Two outstanding stories expose the vast scope of family destruction when family police tear apart families because of housing

In one of the richest states in America, lawmakers leave hundreds of children
trapped in foster care because their parents can't afford adequate housing.

Hearst Connecticut Media exposes the problem in that state, where it’s bad. The Nation exposes it in Missouri – where horrible leadership has set off a foster-care panic, making it even worse

First of two parts

● Virginia Ortega didn’t have an air conditioner in her rental apartment in Missouri. She couldn’t afford one, and the landlord wouldn’t provide one. So the Missouri family police agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency), known as the Children’s Division, took away her 16-year-old autistic son. For months, she did not even know where he was. 

Now, as The Nation explains in this story 

To get her son back, a judge told her, she had to have decent housing, a job, and $3,000 in a bank account, she told me. But after Cesar was removed, she was fired—someone at work had spread a rumor that she’s a bad mother. Ortega suffers from leukemia, which makes it hard for her to find another job.

● Lauren and her nine-year-old son John were all set to move from Missouri to live with a cousin in a spacious house in Oklahoma. They were just waiting for a transfer of medical records for John, who has kidney disease. 

But that wasn’t good enough for the Children’s Division. They* tore John away from his mother – because they’d been living in an extended-stay motel. 

● In Connecticut, the children of Kelly Toutain and Zachery Lyons were taken for exactly the sort of reason foster care apologists love to cite when they say children aren’t taken because of poverty: They had mental health problems – but nothing that affluent families don’t handle routinely, because they have the money for good doctors and therapists.  

Now the mental health problems are under control. But, as a story from Hearst Connecticut Media explains, to allow their children to be placed with a relative, they had to move out of the apartment they had in the same house. So while mental health problems (and the lack of money to deal with them) may have triggered the removal, homelessness is what kept the family apart. 

Connecticut is bad; Missouri is worse 

The two in-depth stories shed new light on one of the prime examples of the confusion of poverty with neglect: children taken because their families lack adequate housing. (Or sometimes when they just lack housing not good enough to meet the arbitrary standards of the caseworker who showed up at the door that day.) 

In the next post to this blog, we’ll take a close look at what The Nation found in Missouri. But first, Connecticut: 

In 2024, 391 Connecticut children were taken from their families for reasons including homelessness or lack of housing – and that’s just the number the state admits to when reporting entries to the federal government. 

And, the Hearst story reports, 

During the first six months of this year, the families of 452 children currently in foster care were on that [housing] waitlist, according to agency data. Another 635 children with open DCF cases but who remain with their parents who are at risk of homelessness or living in unsafe conditions are also waiting for housing. 

The wait list for housing is so long that some children lose the right to ever live with their families again for their entire childhoods. Under the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act, states are required to seek termination of children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. (In fact, there’s a lot of leeway, but “ASFA made me do it” is the family policing equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”) Said one Connecticut family defense attorney: 

“I have so many clients who are FaceTiming me from their campsite, or going into court unhoused,” Custody of their kids is terminated (permanently) before they even get a case manager.” 

But, hey, it’s not housing alone, right? (Except when it is.) It must be mentalhealthdrugabusedomesticviolence, the three excuses for taking away poor people’s children, chanted like a mantra as if a single word.  But that confuses cause and effect. Again, from the story:

Elizabeth Berman, a child-welfare attorney for three decades, said … addressing other issues that contribute to child removal is impossible until parents have stable housing … 

“They can't work toward reunification because they're living in a tent,” she said of one client. “Having to figure out, with no money, what little wooded area am I going to sleep in tonight, or what bridge am I going to be under? It's all consuming. So you can't really focus on mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment or education or anything else because your energy is tied up in fundamental basic survival needs.” 

And, as has been pointed out for decades, mental health issues, domestic violence and substance abuse all can be caused by poverty – and as affluent sufferers from those sorts of ailments, such as Betty Ford – taught us long ago, they often can be cured with money. 

Connecticut once understood this. Again from the story: 

DCF’s supportive housing program has landed national recognition for successfully connecting parents with long-term affordable housing and the services needed to safely reunify with their children. Research shows that those in the program were more likely to get their children back and were less likely to face new substantiated abuse or neglect allegations within five years. Research also found the short-term expense of the program to the agency was cost neutral. 

Even if it weren't cost-neutral, Connecticut sure as hell could afford it. Connecticut spends on child welfare at one of the highest rates in the country, a rate nearly triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.

The program still exists, but it provides nowhere near enough assistance to meet the demand. That may help explain why, while entries into foster care are going down in most states, they're going up in Connecticut.

But at least Connecticut still takes children at a rate slightly below the national average. And at least in Connecticut, the entire system, starting at the very top, doesn’t ooze contempt for impoverished families. For that, we must turn to Missouri. 

We’ll do that on this blog in Part Two. 

*-The Children’s Division will tell you they can’t take away children themselves. For a detailed discussion of why this is disingenuous claptrap, see this post.