It was a little after 4 a.m. on a May morning when Victoria left the homeless encampment she was staying at near Russell Road on the border of Henderson in order to catch a bus to HELP of Southern Nevada.
Victoria, who is using her first name for privacy, had just entered her third trimester while living on the streets and was desperate to find a safe place, somewhere inside.
She knows better than anyone the consequences that could come from being unsheltered with a baby and how it could lead to having a child removed by the child welfare system. Eight years earlier, while experiencing homelessness and addiction, she got pregnant with her first child. Unable to remain sober and housed, she eventually lost parental rights before her son turned 2.
“I already lost one kid to the system,” Victoria said. “This was my second chance to get right and not lose another child to the system.”
After an hourlong bus ride, she arrived at the HELP of Southern Nevada office on Flamingo Road.
The nonprofit, which offers a variety of housing and homeless resources, hosts a weekly drop-in event every Thursday for people needing on-the-spot assistance. Outreach workers from the nonprofit had previously encouraged Victoria to come in for help. Now she was ready.
Though she wanted to find housing, she was worried no place would take her along with the father of her unborn child.
“There’s not very many programs out there that are willing to take non-married people like me and him,” she said.
To her surprise, case workers had just the solution: a Clark County-operated non-congregate shelter specifically designed for families.
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Clark County used federal relief dollars to convert six older motels and hotels into noncongregate shelters. Four facilities serve adults without children; two serve adults with children.
Dubbed “La Quinta” after the motel chain that previously operated at the location, the main noncongregate facility for unhoused people with children has become a lifeline for families living on the streets or on the verge of homelessness, especially those families dealing child welfare cases.
The program was in such demand, the county opened an additional facility for families this year, which has remained full.
“I feel like the need is always going to be there, because we’re offering something that’s safe, stable and can keep a family together,” said Brenda Barnes, social services manager with Clark County.
In the early days of its transformation from motel to family shelter, officials noticed the facility also presented opportunities to reunify families who were dealing with the child welfare system. For some families who have their children removed, housing can be the last barrier to reunification.
Opening the facility, “gave us a place where, if housing was the only factor to reunify and get kiddos back with their parents safely, we were able to kind of make that plug,” Barnes said.
It has since been used as an option to steer people away from child welfare altogether.
The family shelters run by the county have served 1,823 families – roughly 4,000 children – since opening in 2021.
Data provided to Nevada Current showed 1,050 of those families have previous referrals with the child welfare system, of which 258 referrals stemmed specially from homelessness or inadequate housing.
County officials estimate the family shelters have diverted 1,838 children – roughly 875 families – from entering the child welfare system and prevented them from being removed from caregivers and parents.
It costs roughly $1.4 million a month to run the two family specific shelters.
During an interim legislative committee hearing in 2024, state lawmakers were told the first three years of operations resulted in the county saving $32 million in child welfare costs.
At the hearing, Barnes told lawmakers the “return on investment” was believed to be greater than the estimates.
At the time the county had diverted close to 1,600 children from the system at the time. By doing so, the county estimated it saved Child Haven, a campus where children removed from their families stay, roughly $10 million in operational costs.
At the 2024 legislative hearing, Barnes reiterated all estimates were “based on not a full comprehension but an overview of what it costs to run a child haven as a facility and what it costs to have children in foster care.”
The bigger accomplishment is keeping families whole instead of removing children.
“You can’t put a price on the reduced amount of trauma by opening these doors,” Barnes said.
Filling a Void
The 2024 Southern Nevada Point-in-Time count, a yearly snapshot of the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given night, found 7,906 people were unhoused in January of that year. Roughly 20% of the entire homeless population – around 1,500 – were families with children.
The number is likely an undercount yet still higher than previous years.
The 2022 homeless count found 516 families with children.
“It stood out in opening these facilities that we were offering a service that wasn’t available in the community,” Barnes said.
The first family shelter the county opened was a converted Rodeway Inn in December 2021 with 150 rooms. In less than a year the facility was “bursting at the seams,” Barnes said, adding that the county had to transition to a new location the following year. The Rodeway was repurposed to serve adults without children.
The former La Quinta, which has 251 rooms, has served 1,553 families since it opened in 2022. The additional location that opened this year, which has 150 rooms, has served 270 families.
“I feel like if we were to open another facility, would we fill it? Probably. Absolutely,” Barnes said. “It doesn’t mean that those families are currently unsheltered. It just means that we’re providing a resource that meets their unique needs a little bit better than their opportunities before.”
Coming to La Quinta
Victoria, 41, first began experiencing homelessness in 2013 after both her mother and grandmother died in the same year.
She had struggled with mental health issues and addiction since she was 16, but being unhoused after the death of her family exacerbated her substance abuse and “I just lost myself.”
“People really don’t get it. It’s really a sickness. It’s really a disease,” Victoria said. “It’s not as easy as people think. People say, ‘Oh, you can quit if you want to.’ The person has to be willing to quit at that time. You can’t force a person into recovery.”
When she found out she was pregnant with her first son – years before La Quinta opened – she also struggled with finding housing and addiction services.
“They say there’s so much help for us pregnant women but there’s really not,” she said.
Victoria gave birth while struggling with homelessness. While her newborn son inspired her to maintain sobriety for a time, she eventually fell back into addiction and wound up homeless once again.
Her son was removed from her care when he was 18 months old. Life began to spiral after she lost her parental rights.
“After I lost my son and everything, I just went on a rollercoaster,” she said. “I didn’t care anymore.”
Victoria spent the next few years moving from encampment to encampment. She tried drug treatment programs, but nothing would stick.
Then, earlier this year, another unhoused woman Victoria knew from a nearby encampment became pregnant. Not long after, Victoria began mirroring the same symptoms. “I thought it was just sympathy symptoms,” she said.
Victoria was in fact pregnant for a second time. Traumatized by losing her first child to the child welfare system, she said she began trying to stop using drugs. She had been sober a little under a month by the time she arrived at La Quinta.
“I lost my first son because of my own actions and my own decisions in life,” she said. “Choosing to do my drugs and not putting my son first, that’s my biggest regret.”
Not all people who stay at La Quinta have been experiencing homelessness chronically like Victoria.
Shay, a mother of three using her first name to maintain privacy, also sought housing resources. Shay was evicted from her apartment in July and didn’t know where she and her children would stay..
She worked a part-time security job with an inconsistent work schedule. At the beginning of the year, she fell behind bills and couldn’t pay her $1,100 rent.
She sought housing assistance from other nonprofits around town and thought she would qualify for rental assistance. It never materialized.
Then the eviction notice came. Two days after her eviction hearing this summer, she and her three kids, 9, 8 and 4, were locked out of her house.
“I was feeling like I should just quit, like it was pointless,” she said.
Barnes said similar stories of evictions have played out among people staying at La Quinta
The legacy of the pandemic, unsteady employment, increased rental costs and other factors can create a “domino effect” leading to eviction notices, Barnes said.
The county does not consistently track the number of people entering La Quinta who have been evicted. But the county was able to provide a snapshot from July that showed 27 of the 77 families referred to La Quinta that month had recently been evicted.
“Our observations are consistent with national trends showing that rising housing costs and the end of temporary eviction protections have contributed to increased housing instability,” said Jennifer Cooper, a spokeswoman for Clark County.
A family member told Shay about HELP of Southern Nevada. Though she met with a case worker and did a housing assessment, Shay wasn’t sure it would lead to anything.
“By the time I even got to the bus stop, they had called me and told me that they found housing for me,” she said.
She and her three kids could stay at La Quinta.
'Sometimes it Take a Few Tries'
While Shay was able to stay at La Quinta for several weeks before transitioning to another housing program, Victoria and her partner – who she refers to as her husband – were eventually asked to leave La Quinta. Though it stung, Victoria admitted it was their fault for violating the property rules.
All residents have to sign an occupancy agreement that outlines mandatory case management, welfare and room checks. Alcohol and controlled substances aren’t allowed on the property.
“We have to keep those to ensure we maintain a safe environment,” Barnes said.
Victoria’s husband brought in a marijuana vape pen, though she maintains it was empty.
Barnes said even if people violate rules, they are usually given warnings before being asked to leave. Even then, there is a chance to come back to La Quinta.
“We’re not a one-stop shop or a one-chance you’re out place,” she said. “There’s always an opportunity that if you couldn’t follow the rules that we could re-evaluate. People come into this system of care multiple times, and that’s okay. Sometimes it takes a few tries.”
After leaving La Quinta, Victoria contacted her previous case worker with HELP of Southern Nevada, who was able to get her into another housing program. Victoria signed the lease to her unit, and then an hour later went into labor.
The average length of stay at Clark County’s family shelters is 117 days, according to data provided to the Current. County officials noted one family stayed for more than a year and a half.
While housed in the facilities, families meet with case managers, which can make referrals for other housing programs in the community or the Housing Choice Voucher program, commonly known as Section 8.
Housing vouchers are hard to get and qualifying for them can be a multi-month process. At the end of it, there is no guarantee people will find a place to live.
Housing vouchers also have stringent requirements on income limits and the type of places people can live.
And the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban and Development requires environmental reviews and housing inspections “just to make sure families aren’t put into places that really end up in slum lord situations,” Barnes said. “They want to make sure they are appropriate and safe units.”
Another ongoing challenge is finding landlords willing to accept those vouchers, Barnes said. Nevada, like most states, doesn’t have any laws prohibiting landlords from turning away potential tenants who will be paying rent with public assistance.
The time to move someone from the family shelter to permanent housing could “have been cut shorter if we had landlords willing to rent to voucher holders,” Barnes said.
“We can exit families into permanent housing if it was affordable for them to live in,” she said. “And families want to. Families don’t want to stay in La Quinta forever.”
Though the county has been able to find a solution to stabilize some unhoused families, the road to permanently housing them isn’t easy.
Barnes said it will continue to be a challenge “until we can (contain) the cost of living and have a decent wage for families to live off of
This story first appeared in the Nevada Current. Read the original here.
