She took in her nephew, niece and mom. Could they find a home?

When Denise Chattams lost her Ohio home of 18 years, her family had to split into pairs to stay where they could: a friend’s house and a daughter’s apartment.

The high school teacher, then 55, shared a bedroom with the toddler nephew she’d agreed to raise. Her elementary-aged niece and elderly mother crammed in with a relative. Denise and her mother had agreed to raise the young children to keep them from being adopted by strangers. That decision eventually overwhelmed the family’s finances, leading to foreclosure and bankruptcy.

“I promised my mom I’d make it right,” Denise recalled. To herself, she thought, “I don’t know how.”

Two years later, on a whim, Denise applied for Vermillion Place. The hub of 26 duplexes, with a shared community center and playground, had just opened, promising to help families like theirs.

The Dayton, Ohio, development is one of a growing number of affordable housing projects designed to meet the unique needs of “kinship families,” which form when someone, often a grandparent or aunt, raises young relatives because parents are unable to do so. At least 23 places nationwide now offer kinship housing. Although promising, the need is much larger, and experts with Generations United, a nonprofit advocacy group, say legal barriers make it challenging to expand the solution to more communities.

“Frankly, I don't know that we had a lot of hope in the beginning that we were going to be able to pull this off,” Dayton Children’s Hospital CEO Deborah Feldman said of Vermillion Place. “Navigating the rules and regulations was very difficult.”

Denise is grateful the hospital – and its dozen partners – managed to make it happen.

“This place is godsent,” she said, leaning on the kitchen island of her new home.

Family math

Nationwide, 1 in 20 children – and as many as 1 in 4 in some Black and Native American communities – will live with relatives who aren’t their parents.

Kinship families often form suddenly: Parents die in a car wreck, go to prison, or drop off the kids, then disappear. Sometimes, child welfare officials remove children because of suspected neglect or abuse, then place them with safe loved ones.

Kinship caregivers tend to be older, poorer and in worse health than other parents, all factors that complicate finding an affordable home to meet everyone’s needs.

Less than one-third of grandparent caregivers whose income qualifies for housing assistance actually receive it, according to Generations United. The group also notes that many spend more than half their income on rent, often because aging caregivers must now raise children on a fixed income only intended to support one person.Kin caregivers particularly struggle to afford housing with enough rooms and accessible, aging-friendly layouts.

“Even worse than inadequate space, caregivers may lose their homes,” the organization noted in a 2019 report. “They may be renting through private lease agreements that prohibit children from living there. Evictions are common.”

So, too, is bankruptcy.

Financial challenges that someone might have weathered alone become too much when the expenses of raising another generation of children are added in.

Love

Denise, a high school teacher, bought her newly built Dayton home in 2006, raising her two daughters to adulthood in the two-story yellow house with a framed porch and bay window.

In 2021, an adopted younger sister asked Denise to care for her newborn son, Imagine, while she got back on her feet. A few weeks later, a social worker told Denise that child welfare officials had been investigating her sister. Before moving out of state, the woman told the caseworker she wanted Imagine to grow up with Denise.

“I thought it was just going to be a month,” she said.

In shock, Denise took four days to decide what to do.

Fear for Imagine’s future ultimately trumped Denise’s own dreams as an empty nester. She worried that strangers might foster or adopt kids just for the money, neglect him, or even abuse him. One in 3 former foster youth reported being abused while in foster care in one study of young adults from two states, although federal officials say such incidents are rarely reported. The study did not include child-on-child abuse, which can be more common.

“If I don’t take him, who’s gonna take care? And who’s gonna nurture him? Who’s gonna love him? Who’s gonna provide for him?”

Having made up her mind, Denise filed court paperwork for emergency custody and then guardianship. She paid hundreds each time she needed to serve Imagine’s parents to compel them to appear in court. Eventually, she said they signed away their parental rights.

She invited her mother, Mari, and the niece she was raising, Ja’Niya, to move in so the siblings could grow up together.

“I don’t want them to ever feel like they have to be strangers to each other,” she said.

Hospital

Over the years at Dayton Children’s Hospital, workers noticed more patients with complex medical conditions were brought in by relatives.

The opioid epidemic seemed to play a role.

In Ohio, thousands of people die each year from overdose deaths, many of them parents whose relatives had to decide whether to raise the children left behind. One nationwide study published in 2024 counted more than 320,000 children who lost a parent to a drug overdose between 2011 and 2021.

The critical role of family support networks and kinship caregivers in working-class Dayton was not new to Feldman, the hospital CEO. She had formerly overseen the county and its child protective services program.

“We have children in our community that, for a variety of reasons, their parents aren't able to care for them. And none of those should end up with foster care [if it can be prevented],” she said. “We know that if they can end up in a kinship environment with a family member, they will adjust so much better.”

Research has consistently found that foster kids have better long-term outcomes – such as education and employment – when raised by relatives. They maintain cultural, community and family relationships that support them through key life transitions, including into adulthood.

Ohio is one of a few states that has worked to create a time-limited financial aid program for kinship families formed outside the child welfare system. And it was among the first kinship navigator programs, which connect families to social services, to be eligible for federal funding to prevent entries into foster care.

At the hospital, Feldman and others wondered how to help kinship families beyond children’s medical treatment.The hospital embraced a health care philosophy supported with funding under the Affordable Care Act: social determinants of health. Research supports the idea that a person’s well-being depends on quality of life, issues like safe housing and healthy food, as much as a doctor’s prescribed treatments.

“It's those impacts that happen outside the walls of the hospital that really make the difference,” Feldman said. “Yes, we can provide great asthma care, but going back into a home that doesn't have a vented dryer, or the windows don't shut, or there's other environmental challenges, there's mold – that child's asthma is not going to get better.“We know that housing that’s safe, affordable, and really well built is absolutely critical.”

Jessica Salem, executive director of the Center for Community Health at Dayton Children’s Hospital, imagined kinship housing where neighbors helped each other and became friends, reducing the isolation many feel as someone raising a child at an atypical age. They could offer one another advice and support that other parents wouldn’t know to give.

Salem could see it in her mind.

“There's all these grandmas on their back porches,” she said. “We’d have a playground on site, and they are just watching each other's kids.”

Finances

Denise appreciates the unexpected joys in her second act as a parent: hearing “I love you,” snuggling during movie nights, and watching Imagine close developmental gaps because she advocates for his health care and education.

But it is difficult keeping the budget balanced with a toddler, a preteen and an aging mother.

“I have four people living on me,” she said.

Research has found that kinship families struggle more with finances than strangers who adopt. Some of that is because relatives who take in kids tend to have lower incomes. It is also because the financial, medical and educational benefits offered to strangers who raise foster kids or adopt them are not always available to relatives, too.

If strangers had taken in Imagine, they likely would have received a monthly adoption subsidy of $500 or more until he was 18 years old. Some states, including Ohio, offer similar subsidies to relatives who take guardianship of foster kids.

When government officials do not return kids to their parents, most are adopted or enter guardianship: 67% of children who exited foster care in the 2023-2025 fiscal years, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal data. Only 12% are recorded as leaving foster care to live with a relative.

In Ohio, the trend is reversed. The rate of adoption and guardianship is half that of the nation, while the percentage of kids being taken in by relatives is almost four times higher. A spokesperson with the state's Department of Children and Youth did not answer questions from USA TODAY about why that might be.

That suggests more Ohio kin caregivers are taking in relatives, but do not receive child welfare aid through age 18. Some experts call it “hidden foster care” when officials close child welfare cases and direct families to bear the costs themselves.

Regardless, most kinship families form without intervention from child welfare services at all, which also leaves them out of most specialized support programs.

Generations United estimates that kinship families save taxpayers at least $10.5 billion annually by keeping kids out of foster care but "do so at a great personal cost."

Denise does not receive any financial assistance because, at the suggestion of the child welfare worker investigating her sister, she sought custody herself through probate court. She did not know that adopting through foster care, although full of bureaucratic requirements and intrusive supervision, would have come with financial assistance until Imagine was an adult. No one told her about an aid program in Ohio open to kinship families newly formed without child welfare officials opening a legal case.

“Anything and everything that we have provided for him, between my mom and my daughters, we did by our own power,” she said. “Has it been hard? Yes. But I would do it all over again. For me, it’s the reward of the growth that you see you’ve invested in that child.”

Sometimes, the challenges become overwhelming, leading to a failed kin adoption or guardianship. Denise said one of Imagine’s and Ja’Niya’s older siblings had been taken in by their paternal grandma. Eventually, she returned the boy to child services because “she felt she was just getting too old to deal with it.”

It’s a difficult decision Denise can understand.

“I’m not naïve to believe that everybody is cut out for this,” she said. “This is not for the weak.”

Shortly after Denise gained custody of Imagine, she discovered he had developmental delays and speech difficulties that require regular, specialized therapies. And Ja’Niya, like most elementary-aged kids, grew out of clothes almost as fast as they could buy new ones.

Mari’s Social Security and Denise’s paychecks did not stretch far enough to pay the mortgage, the bills and to keep them all fed.

A small financial hole swelled into a consuming pit.

In 2024, Denise lost her house.

Building it

The idea for kinship housing, seeded by Dayton Children’s Hospital leaders, took years to become real.

About a dozen organizations collaborated to stitch together private and government funding, navigate the rules that came with the dollars and design homes within the budget that could still meet the needs of kinship families. The hospital donated the land and provides funding to sustain the program.

Generations United documented that projects launched in other communities face similar barriers.

Regulations for federally funded housing projects can inadvertently exclude kinship families or make it difficult for managers to save units for those tenants. Other times, low-income tax credit financing limits design options. For instance, the increased cost and reduced return on homes with four or more bedrooms means few are built in affordable developments despite the significant need for them.

Other times, kinship families won’t move in because the apartments don’t meet licensing standards for foster care, a requirement in most states if kin caregivers want to receive the same financial aid as strangers while a case is open.

“I just had no idea myself how many lawyers and accountants needed to be part of the conversation to just get all the agreements that have to be in place,” Salem said, reflecting on the project in Ohio. “It's incredible.”

On a cold day in December 2024, local officials celebrated the groundbreaking on Vermillion Place, looking from a top-floor window of the hospital out on the Old Dayton neighborhood where a retired school was demolished to be replaced with two-story, three-bedroom townhouses. Some of them have additional accessibility features like ramps and walk-in showers.

Sliding glass doors open onto a shared, grassy backyard with a curving sidewalk, playground, swings and community center.

In November 2025, Denise applied on a whim. They had so far failed to find a home they could afford that could fit all four of them while being livable for Mari, who needed space and certain design features to live independently despite her limited mobility and scooter.

The family barely met Vermillion Place’s requirement to spend no more than 40% of income on rent.

Denise was taking a tour of an empty unit and standing at the kitchen island when the property manager checked her phone.

“Denise,” she said. “I got your approval.”

At last

On Good Friday, a day of hope and renewal for Christians like the Chattams family, Imagine, 5, sprawled on a borrowed couch to watch videos on a tablet. Ja’Niya, 12, helped cook scrambled eggs and bacon, serving up breakfast on paper plates.

A giant Easter egg crowned the kitchen island where Denise had sat the night before with her two adult daughters, new grandbaby and her mother to plan the coming holiday meal.

Mari drove her scooter up to the front window, looked across the shaded porch and said, “I think I’ll sit outside today.”

Instead, Denise drove the family across Dayton on errands to prepare for the holiday. Barbershop for Imagine. New braids and fresh fits for Ja’Niya. And a doctor’s appointment for Mari. They made it home after dark and quickly put on pajamas. Mari and Ja’Niya wore matching sets of red-and-black plaid.

Denise said it was an easy choice to become a kinship caregiver, but she doesn’t sugarcoat the costs. Each day, after teaching classes for a local extension office, taking online courses and caring for everyone, Denise is just tired.

“I cry internally, but I never cry externally because I don't want it to affect no one,” she said. “Because if I feel weak, then it's going to make me crumble. And if I crumble, then who's going to support them?”

She remembers the extended family that raised her: parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and great grandparents, alongside cousins and siblings and foster children. The family is smaller now, but she’s glad to reunite Imagine and Ja’Niya in one home so they “never grow up wondering what their sibling looks like.”

“I am so thankful for my mom and my daughters. I couldn’t do it without that village.”

With one less worry – a safe home – Denise can now imagine a future for her family.

“We will be here having dinner Sunday,” she said. “We’re just gonna celebrate Christ’s resurrection with a family meal. That’s what makes this home. That’s what makes it rewarding, the fact of knowing that we're together.”

Jayme Fraser is an investigative data reporter at USA TODAY. She can be reached by text or on Signal at (541) 362-1393 or by emailing [email protected].