Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan on Thursday unveiled a plan to address holes in the city’s homelessness safety net that he said would prevent another tragedy like this month’s death of two children sleeping in a van in the freezing cold.
The seven-point plan includes expanding the hours of a housing help line to 24 hours and seven days a week, beginning efforts to identify families living in vehicles and treating every call that involves children as an emergency, even if they are still housed.
“We have a tragic situation in that this city set up an immediate shelter system on Dec. 16 and that the family never learned the new service was available and we did not learn of their status living in the van,” Duggan said. “This cannot ever happen again.”
The plan is the product of a city examination of the homeless response system and its interactions with the family of two children, 2-year-old A’millah Currie and 9-year-old Darnell Currie Jr., who appear to have frozen to death while they slept in the van parked in the structure of the Hollywood Casino in downtown.
On Thursday, officials said Tateona Williams contacted city and county services for help several times, dating back to at least December 2022, when she called seeking pandemic-related help to pay her rent. The $1.1 billion rental aid program, funded by federal pandemic relief money, operated in 2021 and 2022. It had already expired at the time of her call, according to a city review. Months after she had sought help, court records show that a judge signed an eviction order in August 2023 for nonpayment of rent.
She also contacted a city homeless hotline for help with shelter twice in December 2023 – new information shared by the city Thursday. The city report found that she was referred to an overflow shelter, a temporary option when other beds are not available. There was no record that she went to the shelter, but officials said if it was a short, one-night stay, there may not be a record.
In 2024, the city’s homeless response system contacted Williams three times from March to May but was unable to reach her, records show. That summer, she called twice to say that her family had temporary housing but she did not know if they could remain there.
Duggan said Williams last reached out Nov. 25, 2024, to say she believed she and her family would soon lose shelter, but the case was not deemed an emergency and a worker was not sent to assess the situation. Instead, the phone operator classified the case as one in which the caller would lose housing within 14 days.
“The family was sleeping in a van in casino parking structures. Nobody from the homeless team ever reached out again to inquire as to their status,” Duggan said.
Williams and her four children, along with their grandmother and her child, were living in the vehicle, Detroit police said. On Feb. 10, they were parked on the ninth floor of the Hollywood Casino at Greektown when their car stopped running in the middle of the night.
Later that day, Darnell and A’millah stopped breathing and died. The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office has not confirmed an official cause of death and said the investigation could take several months.
The circumstances prompted Duggan to direct the city and its housing department to investigate the homeless response system, leading up to Thursday’s report. In the weeks after the tragedy, leaders of homeless service agencies have said the way people get into shelter is “broken” and have called for more money and resources to address the need.
Duggan: ‘Bottleneck’ in Detroit’s homeless system
Homelessness, housing experts have said, is not a monolith. It has multiple root causes, from mental health challenges and substance abuse to evictions and affordability hurdles.
It’s a family living out of a car. It’s a person sleeping in a vacant home. It’s a teenager couch surfing. These groups are likely uncounted, meaning available data — which primarily tallies the unhoused in shelters and housing programs — doesn’t paint a true portrait of the scale of homelessness across the city.
Still, what a one-night count does show is that last year, there were 1,725 people facing homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered, in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park — a 16% increase from the year before.
“The loss of the Currie children … should never have happened. When a family reaches out for help and they’re in the midst of a crisis, it is our job, our duty, to provide them with those services that they need,” Deputy Mayor Melia Howard said.
The day before the release of the city’s report, Howard helped Williams move into a fully furnished home provided by Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries at no cost for the next year.
Howard directed families with children living in their car to call the city’s housing resource help line at 866-313-2520.
In recent years, the number of children and families experiencing homelessness has gone up.
From 2023 to 2024, children faced the largest increase in homelessness across the country and locally. The number of children experiencing homelessness last year — sheltered and unsheltered — reached the greatest number in a decade, according to a Free Press analysis of HAND data.
A total of 464 children were unhoused, or 27% of the people counted during a one-night tally in January 2024 of people who were facing homelessness in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park. While the number of adults, 18 years and older, experiencing homelessness has declined by 42% since 2015, the number of unhoused children increased by 5% during the same time.
“The city, in particular, has really made changes to add more family beds to the system, but I think we’re experiencing family homelessness at a level far greater than the beds that are being added to the system,” Tasha Gray, executive director of the Homeless Action Network of Detroit, or HAND, said Wednesday. “In addition to that, it’s not just about adding beds to the system — because obviously for emergency shelter it’s temporary — it’s also being able to have the resources to get people out of the system.”
The vast majority of those who made contact with the Coordinated Assessment Model (CAM), which directs people facing homelessness to shelter and other housing resources in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park, were put on a waiting list to be placed in a shelter.
Among those who received a referral, families spent the most amount of time — 133 days on average in December — on a list waiting to be placed in a shelter. Single women were on the waitlist for about three months, according to CAM’s latest quarterly report.
The city’s recent review of Detroit’s homeless response system reveals that 76% of calls in 2024 came from people who had housing, whether that was staying with friends or paying for a motel. About a quarter of callers reported being “literally homeless,” in a car or uninhabitable structure.
“The CAM network has a challenge every day in figuring out who is in imminent danger of being pushed out and who you could make arrangements with to stay in their current housing. … Because of this, what I would call a bottleneck in the CAM system, there were times when the Detroit police would pick up somebody unsheltered from the street and not have,” a place to take them, Duggan said.
On Thursday, Duggan noted changes made as recently as December to address the need for shelter, including adding 110 drop-in beds and a 24-hour outreach team, who go out to places where unsheltered people are and provide hygiene kits, food and take them to emergency shelters.
Still, Williams and her family fell through the cracks.
Duggan said Williams did not know immediate shelter was available and the outreach teams weren’t out looking in parking structures.
“This is something that is going to be hard to accept for a long time — that we had the beds in place,” he said.
In addition to expanding hotline hours, the mayor’s office said it will do the following:
- Require that outreach workers visit families with minors who are facing loss of shelter.
- Ramp up attention by outreach workers and police on parking lots and structures where people may be sleeping in their cars
- Expand night outreach teams for more coverage
- Double the number of drop-in beds for people seeking immediate shelter from 110 to 220 within the next 90 days. Duggan said he will ask Detroit City Council for an additional $2.4 million from the general fund to pay for this.
- Encourage the use of police precincts for people seeking emergency help. This strategy has worked, Duggan and Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison said Thursday.
- Expand efforts to share information about resources to bus stops and gas stations.
Free Press staff writers Kristi Tanner and Andrea May Sahouri contributed to this report.