court are single-mother households, like the Godfreys’.
New York University research has found that housing conditions and demographics – not mental illness or substance abuse, as the Trump administration maintains – are the main reasons families end up in homeless shelters, and that housing subsidies are the strongest predictor of housing stability. Among homeless single-parent families without jobs, the biggest barriers to work are the lack of childcare, housing and transportation.
“It’s almost impossible to find your way out of poverty these days,” said Kate Barrand, president and CEO of Horizons for Homeless Children, a Massachusetts non-profit that serves unhoused families. “The system is built to hold them down because embedded in our support system is this belief that if people are poor, it’s their fault. You see these families, these single mothers who work harder than most everyone I know, and they’re literally running in place.”
Embedding housing help in schools
Atlanta is home to one of the few eviction-prevention programs in the country focused specifically on children. Over the last decade, Standing With Our Neighbors, developed by the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, has embedded a lawyer and social worker in nine schools in zones with the highest eviction rates to work with parents, landlords and the courts to prevent families from being forced from their homes. The Godfreys live outside these zones.
The foundation also provides emergency rental assistance and works to compel landlords to repair what they call “shocking” mold, sewage and other conditions that make dwellings impossible to live in and that force families to flee, called “informal evictions”. That’s what happened once to the Godfreys, when a tree fell on their rental home and the landlord didn’t repair the roof.
In 2024, the Standing With Our Neighbors program at Tuskegee Airmen Global Academy helped keep 123 students housed, about one-third of the total student body. With more stability came more consistent attendance and instruction. As a result, the share of students rated as a step above beginning-level learners – “developing or higher” – increased from 46% to 67% in math, with similar improvements in English and language arts, the highest in the history of the school.
“It is very hard for a child who is homeless to focus in math class when we’re talking about fractions and they don’t know where they’ll sleep that night,” said principal Melanie Sithole. The program also increased the attendance rate at another Atlanta school, Hollis Innovation Academy, from 48% to 67% in one year.
Michael Lucas, executive director of the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, said they were hoping to expand the program to additional schools, including early childhood learning centers. Instead, they’re preparing to pare the program down because the Trump administration cut their federal funding. “It’s going to be harder,” he said. “But we can’t walk away.”
They focused on underperforming schools with high turnover rates and found that those schools were also in zones with the highest eviction rates. Those zones mapped almost exactly, they found, on to Atlanta’s majority-Black neighborhoods.
Some housing advocates argue that housing and eviction-prevention programs should be “racism-conscious”, and undo the harms of previous biased policies, like redlining, which upheld segregation by denying Black families access to loans or services facilitating home ownership. Washington state, for example, helps families affected by past state-sanctioned discrimination with down payment assistance.
Carl Gershenson, a sociologist and director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton, said any eviction-prevention program could probably be considered racism-conscious: “Our data shows Black renters have higher eviction filing rates against them, so anti-eviction policies are going to have a disproportionately large benefit for Black renters.”
Another job loss, another move
On another recent winter day, the Godfrey family was cooped up in the Stone Mountain house. Jaimie had just learned that the childcare center where she worked was behind on rent, getting evicted from their building and shutting down. She was out of a job again.
Though she hadn’t slept well in what felt like years, her worries about the future keeping her up all night, Jaimie had accidentally drifted off to sleep that morning just as she planned to wake the kids up for school. They missed the school bus.
With no car to take them and no money for a ride-share, Na’Kaya and Junior, too, would be home for the day, despite the warning letter Jaimie had recently received about their chronic absenteeism and her fears about their grades slipping again.
The family spent the morning cleaning up puddles of water that had leaked in through the roof from the night’s rain and laying out peanut-butter traps to catch the rats now boldly raiding the pantry.
In the afternoon, after applying online for work-from-home jobs she could do while the baby napped, Jaimie spent $15 of the last $37 in her bank account on a large economy package of chicken legs to make sure the kids had good food to eat. Junior helped give his dog, his only friend, a bath and took a call from the police officer Jaimie had asked to mentor him. KK played all day with Kylie, hiding the baby’s bright plastic balls in a hole in her dress and drawing them out one by one to the baby’s surprise and delight.
Then, as she often does, Na’Kaya retreated to her room, decorated with blue twinkle lights. The lights keep her up at night. But Kylie often sleeps with her and Na’Kaya likes being able to see the baby’s slumbering face when she wakes up crying from a bad dream.
Though she thinks about it all the time, Na’Kaya doesn’t like talking about the family’s many moves. As she shared her story, she slowly slunk to the ground and crouched in the corner of the room. She drew her arms inside her T-shirt, which read “God Got Me”, and stared blankly at the wall.
Na’Kaya doesn’t have time for friends, she said, because she wants to get her brain focused on bringing her grades up. But she finds it hard to concentrate. She worries about Jaimie and writes her mother encouraging notes on days when Jaimie has a hard time or brings her a plate of food when Jaimie can’t eat.
Na’Kaya wonders why they move all the time, how she can make life better, how she can help her mother, why she’s afraid of boys and whether her dreams of becoming a doctor or an entrepreneur will ever come true. “I like all the subjects, and I don’t mind doing the work,” she said. “It’s just hard when all this stuff is bunched up in my head. It makes it hard for me to think.”
Sometimes, trying not to bite her nails, she scribbles how she feels on a piece of paper, then balls it up and throws it away. “I write how I thought Atlanta was a good place for everyone,” she said. “But it pretty much don’t seem like that.”
The family’s lease on the house is up in March. They have no idea where they’ll go next.