It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey, I'm Paul Dailing, and I've been working on a question that came to Curious City from radiologist Dr. Dorothy Lamb.

She says it occurred to her while she was taking a walk.

It might have been a rainy day last summer when I was walking downtown and I saw just a family

just sort of huddled in a corner, you know, a mother with two children that looked like

they were probably elementary school age.

Dorothy had seen homeless families before, of course.

But this time she was pregnant, which made it feel more personal.

I just placed myself in how I would imagine it would be to be a mother in that situation.

And so my question was, how many homeless children are there in Chicago?

How big is the problem?

It turns out the number of homeless kids in Chicago is difficult to pin down.

The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless estimates almost 21,000.

But the federal government uses a couple of numbers. The lowest of those is about

1,200. And the gulf between those two numbers is a huge problem. For one, the federal government's

count helps determine how much money agencies get for things like food, beds, and programs. If the

count is too low, they don't get the funding they need.

If you understand the circumstances that many homeless kids live with,

it becomes easier to understand why they might be so difficult to locate and count.

So I'm going to tell you some of their stories.

First, I spoke with Avion at a diner.

Avion is considered to be doubled up.

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