GREEN BAY – Like any other family, James Gray and Estelle Moncada love to play with their kids at the park. Their twin girls, Maewahniw and Mataeqsak, are 5 years old and chase each other around, falling down in the grass laughing with their 3-year-old brother, Mahwaew.

But the park isn’t just a place they visit — it’s also their home.

The family spends most days hopping between parks, sleeping on a mattress in their van at night. Their five years of homelessness have taken them to hotels, shelters and parking lots around rural northeast Wisconsin, northern Michigan and finally Green Bay, where they hope to stay while their kids go to Starr Elementary School.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 2025 over 5,200 people in Wisconsin experienced homelessness, which has risen 16% over the past five years. Of those, nearly 1,900 were people in families with children – accounting for 561 families.

Because of the way homelessness is counted, that number could actually be much higher. Volunteers have to search for unsheltered people on a single night in January and confirm each person is homeless to add them to the point in time count. The process means it’s often hard to see the “hidden homeless” population living in their vehicles.

The count indirectly ties to the amount of federal funding each region receives for homeless support services — which means there simply aren’t enough resources for homelessness service organizations to provide for the entire homeless population. People like Gray and Moncada have spent years on the waitlist for housing programs meant to help homeless families.

Adding to funding uncertainty, the Trump administration announced major changes to federal homelessness grants and an overhaul of the Head Start early childhood education program for low-income families, where Gray and Moncada sent their twin daughters and enrolled their son this year.

Trying to find housing, work while raising children

The family became homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic, around the time when their twins were born. When the anti-poverty nonprofit Newcap opened a shelter in Shawano, they were one of the first families accepted and stayed there for almost two years. Gray and Moncada said a Newcap employee made false promises about securing them a rental apartment that never came through.

Navigating a system with limited resources while taking care of young children can force families to make hard decisions. They eventually ended up at Abundant Life Mission, a shelter in Menominee, Michigan, near the Wisconsin border, but Gray said he left because he didn’t want the kids to interact with people staying there who struggled with addiction.

That meant going back to living in their car and waiting to be pulled from the waitlist for housing programs. A system called Coordinated Entry prioritizes and matches people with housing resources based on their level of need.

“You feel hopeless, you know what I mean?” Gray said.

Newcap called once a month to ask where the family slept the previous night, part of the process of Coordinated Entry, which the organization led for 10 northeast Wisconsin counties before officials filed for bankruptcy this year. Newcap staff did not contact Gray to tell him the nonprofit closed, even though all of his mail had been going to the Newcap office in Green Bay.

Every weekday for a year, Gray and Moncada drove their daughters to and from the Oneida Nation’s Three Sisters location for Head Start, no matter where they had slept the previous night.

“I think it’s hard for people to understand that I’m over here taking care of three kids, you know what I mean?” he said. “If I had known I’d be taking care of three kids at this age, I would have done some things a little different in my past, too.”