DAYTON, Ohio — If you are pregnant and need housing, one program could be paying your rent. An agency is expanding a pilot program to see if housing stability will help more women have healthy babies.

What You Need To Know

  • The Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio is expanding a pilot program to help pregnant women facing homelessness 

  • The program called Healthy Beginnings at Home will pay the rent for pregnant women for more than two years if they qualify for the program 

  • The group's executive director said the goal is to help more women have healthy babies and they plan to expand the program statewide

Mother of two Kileonna Walker is relieved. She just had her second baby and got a place to stay.

“I was very blessed; it came at the perfect time," said Walker. 

She said she was on a waiting list for public housing for two years. and during that time, she said she was a pregnant teen mom, worried about where they’d live.

"I just knew I was running out of time and I wanted to get somewhere stable, get somewhere safe, get somewhere calm for all of us," said Walker. 

She said the stress from it all led to health problems during her pregnancy.

“I had a really hard pregnancy. pregnancy is really hard on my body physically. I was under a lot of stress and, you know, I had heart problems going on and blood pressure, medicine," said Walker. 

That’s what Amy Riegel is trying to prevent.

“Very often the women who had the most housing instability would then come back and say, I had my baby, she was six weeks early, she was low birth weight, or in some really horrible cases that the baby didn't make it," said Riegel.

Riegel is the executive director at the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

"We think there's a connection between housing and the babies, what if we provide housing for these women? Let's see if something changes. They did a small pilot. It worked,” said Riegel.

The pilot program is called ‘Healthy Beginnings at Home’. It's a program that started in 2015 and is now expanding.

"Now we're in a phase of helping over 150 women to receive the housing intervention and hopefully prove the circumstances of this can be taken statewide for all pregnant women," said Riegel.

She says the next pilot program starts this summer, helping pregnant women in Akron, Cleveland, and Dayton. It’ll provide rental assistance for more than two years and help them get on housing wait lists.

As for Walker, she says she had help from a mentor to get back on her feet and ended up delivering a healthy baby girl.

“After waiting for so long, yeah, it's great. Not only is it like by myself, but it's a great first start because it's what I can manage,” said Walker. 

If you or someone you know is pregnant and needs help with housing, you can find more information here.