Maricopa County's family housing hub helped 6 percent of assessed families

2014 launch pledged ‘rapid response without waiting lists’ for any family

A decade ago, nonprofit leaders in Arizona’s most populous county touted their creation of the “Amazon of homeless service systems,” a single intake point that would spare families in crisis from calling shelter after shelter. A ProPublica investigation published Friday found that the Family Housing Hub, launched in 2014 by UMOM and other Maricopa County nonprofits, has become a “dead end” for many of the families it was meant to serve.

According to a 2023 evaluation by Homebase, a nonprofit consulting group whose review was requested and paid for by the Maricopa Association of Governments, only 6% of families assessed by Maricopa County’s homeless response system received help with permanent housing. The evaluation drew on an analysis of three years of enrollment data from the system and interviews with providers and people who had sought housing assistance. The same review found that 94% of people assessed for housing help by the system did not receive it — a figure that did not capture parents who were unable to connect with a worker at all to find out whether they qualified. Homebase concluded that the system for single adults experiencing homelessness was accessible, but the family system was not, and that families encountered a “breakdown in communication” and a “lack of transparency.”

ProPublica’s reporting said the system “has returned to what it was a decade ago, with families calling as many shelters as they can, repeating the very situation the hub was intended to fix.” In interviews with the outlet, 30 families described calling 211, meeting with outreach workers, or showing up at shelters without being offered help. Some said they called 211 multiple times without being connected to the hub. Others, who said they were sleeping in cars or outdoors, told ProPublica they could not get a spot on the shelter waitlist. Families who did reach the waitlist said they were left guessing how long it would take to be helped, and some said operators told them to sleep in their cars.

Vanessa Lopez told ProPublica she experienced the frustration after leaving a hostile relationship in the spring. While she and her two children stayed with a friend, Lopez said, she repeatedly contacted 211, which functions as a referral service for the hub, hoping it would lead to shelter for her family. Her friend eventually asked them to leave. Overwhelmed by the stress of not knowing where to take her family, Lopez took a leave from her job, she said. By then, she had called 211 at least five times. During one call she broke down in tears, she said, frustrated that others seemed to get help while she could not, and she wondered aloud if she needed to be addicted to drugs to receive assistance. “It’s not me telling you no,” Lopez said the operator told her. “It’s the system.”

Monique Lopez, the CEO of United Methodist Outreach Ministries, known as UMOM, which runs the Family Housing Hub and the shelter waitlist, acknowledged the frustrations of callers like Vanessa Lopez — the two are not related. Before UMOM offers callers shelter or a spot on the waitlist, Monique Lopez said, the organization first tries to help them find other options. “We don’t start the conversation with, ‘Hey, do you want to get on the shelter waitlist?’” she said. “It really is ‘Let’s try to figure your situation out first.’” Monique Lopez attributed some of the friction to the number of organizations offering assistance through the hub, each with its own rules, and noted that not every family meets the requirements of every program. The federally funded intake process, known as Coordinated Entry, mandates that providers use a vulnerability assessment to prioritize scarce housing, and UMOM has updated its website to add more information about the system, she said.

Ashley Oakley, UMOM’s chief development officer, said in a statement that the 2023 evaluation reflects a gap between the need in the community and the housing that is available — “one of the biggest challenges” facing those working on family homelessness in Maricopa County. To determine who gets onto the housing list, workers with the hub conduct a vulnerability assessment that assigns a score based on how long a person has been homeless and whether they have a disability, Oakley said. A revised evaluation, implemented over the summer, now gives households with children under 6 a higher score, she said.

Any family sleeping in a place not meant for “habitation” or in a dangerous situation is eligible for shelter, Oakley said. To remain on the shelter waitlist, families must check in weekly and report where they slept the previous night. Staying in a hotel for a night should not “by itself” remove a family from the waitlist, Oakley said. But families told ProPublica they had been removed from the waitlist after a hotel stay. UMOM said it is reviewing its process to ensure check-ins are handled “consistently.”

Felicia Vela told ProPublica she was kicked out of a guest house she was renting with her two children in February. Text messages reviewed by ProPublica show she had stashed her belongings in a storage unit and was staying at a hotel she could not afford for much longer. She said she called 211 at least twice and explained her situation; one operator told her the waitlist was closed, she said, and another told her it could take six months to a year. UMOM, in a statement, said it does not comment on individual cases and that the waitlist does not close. When Vela had nowhere to go, she said, she slept in her car while her children stayed with a friend. She tried to earn extra money by donating plasma, she said, but her blood pressure was too high. Vela, who works a warehouse job, has since moved into an apartment with the help of a local nonprofit that is not associated with the hub, but she is now behind on rent and facing eviction, and her car has broken down, leaving her unable to get to work. “It’s like I can’t get a break,” she said.

A single mother ProPublica identified as Ebony — who asked that her last name not be used to protect future job opportunities — told the outlet she lost her security guard job this year after a chemotherapy treatment caused her to faint as she was about to begin her shift. In April, she said, she lost her apartment. She called every number she could find looking for help, including 211, and was eventually placed on the waitlist, but that did not solve her immediate problem of where to sleep. She and her children stayed in hotel rooms until she ran out of cash, she said, and then the family slept in an alley. The next day, she connected with Austin Davis, who runs a local nonprofit that helps families find emergency shelter, and he helped pay for weeks of shelter. Then one morning she texted Davis with some good news. She had met a pastor who helped her get into a local housing program. But she needed help for a few more days, until she could move into her new apartment.

Davis told ProPublica he has also sent families to one of the city of Phoenix’s heat relief centers, housed inside a 21,000-square-foot former charter school, because workers there can place them in shelter immediately. City officials said the number of families seeking help at the center has doubled from a year ago. Some families told ProPublica they were able to immediately get shelter through the workers there. After city officials learned that Davis was sending families to the center for shelter, he said, they asked him to stop sending families. Davis said his interactions with hundreds of families over the past year have shown the official channels are “too complicated,” and that the system is “really designed to run people in circles until they either give up or hit enough roadblocks where they can’t continue.” He crowdsources donations to put families in hotel rooms for days, weeks or sometimes months.

From 2024 to 2025, 139 units of shelter for families in Maricopa County closed after federal pandemic-relief funds expired, ProPublica reported. The state also cut $867,000 in funding to help families get into housing quickly — funding that had helped about 40 families. Over the summer, the waitlist for shelter ballooned to more than 200 families. It takes about seven weeks for those on the list to get shelter, according to UMOM. Some families interviewed by ProPublica said they waited longer, and more people are entering the system than leaving it, the outlet found, delaying help for newly homeless families. The 2026 point-in-time count tallied 2,103 people in homeless families in the county — the highest since 2015 — although the annual survey is considered an undercount, especially for families. In 2025, there were 630 units of shelter and transitional housing for families in the county, down from 769 the year before, according to the most recent federal data. Monique Lopez, the UMOM CEO, acknowledged that family shelters are full and that “people are living in unsafe and unstable situations while waiting just to get into emergency shelter,” she said.

Richard Southee, a regional executive director at Central Arizona Shelter Services, the largest shelter provider in Arizona, told ProPublica that federal funding has been concentrated on more visible forms of homelessness, such as encampments. Homeless families typically move more frequently, he said, and stay with friends, in hotels or in other arrangements to avoid drawing the attention of the Arizona Department of Child Safety, which can treat a lack of shelter as evidence of child neglect, along with other factors. “We’re deciding who’s going to be at the back of the line, and we as a nation really have said people who are not chronically homeless are going to be at the back of the line,” Southee said. “You have to stay homeless to get to the front, and that’s a design choice.”

Experts told ProPublica the intake process should not leave people wondering whether help exists or how to access it. “You have to have some kind of method for setting priorities when there aren’t enough resources to go around,” said Marybeth Shinn, an expert on family homelessness at Vanderbilt University. “The process should be transparent. People should know if they’re on a waitlist,” she said.

The Family Housing Hub was launched in 2014 by UMOM and other Maricopa County nonprofits, after years of planning and strategizing over how to end family homelessness in the county that is home to Phoenix. As nonprofit leaders developed their system, they pledged to provide a “rapid response without waiting lists” to immediately meet the needs of any family asking for help. The national push to create such systems began in 2012, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development asked communities to establish a Coordinated Entry system; by 2018, the agency required it in order to receive housing and homelessness grants. The mandate coincided with a Barack Obama-era plan to end family homelessness by 2020 — a goal that was not met. Experts told ProPublica the systems were set up without evidence they would be effective, and a 2021 study of single adults found issues similar to those now reported by families in Maricopa County, including concerns about fairness and a lack of transparency. People did not understand the screening process and generally received vague explanations about how their information would be used, the study found.

The county saw a decline in family homelessness from 2015 to 2019, then the numbers began to rise, even as the stock of emergency shelter increased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to address the problem began to fray, ProPublica reported. The group of nonprofit leaders, which called itself “Standing Strong for Families,” stopped meeting regularly. Arizona, along with other Sun Belt states, saw an increase in housing prices, and with one of the lowest supplies of housing for low-income people in the country, eviction filings began to soar, the outlet found.