This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
“Kids do better when their parents are doing better and parents do better when their kids are doing better,” says Bonnie Howard, a senior fellow at the Campaign for Grade Level Reading. That’s one of many reasons that the Campaign—and a number of housing organizations as well—think that locating educational support programs physically in affordable housing developments, or at least programmatically within housing organizations, makes good sense.
For example, a multigenerational strategy like the Campaign’s, which works with both caregivers and children, is easier to carry out when the program is held where both live. That means that while children get help with reading and writing, adults can, for example, get help with employment goals.
Abra Lyons-Warren, director of cross-sector initiatives at the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, advocates strongly for co-locating critical services within public housing developments. By essentially eliminating travel time and costs, it helps residents access services that transportation barriers would otherwise keep them from, she says. For child care programs, Lyons-Warren says it also dodges issues of discomfort about sending one’s child to an unfamiliar neighborhood.
Department of Housing and Urban Development data from 2022 found that approximately a third of public housing residents, about 540,000 people, are children under the age of 18, so child care and educational support services are particularly relevant to residents.
Lyons-Warren also sees bringing quality access to early childhood education to all neighborhoods as an action that can mitigate the fact that one’s childhood neighborhood has a dramatic impact on their adult economic mobility. “In many parts of this country, where you live dictates where you go to school,” Lyons-Warren says, and “different schools have different resources.”
In this spirit, housing organizations across the country are working on programs for children from early childhood though school-age and into higher education.
Early Childhood
Joe Fretwell, who manages early care and education at the Low-Income Investment Fund, a community development financial institution focused on racial equity, is concerned that early childhood gets overlooked when talking about educational services. “At a very high level, child care in the U.S. today is effectively operating like K-12 schools were 150 years ago when there was no formal system for public education. It was just, if you can afford it, you send your kid to a private school or some small school, and if not, you just go without it.”
The Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority (AMHA) in Ohio is trying to change that. AMHA has been working to improve maternal and early childhood outcomes since the late aughts, motivated in part by stark disparities in infant mortality: Black infants in Ohio are twice as likely to die before the age of 1 as white infants. As of 2022, two-thirds of AMHA residents were African American.
Hannah Horrigan oversees the housing authority’s education initiatives. She sees locating enrichment opportunities within the housing authority’s complexes as a way to ensure that the families residing there are able to partake in them.
Ten staff members make monthly cold calls to new residents, to people who have children who are newly eligible for programs, and to people who have newly become pregnant. The phone calls are followed up by visits, as part of the AMHA’s home visitation program, which is one of the three pillars of its early childhood programming. Family outreach and maternal depression programming make up the remaining two pillars.
Along with after-school programming and tutoring conducted on site, the agency conducts vision and asthma screenings and Mom-Me Time, an initiative that supports mothers grappling with postpartum depression.
The housing authority receives funding from foundation grants, individual and corporate donors as well as state Help Me Grow dollars. The mix allows the staff to continue supporting families even when they move out of public housing. This follow-up attention helps families navigate a housing transition that can present similar challenges to losing housing voucher assistance.
By coordinating housing with these other social services, parenting supports, and early childhood offerings, Horrigan says, “We’re serving the whole family by making sure their basic needs are met so the family can then focus on those other things like developmental milestone achievement.”
Elementary School Enrichment
The Housing as a Platform Initiative (HAPI) named itself after the idea that affordable housing is a good stable base on which to place other activities. HAPI is a network of eight affordable rental community developers and owners that provide evidence-based programs in education, finance, and health to their residents. HAPI grew out of a brainstorming session with NeighborWorks America roughly a decade ago in San Diego.
HAPI’s members were interested in showing measurable impact for their residents. The decision to focus on connecting housed families with education programs was pragmatic because research has shown that stable housing already creates a significant positive effect on children’s academic success. So, after-school programming in an affordable housing environment capitalized on that, offering the most bang for the limited bucks available.
However, HAPI’s members are housing providers first and that’s where their expertise lies, so Carmen Huertero, HAPI’s executive director, says the group pondered how to provide “plug and play” tools its members could use in after-school programs in collaboration with the school system. Acting as an umbrella, HAPI leverages its purchasing power in order to help smaller nonprofits access tools such as the iReady program, a computer-based system that walks children through reading and math problems that can be calibrated to each student. The program also tracks student performance, which enables the after-school staff to show the children the progress they have made since taking a diagnostic test at the beginning of the school year.
People’s Self-Help Housing (PSHH), which operates in four counties along California’s Central Coast, is one of the housing developers partnering with HAPI. Their residents include many migrant families, most of whom work for local farms.
Kris Reid supervises PSHH’s educational programs. He says that for most of the parents whose children attend the learning centers, time is a scarce commodity.
“They work two or three jobs. They obviously have trouble putting food on the table and clothes on their back. So, they’re working a lot,” Reid says. That means parents have little to no time to support their children with things like homework. PSHH’s learning centers help fill some of that gap.
Reid says that many parents start work before dawn. It’s often older siblings or grandparents bringing kids to or from the learning centers, making their location in walking distance from home that much more important.
Between school and the after-school programming, Reid says these children “are basically also learning what it’s like to work two jobs starting in an elementary school age. They don’t get to be kids. They miss that part of their developmental stage.”
PSHH currently runs 11 learning centers, each located on the ground floor of one of their housing developments. The centers prioritize residents, but also accept nonresidents, and collaborate with the schools that the housing complexes feed into. The organization is planning to open three more centers in the next couple of years.
The centers focus on children in first through fifth grade because the kindergartners aren’t able to focus long enough to use iReady effectively, says Paola Salcedo, who runs one of PSHH’s learning centers and has two of her own children enrolled in another.
A 2023 assessment of the program found that the percentage of students who could read at grade level had doubled from 15 to 30 percent over the course of the school year. While that may be impressive, it still means that more than two-thirds of the children were falling short of that benchmark. Huertero acknowledges that iReady isn’t a silver bullet, though it has put them slightly ahead of the national rate of nearly three quarters of fourth graders not achieving “proficient” status.
“We don’t see miracles happening in one year or even [in the] last semester,” she says. “We’re seeing progress, but this takes time. And that that’s one of the reasons why we focused on working with students that had a stable home.” Those students were the most likely to continue “participating in a consistent, supportive environment to give them the highest chance of success.”
Supporting Higher Education
Good Shepherd Housing’s Career Power program focuses on 16- to 24-year olds, helping them pursue—and succeed in—higher education. Located in Fairfax County, Virginia, the personalized program is not centered around a particular training program or curriculum, but instead around identifying barriers facing the participants, whether financial, institutional, structural, or personal, and spending months of dedicated time chipping away at them. Executive Director Genee Hayes explains that the Career Power staff will “coach and walk right alongside [students] in every step that’s necessary to achieve the next level.”
Unlike many large affordable housing developments, Good Shepherd doesn’t connect its housing and education work by co-locating them in the same building. Because it has grown organically, the group’s housing is scattered over a number of developments along one stretch of Richmond Highway. This means they don’t control an entire development with a community room that could serve as a space for after-school tutoring or other activities. Good Shepherd has instead embraced a virtual service provision model that Career Power career counselor Kevin Gonzalez says actually helps youth and families engage more easily because, for example, it eliminates challenges like unreliable transportation.
“Eliminating that obstacle just enables me to meet with them where they are. I meet with parents at 7, at 8 p.m. because they’re not available at 4 or 12 because they’re at work,” Gonzalez says. This allows Career Power to also serve participants who don’t live in the agency’s housing—more than half do not. And yet “they all have very similar needs and are in similar situations,” he said in an email.
Developing relationships with students and their families undergirds the Career Power effort. It’s based in a “notion of intergenerational change and driving behavior, not in a preachy way,” Hayes says. She explains that low-income families often count on their adolescent and young-adult children to contribute financially to the household, and pursuing post-secondary education can delay that or decrease that amount in the short term. That is something to be taken seriously, Hayes says, but the program aims to help the young people and their families understand the longer-term benefits of additional training or education, and support them in navigating the trade-offs on the way.
“That might mean that these next two years are tighter than you anticipated them being,” says Hayes. “[The parents] thought [the child was] going to be able to help contribute to rent, and [now] they’re only going to be able to do it from their part-time job.”
The organization complements these conversations with support such as getting financial aid for school or offering rental assistance to keep a family in their home if they are in a tight spot.
Good Shepherd launched Career Power about a year and a half ago. A number of young people who had come into contact with the agency through a one-time grant a local donor had given to allow Good Shepherd to brings services to a mobile-home community signed on. Initially, the goal was to serve 23 people, but as of August, 41 were enrolled.
Hayes says that while their program doesn’t physically take place in their housing or serve only their residents, that it’s still relevant and valuable that Career Power grew out of their housing work, for several reasons, including pre-existing relationships and communication channels, and trust. And starting with their own residents, gave them a head start in designing a program that would meet its target audience’s needs. “Because we started [Career Power] with our own residents,” she wrote in an email, “we were able to learn: 1) virtual was possible and often preferred by our families and 2) trusting relationships with an accountability partner were critical to success. . . . The fact that we provide housing—and that Kevin has been into many of our units—helps him understand that family’s space better.”
Gonzalez often shares parts of his personal story with Career Power participants.
He was born in El Salvador, but his parents left when he was a few months old, and his grandparents raised him until he was nearly 13. Then, his parents brought him to live with them in the United States, where they shared an apartment with several other people. Gonzalez arrived in the U.S. not only not speaking English, but not knowing how to read or write.
“I learned to read and write in English first, and then I learned to do that in Spanish,” he recalls.
Gonzalez leaned into the attitude his grandparents had instilled: that he could adapt to any situation. When it came time for college, though, Gonzalez realized he had an unexpected obstacle in front of him: low expectations.
“[The high school counselor] was like, ‘So what kind of job are you going to get?’ And I already had three college offers, and I was like ‘All right, never mind. You’re not going to help me. You already have very low expectations of me, so therefore, I’m already ahead of you.’”
Gonzalez can’t forget how damaging low expectations could have been for him, and is careful never to extend those to the program participants.
“A lot of them don’t know that they can do things. Sometimes students perform low because that’s what’s expected of them. Nobody’s expecting greatness. So they don’t produce greatness,” he says. “And when they come to me, I tell them . . . ‘You can completely change your life. And here’s what we can do to make that happen.’
“I’m very honest and vulnerable with them,” he adds. “I’m very open about my own personal story and speak on it.”
This vulnerability and the trust Gonzalez develops with the participants and their families means that when they run into obstacles, they feel safe enough to be honest about what is going on. And that enables Gonzalez to help them find solutions. For example, one young man had enrolled in George Mason University, but his early grades were lackluster. Gonzalez discovered the student had a tight window to make it to class after work and had to park far from campus, so he was consistently late to class. Ultimately, Good Shepherd helped him obtain a parking pass for the school lot.
“There’s always a path that you can navigate to get to where you want to go,” Gonzalez says, “if you’re willing to walk through mud, jump through fire—because that’s what it takes.”
A Whole Life Cycle
“[Housing is] 24/7; it’s 365; it’s seven days a week; it’s multigenerational,” says Howard, of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading. And so whether the need is support for early developmental milestones, supplemental help for school-aged children, or removing barriers to higher education, housing organizations are a natural place to locate some of the solutions.
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