For the past year, nine-year-old Brigitte has lived with her parents in a converted garage, behind a house, in Salinas, California. Her bedroom is just about big enough to bust out some K-pop dance moves, though not spacious enough for her parents to agree to get her the cat she dreams of.
There’s no outdoor space, or a living room, but the family no longer has to share a kitchen, bathroom or fridge with two other families, like they did when they first moved here from Oaxaca, Mexico, three years ago.
“It was difficult,” said Brigitte, of being the only kid in the three-bedroom house packed with three families. She did her homework on a small table in the bedroom she shared with her parents.
Families had to compete for space in the kitchen; the bathroom was always occupied, so they often couldn’t shower until 10pm; and the residents were constantly battling over the car parking space.
Nancy, Brigitte’s mom, who works in Castroville packaging cauliflower, artichokes and broccoli, said she was always cleaning up after others and she mostly hid the family’s food in their bedroom because “we shared the fridge but they didn’t respect your food and would eat it.”
Their rent for the room in the shared house was $1,000, plus utilities, for the first year, but then the price was hiked to $1,300.
Brigitte’s father, Cruz, who works at a car wash, said what prompted them to move was “the stress of being there constantly battling, of coming home from work exhausted and having to clean up the kitchen and the bathroom after others, with none of the others helping”.
The family met with the Guardian at a playground in Salinas because they were not allowed to have guests over to their garage where they pay $1,800 a month.
“It’s really expensive here to rent a house with our salaries,” said Cruz.
The number of children living in a precarious housing situation in California has risen significantly in recent years.
In 2021, the state started requiring schools to fill out a housing questionnaire to understand their students’ housing situation. And while the survey does not capture all unhoused children, it nonetheless paints a troubling picture.
The number of students experiencing homelessness in California rose by almost 20,000 in 2024reaching an average of 4%, the highest rate of student homelessness in a decade, according to the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).
Increased awareness among school leaders may account for some increases in the numbers. But the numbers are based on a single-day count in October 2024, meaning they are almost certainly an undercount.
Students are considered homeless if they lack a fixed, regular and adequate night-time residence. It includes students living on the street, in shelters, in motels, in cars, doubled up with other families or living in garages, like Brigitte.
Homeless students face steep educational barriers – they are more likely to miss school, switch schools frequently, face suspension, and attend schools with high rates of poverty. Compared with their peers, they are also less likely to meet academic standards, graduate high school or pursue college. Preventing such outcomes is both socially and economically beneficial for the student and for the state.
Across California, the statewide average of 4% student homelessness masks sharp local disparities. In Monterey county, the rural central county where Brigitte and her family live, 16% of kids enrolled in public school have experienced homelessness at some point – the highest percentage in California by a long shot – up from 4.2% a decade ago, according to California department of education data.
“It’s a pretty staggering statistic to consider,” said Brett Guinan, one of the authors of the PPIC report, adding, to underscore the magnitude of the problem, that the increase in Monterey county student homelessness was happening as overall school enrollment was at a historic low in the county – meaning that more students are reported as homeless, even though fewer students are part of the survey.
Students living doubled up several families to a house or in a converted garage, like Brigitte and her parents, account for the majority of California’s homeless students. More than 90% of the homeless youth in Monterey county live doubled up, according to the latest cumulative data from the California office of education.
Precarious living has become increasingly common in the region, as the state faces rent inflation, wage stagnation and a longstanding housing crisis.
California renters are already stretched thin – but in Salinas, they’re skint: 57.1% spend more than a third of their income just to keep the lights on and a roof overhead.
Meanwhile, some funding earmarked to help unhoused students have dried up, Guinan said, including $99m in federal pandemic relief funds dedicated to homeless students. “All of that funding has now expired, and there is a lot of uncertainty over what funding for homeless students will look like moving forward,” Guinan said.
In Monterey county, the classroom is not just a place of learning, it’s a frontline in the fight against child homelessness. With housing costs surging and wages stagnant, local school districts have become de facto safety nets for the most vulnerable students, ensuring they’re not left behind simply because they lack a fixed address.
“Our job in the school district isn’t to fix homelessness,” said Donna Smith, who has been coordinating the services for Homeless Children and Youth at the Monterey county office of education for the past six years, “it’s to provide services to students experiencing homelessness.” That includes everything from school supplies, hygiene kits and clothing to transportation, tutoring and help navigating the healthcare system.
For families in crisis, even basic paperwork can become a barrier, she said. By law, homeless children must be enrolled in school without delay, even if they lack birth certificates, vaccination records or other documents. To make sure there are no learning gaps, the school district’s homelessness liaison team will “enroll the students right away and then work backwards” to get the necessary paperwork, said Smith.
Staff offer “wraparound services” – holistic support that adapts to the severity of a student’s needs. “Some students might not need anything,” said Smith. “Or they may just need a backpack and then you’ll never see them again. And then some families need more ongoing support – maybe they need help with food.”
The school staff can assist families of homeless students find housing, and have grants to help put a deposit on an apartment or pay rental arrears “so they don’t become homeless”, said Smith.
School staff are trained to recognize signs of housing instability and to notify teachers who can modify assignments. “We know that kids living in shelters can’t always do their homework – it’s loud,” she said, so academic expectations can be adjusted.
Smith has seen families living doubled-up two or more families sharing a home, often crammed into single rooms, converted garages or worse. “Sometimes there’s a couple of families living together, sometimes three,” she explains. “I’ve seen converted garages – or unconverted ones – where a whole family is living.”
Homelessness here cuts across employment and immigration status. “These are not necessarily children of migrant families,” Smith emphasizes. “Maybe their families are sick, or they lost a job, or they do have a job, but it’s not enough to pay the rent.”
In Monterey county, about 13% of homeless students are migrants compared with the average of about 3% statewide.
In some agricultural pockets around Salinas, Smith said the situation was even more dire. “I know they had families staying in hothouses,” she said, referring to an incident in 2023 where a farmer was fined for having illegally converted greenhouses into makeshift housing for some 100 people, including many women and children as young as two. “There were many, many families living together in those. They got shut down because it’s illegal.”
Seeing kids from migrant families doing their homework on boxes on the floor, as their families struggled to rent informal living species, like hallways, is what inspired Alexa Johnson, executive director of Monterey county’s housing resource center, to switch her focus from migrant education to housing.
“The cost of rent is increasing, but the amount of money that folks get paid is remaining the same,” said Johnson, pulling up a graph on her computer screen of the rate at which people are using the section 8 rental-subsidy vouchers the government provides to help low-income Americans. “Right now, in our county it’s back up to 74% – where it was during the pandemic.”
The housing crisis in Monterey county is getting worse for everyone, not just migrant families, but there are challenges unique to families working in seasonal agricultural work, many of whom are undocumented.
Non-US citizens aren’t eligible for many federal and state housing subsidies, so families work selling tamales or doing childcare on the side in between harvests, said Johnson. But this kind of precarious cash-based work doesn’t come with pay stubs to show a prospective landlord.
“When a season ends, where are you getting the money for your rent? A lot of them will get unemployment during that time, but it doesn’t cover what they need for all of their expenses and rent,” said Johnson.
And for children studying “housing is the crucial piece of the puzzle that’s missing,” said Johnson remembering the pandemic when kids without wifi couldn’t log in to Zoom for remote learning. “So you start just seeing how important housing was to the overall wellbeing of not only that child, but the family.”
All pandemic-era federal funding that helped school districts identify and support homeless children expired this school year leaving uncertainty about not only the future of resources, but school districts’ ability to accurately track how many students are in need of them.
“I suspect that the numbers [of homeless students] will probably go down as we lose our ability to identify these students,” said PPIC’s Brett Guinan. “If they don’t have funding for separate staff to track them down or for additional hours for their current staff, the ability to capture the complete picture is limited, even if the schools are trying their best.”
In Monterey county, the worry for homeless students who are undocumented isn’t just food, clothes or accurate headcounts – it’s whether Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids will drive them out of school entirely.
“Our kids are fearful. Our families are fearful, and as these Ice raids ramp up, I can tell you, we are going to see our attendance at school in the fall decline,” said Dr Deneen Guss, superintendent of schools serving Monterey county’s 72,000 students. “We already know it’s going to happen because we’re hearing families saying they don’t wanna go to the doctor. They don’t wanna leave their house.”
Brigitte’s family used to spend most of their days outside the house at parks, but with the fear of Ice raids, they have been spending more time cooped at home.
Nancy loves baking desserts and decorative jellos and dreams of a real kitchen, rather than the kitchenette of her converted garage. Cruz dreams of a house with a big yard and a fireplace, but isn’t holding his breath.
“I want to have a bunch of animals in my house and I want to have a brother, but sometimes I don’t want to,” said Brigitte pausing to think about how a baby brother might fit into the house, before adding: “I want to work hard to give my mom and my dad a new car, shoes, and things that are good.”
