SANTA ANA, Calif. — Every time 9-year-old Paulina Gallegos draws a picture of a house, she makes sure to include lots of windows.

“My other house that I used to have only had one window,” she said.

For the last two years, Paulina, her two siblings, mother and father have been living in a garage in Orange County — with no kitchen, no bathroom and no air-conditioning. Paulina’s mom, Yeimi Aguilar, said it wasn’t humane.

“My daughter would say it was like an oven in there,” Yeimi said in Spanish. “So we would go to the park or walk around Walmart. We wouldn’t buy anything. We would just look around and try to stay cool.”

Yeimi works at 7-Eleven, and her husband is a gardener. But without a credit score, they couldn’t get a lease.

“It was really hard, I felt desperate, although I didn’t show it,” Yeimi said.

And yet, this family wasn’t counted as homeless in last year’s point-in-time homeless count.

“The kids would always ask me, ‘Mom, when are we going to have a home?’ And I would tell them, ‘God willing, we will qualify for a home soon,’” Yeimi said. “They would draw a big house with stairs, and my son would ask me, ‘Is it going to have a pretty pool? ‘And I would say ‘yes.’”

If you were to include families like these in the count, the number of homeless kids in Orange County would soar from 722 to 23,246, according to an Orange County grand jury report that compiled public school reporting data.  

Madelynn Hirneise, CEO of Families Forward, an Orange County nonprofit that helps stabilize housing insecure families, said the difference between the numbers comes down to how you define homelessness.

“The way we historically count the homeless population it’s really hard to get an accurate count, but essentially, we are county people that are visibly there, on the street that weren’t able to find or secure shelter,” Hirneise said. “[If] you’re housing insecure, living in a motel, doubled-up, tripled-up, sleeping in a garage, [you] haven’t historically [been] counted under our point-in-time HUD definition.”

The government uses the point-in-time count to determine where to allocate resources, which means homeless children and organizations such as Families Forward are often underfunded.

“The biggest challenge for an organization like Families Forward is that there is so much need, so much need that we can’t keep up with the demand,” Hirneise said. “In the month of July alone, we had 120 calls by July 11, and these were families that were housing insecure and had lost their housing. We’re projected to go over 240 this month, and the month prior, we were at 175.”

A few days ago, Families Forward helped Paulina’s family secure an apartment in Irvine. That home has a kitchen, two bathrooms and a real place to cool off.

“My favorite part about my new house is we have big pool nearby,” Paulina said.

Ahead of the expiration of pandemic-era protections, Families Forward said it can use all the help it can get. To learn about how you can volunteer or donate, visit here.