8 Black Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Being Unhoused
Many look at the lives of celebrities and their immense wealth and immediately assume that there is no way that they can relate to the financial struggles that many Americans face.
However, with just a few minutes of deep diving they would find that some of the wealthiest celebrities in Hollywood once found themselves without shelter and unhoused — proving that you never truly know the struggles someone has been through when you’re on the outside looking in.
Here, we compiled a list of celebrities who have been open about being unhoused.
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1. Tyler Perry
Before he became one of the biggest self-made moguls in Hollywood, Tyler Perry struggled to provide for himself while attempting to make his dreams come true. “It was too much. It’s too much. The pain was too much. What I’d been through was too much. I’m homeless. I don’t have food to eat,” he said in a 2023 interview.
“So, I would say to anybody, just look for the little things that encourage you, even if you don’t see anything, the little, small things that keep you going,” he added.
2. Halle Berry
In her early days as a struggling actress determined to make a name for herself in the entertainment industry, Halle Berry found herself without a place to live when she began her modeling career in New York.
“I mean three months later, I was out of my cash,” Berry said in a 2017 interview with PEOPLE. “I called my mother and asked her to send me some money, and she said no, and that subsequently led to a year of not speaking to her because I was so upset that she wouldn’t help me.”
“That’s probably one of the best things she did for me … She said, ‘If you want to be there, then you work it out.’ And I had to work it out,”she recalled. “Giving up was never an option.”
“It was prove to her and everybody else. I’m going to figure this out.’ And shelter life was part of figuring it out for a minute until I could get a waitressing job. Then I got a bartending job, and until I could figure that out, that’s what I did,” she told the outlet.
3. Oprah Winfrey
The billionaire media mogul faced being without shelter very early in her life, at the age of fourteen, when she grew up in extreme poverty. Her financially unstable childhood led her to reflect in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, how difficult it would have been for her family to survive.
“My mother wouldn’t have been able to go to work,” Winfrey told PEOPLE in May 2020. “She was a domestic (maid), traveling on the bus from inner-city 9th Street Milwaukee to Fox Point in the suburbs. That would not have been happening. We would have been doing what we could to find food.”
“There wasn’t health insurance,” she continued. “Not only did we not have insurance, every time the insurance man came to the door my mom told to me tell him she wasn’t at home. You tried not to get sick because if you got sick, it threw everything off. And she had to decide, ‘Am I going to take my child to the doctor, or am I going to feed my child?’ So we would have been hungry.”
4. Steve Harvey
Known for making fans laugh for over 30 years as a comedian, there was a time in Steve Harvey’s early life where there was little to smile about. In his exclusive cover story interview with PEOPLE in 2016, shared his journey from not having a place to live to building his empire.
Speaking about his struggles during the late 80s to get his comedy career off the ground, he told the outlet “That was an ugly period, just very painful. Everybody has a moment when they turn back, when you say to yourself, ‘This is too much,’ I had it on several occasions.”
“I sat down and started crying, but a voice said, ‘If you keep going, I’m going to take you places you’ve never been,’” he said of how he powered through and continued to strive for his dreams. “It was like God said, ‘Don’t quit, you’re almost there.’”
“I’m running from homelessness,” Harvey continued. “I can’t ever be in that position again. If my show gets canceled, I’ve got three more. I don’t have any free time, but I have 12 jobs.”
5. Tiffany Haddish
Breaking into the entertainment industry is not an easy feat, and many (now successful) celebrities faced severe hard times before their big break, including Tiffany Haddish who previously lived in her car.
“We were doing these sketch shows at the Laugh Factory and Kevin [Hart] was coming up there. It was like every Wednesday night, I would show up late. I didn’t want nobody to see my car,” Haddish explained in an interview on This Life of Mine With James Corden in 2024.
“I would park a little further away or I would pull up and let the valet take the car, but I would pull up late so nobody would see it. One day I pulled up and Kevin pulled up just in front of me and I was like, ‘Damn. Maybe I should pull up,’ and he’s like looking at me. He’s like, ‘Haddish, what’s all this stuff in your car? What’s going on? You homeless or something?’ I’m like, ‘Ah, I’m just in between houses right now,'” she recalled.
After confessing to Hart that she was indeed without a place to stay, she revealed that the fellow comedian gave her $300 to get her “a place to stay for a month.”
6. Lil Kim
As arguably the greatest female rapper of all-time, Lil Kim has millions through her hit songs highlighted by her gritty rhymes, but before she became the Queen Bee, she was without shelter multiple times throughout her life.
The earliest instance was in the early 80s after her parents separated and her mother faced financial struggles. “I was basically living out of the trunk of my car,” Kim’s mother Ruby Mae Jones said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And I didn’t feel it was appropriate for [the children]. So I let Kim go to live with her father.”
After issues between her and her father began to get violent, with frequent arguments and physical abuse, Kim left the home at the age of 14, she told the outlet, where she went on to live with different neighbors who provided shelter. She admitted that during her teen years she did “whatever I had to do to survive.”
7. Ella Fitzgerald
The legendary singer left her home at an early age due to the death of her mother in 1932 and the abuse from her stepfather, that led her to flee to New York City to live with her aunt, per the Houston Symphony.
After dropping out of school, she was sent away to the New York State Training School for Girls with its horrid conditions and eventually ran away with no place to live.
However, once she headed back to the streets of New York she began performing at local amateur nights at the Apollo Theater and band leader Chick Webb spotting and gave her the big break she was looking for.
8. Dawn Robinson
In March 2025, Dawn Robinson, one fourth of the original lineup of En Vogue, revealed that for the last three years she had been living inside of her car.
In a YouTube video sharing the news with her fans, Robinson explained that while she was initially hesitant to share the status of her living situation, she hoped her story would encourage those in similar situations.
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