Once homeless in Florida, woman finds apartment for herself and mother

Ana Duarte spent her childhood in Florida moving through shelters and cramped doubled-up arrangements with her mother. At 26, she has reached a milestone that once seemed out of reach: she found an apartment for herself and Anette Duarte, giving her mother a bedroom of her own for the first time in 64 years.

The new home is more than a personal breakthrough. It is a portrait of what stable housing can mean across generations, and of how long the climb can take for families pushed through homelessness in America. Duarte’s path ran from uncertainty to achievement. She became the first in her family to graduate from college, earned a full scholarship to Florida Atlantic University and now works as a social worker, a job that places her on the front lines of the same housing instability that shaped her own life.

Her story lands in a year when homelessness in the United States reached a new high. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated about 770,000 people experienced homelessness in 2024, an 18.1% increase from 2023. HUD said the year produced the highest recorded numbers for families with children, individuals, people with chronic homelessness, unsheltered homelessness, sheltered homelessness and unaccompanied youth. For Duarte, those national figures are not abstract. They reflect the conditions that forced her and her mother into shelters and precarious housing in Florida.

Florida remains one of the states where homelessness is highly visible and politically fraught. The state’s homeless-assistance system is overseen by the Department of Children and Families, which coordinates policy and funding and works with local Continuum of Care networks. State and university tracking continues to document large numbers of unhoused residents and students, underscoring how unstable housing remains part of daily life for many families even as they try to work, study and raise children.

Duarte’s apartment changes the terms of that struggle, but it also highlights how fragile the path out can be. For families like hers, housing security is not just a roof overhead. It is the difference between moving from crisis to stability and remaining one setback away from the street.