Research & Data > Research Reports > 6 > 47

Homeless Families with Children Receiving Welfare Assistance in Washington State

On average, during each benefit-month between June 1997 and May 1998, about 362 welfare families with children were newly coded as homeless on Washington state's welfare database. Most of these families were not on the streets, however. Some two-thirds (or more), those families coded Homeless-With Housing, were likely sharing living quarters with other family or friends.

The other third, about 121 families per month, may have been living in either temporary shelters or places not suitable for family living. A group of 121 such families would typically comprise about 188 children and 144 adults newly homeless and without housing each month.

The ACES codes we rely on here are not as reliable as one would like. These estimates are uncertain, and we cannot separately estimate the numbers living in temporary shelters and the numbers without even minimally adequate housing. Duration of homelessness cannot be estimated, and could vary from as little as one night to many months.

This report provides basic data about families with children, who receive welfare assistance and are newly reported homeless in Washington state. The report provides data to the CTED-DSHS work group that is preparing an inventory of available state assistance. The findings convey some sense of the numbers of newly homeless families, and should thus be helpful for statewide services planning.

Good data on homeless families is hard to come by. What data we have is hard to interpret and controversial often. This report is based on data in the state's welfare information system, ACES. We believe that most homeless families in Washington state are already DSHS welfare clients or soon become so. Thus ACES offers a reasonable source of data for studying homeless families. But even the ACES data for our purposes have serious limitations, and so too do the analyses and conclusions in this report.

Further findings
Over the full 12-month study period ACES data identified 4,344 newly homeless families, comprising 11,949 persons: 6,756 children, 5,193 adults. The 12-month group included 710 (or more) homeless pregnant women. Some 397 of these women had no children and were in one-person households.

Welfare supports. About 73 percent of the entire group received cash grants, most, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grants. Close to 90 percent had state-provided health insurance; close to 90 percent got Food Stamps. (Of course, homeless families not on welfare would not be getting any of these supports.)

Prior histories. Sixty percent had been active DSHS welfare recipients in the month before they were newly coded as homeless. Thirteen percent were homeless more than once over the 12 study months.

Geography. Some 52 percent were enrolled with welfare offices in the urban Puget Sound area: from Everett to Olympia, including Bremerton and Puyallup. Spokane welfare offices enrolled near 8 percent, and the Vancouver and Orchards offices enrolled about 7 percent.

Modified: Wednesday November 02 2005

For more ways to get in touch with the Department of Social and Health Services, go to the DSHS Contact Information Web page. Technical Site Comments: DSHS Webmaster. Copyright 2004 Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.