But Williams never reached a resolution with the homeless response team, and no one followed up, even after the city opened a new drop-in shelter for families just a few weeks later, its mayor said.
This week, two of Williams’ children — ages 2 and 9 — were found dead of apparent hypothermia in a van the family had been sleeping in for at least two months, Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison said. Temperatures dropped below freezing Monday when Williams had parked on the ninth floor of a casino parking garage.
Starting months prior, Williams had “asked everybody for help” for her family.
“I called out of state, I called cities I didn’t know, I called cities people asked me to call. I even asked Detroit — I’ve been on CAM list for the longest,” Williams told CNN affiliate WXYZ, referring to the Coordinated Entry system unhoused people are urged to contact in and near Detroit.
“Everybody now wants to help after I lost two kids?”
The tragedy has the city of Detroit reevaluating how it connects homeless families with shelters, highlighting what national advocates say are broken systems – mostly the responsibility of state and local officials – for helping people experiencing homelessness.
It’s also exacerbating fears of what could happen if federal support for people in or on the precipice of homelessness wanes as the fledgling Republican administration of President Donald Trump pushes to slash spending by cutting critical benefits programs that serve the neediest Americans and eliminating key agencies.
Many US cities already don’t have enough resources or aren’t deploying them most effectively to meet the needs of their homeless residents, said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. Public officials, meanwhile, have not done enough to address the root causes of homelessness, he said, among them: a shortage of affordable, low-income housing units; landlords driving up rent prices; and a federal minimum wage that stands at $7.25.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development – which supports the construction of affordable housing, provides rental assistance to millions, enforces the Fair Housing Act, and offers grants to help people experiencing homelessness – in recent weeks has “identified over $260 million in savings,” Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement this week without elaborating on the type of savings.
“HUD will be detailed and deliberate about every dollar spent to serve rural, tribal and urban communities,” he said. CNN has reached out to the agency for further comment.
If the Trump administration makes cuts to HUD, it would be “outright wrong,” said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
“And we know what the result of that is going to be,” he said. “It’s going to be more people living on the street, more people dying on the street.”
‘We need to get people housing’
The death of Williams’ children in Detroit points to a growing national homelessness crisis impacting more families every year, advocates say.
An estimated 770,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2024 – a record high that marked an 18% increase from 2023 – HUD reported. Of those, 64% stayed at shelters and 36% were unsheltered in places not designed for human habitation.
One-third of them were in families of at least one adult and one child, the annual survey found, as the number of families with kids experiencing homelessness rose by 39%.
At the same time, the country has a shortage of 7.3 million homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. And America faces a housing conundrum: Mortgage rates aren’t falling and home prices are expected to keep rising as Trump, a billionaire property developer, has launched new tariffs and mass deportations that could boost the cost of materials and labor.
HUD initiatives like the Section 8 voucher program, which helps low-income families lease affordable privately owned rental housing, are already underfunded and have waiting lists, Berg said.
“We need to get people housing … and other services to be stable in the housing,” he said. “None of those are at scale.”
For those in need of emergency shelter, some cities lack enough beds, with those in need often put on waiting lists when they have nowhere else to go, Berg said. Other cities have plenty of shelter space but not enough resources to staff hotlines at all hours, Whitehead said, perhaps only answering the phones from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“People run into crises 24 hours a day,” he said.
Further, some unhoused people fear being criminalized if they call police directly for help, Whitehead said. Some cities prohibit people from sleeping in their cars in public places, with jail time or fines threatened, he said. One California city this week voted to criminalize “aiding” and “abetting” homeless camps, an unusual move advocates say could stifle help for people who need it.
Many shelters also cater to single adults more than families with children, Whitehead said, noting: “The system was not designed for families.”
‘We are not talking about statistics’
The children’s deaths in Detroit have “gotta make us rethink everything that we’re doing,” Mayor Mike Duggan, a Democrat, said during a news conference this week. “It brings home the point that having services available doesn’t mean very much if the residents who need them don’t know how to access them.”
Detroit opened a family drop-in center on December 16 to provide shelter for residents just in time for the cold winter months, he said. Residents can call the police for help if they face a crisis after 6 p.m.
But the city also must give clear options to people when they call about shelters, the mayor said. He also wants a policy that requires outreach workers to do a site visit any time a family with children calls the city for help.
“I want that outreach worker face-to-face to identify what the situation is and make sure it is resolved,” Duggan said.
For now, a police investigation and an administrative review of the circumstances that led to Williams’ children’s deaths are underway, Detroit spokesman John Roach told CNN.
The case, Whitehead said, also should raise awareness of the hurdles people across the country experience when they become homeless – and what’s at stake if the resources available to help them aren’t enough.
“We have to continue to ensure that our elected officials understand that we are not talking about statistics, we are talking about people,” he said. “And in the richest country in the history of the world, no one should lose their life because they have a lack of resources to protect them from the elements.”
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