What We Know — and Don’t — About Homeless Youth

This is the tail end of Homeless Youth Awareness Month, established by Congress in 2007 to make us recognize that we’ve got a lot of young people out in the world on their own who don’t have a safe, stable place to live.

Also to express support for programs to prevent youth homelessness and “provide aid where prevention fails” — easier than passing bills that provide support, I suppose.

Perhaps we’re more aware of homeless youth now. At least, they’ve gotten their own niche in more policy agendas.

Yet we don’t know as much about them as we should. And aren’t doing as much as we should — in part because of what we don’t know, though we know enough to be doing more than we are.

Here then is a brief overview of what we know — and don’t.

How Many Homeless Youth Are There?

The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that some 1.7 million children become homeless each year, not including those who are with newly-homeless parents. About 400,000 of them remain homeless for more than a week.

But, as NAEH says, these figures are outdated. And the source they’re based on doesn’t include youth who’ve been homeless more than a year or homeless youth in the 18-24 age range.

For these young adults, we have some data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, based on what homeless assistance grant recipients report to its information system.

NAEH estimates that there are some 28,000 of them who are homeless for a long period of time or recurrently. The data are only for young adults who seek help from the HUD-funded programs, however.

No comparable data for youth who are living on the streets, “couch surfing” in homes of friends or relatives or living with someone else who’s befriended them — all too often to exploit them sexually.

Who Are These Homeless Youth?

So far as we know (not much), runaways represent a large percent of homeless youth. But they’re generally not leaving home to enjoy a freewheeling lifestyle, as some in the 1960s did.

Many are fleeing physical and/or sexual abuse. Some are responding to constant fighting or egregious neglect, often related to their parents’ excessive drinking or drug use — a source of the physical abuse also.

Substance abuse by youth themselves also enters into the picture — either that alone or in combination with the resulting (or causal) problems in school.

An unusual high percent of homeless youth are LGTB — 40% according to a recent study. This is at least four times the estimated number of LGTB youth in the population as a whole.

Nearly half of them run away because they fear parental rejection. Almost as many actually experience it by getting kicked out.

The same two factors reportedly account for some portion of homelessness among pregnant teenagers and new mothers.

And then we’ve got youth who’ve “aged out” of foster care and find themselves in the world alone without the resources to pay rent — and often without the education and/or training to get a job that will make that possible.

The same is true for youth who’ve been released from the protective custody of the juvenile justice system.

There are about 100,000 of them a year. And they’re often discharged with no support plan to help them cope with the many challenges they face — finding a safe, stable housing situation among them.

Finally, some youth strike out on their own because their families are homeless or otherwise in dire financial straits.

Or they don’t choose independence, but instead have been separated from their parents by policies that ban teenagers from family shelters.

Needless to say (I hope), these multifarious factors aren’t mutually exclusive.

What Are We Doing?

We’ve got a number of local programs that specialize in services for homeless youth, but nationwide they serve only 50,000 or so a year.

The top priority approach, especially for those under 18, is reunification with their parents through counseling that resolves conflicts and/or other services that go at underlying causes.

But returning youth to the nest isn’t always best for them — or even safe.

Nonprofits offer a range of services to help homeless youth make it on their own, e.g., counseling, education and training programs or links to these.

Meanwhile, these youth need a roof over their heads. And shelters for adults may be as risky for them as the streets.

Both federal and local funds support several types of housing specifically for youth, but there’s a large unmet need.

How large is one of those things we apparently don’t know, but we have some fragmentary indications.

For example, a 2007 survey in New York City produced an estimate of 3,800 homeless youth on any given night. The city now has emergency shelter beds for only 250 of them.

Here in the District of Columbia, the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates ballparks the number of homeless youth at about 7,350 a year.

We’ve got only 216 beds for them — and just eight specifically for LGTB youth.

We know more than enough to know that’s not enough, don’t we?

Survey Yields Insights on Homeless DC Youth

Back in February, DC Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown introduced a bill that would, among other things, give us a better fix on who is homeless in the District and what services are — and ought to be — available for them.

Nothing’s happened with the bill, so far as I can tell, since the hearing in June.

But something has happened to address the main focus of the hearing — unaccompanied homeless youth.

The DC Alliance of Youth Advocates has released the results of a survey it conducted with partners — many partners — last March.

It’s the first-ever survey of youth homelessness in the District — and one of the first of its kind anywhere in the U.S.

So now we know more than we did before, which was virtually nothing. I wish I could say we know more than we do.

But, as the report forthrightly acknowledges, the survey had significant limits — some inherent in the enterprise itself and some due to the project design.

As a result, we’ve got lots of information about the literally homeless and “unstably housed” youth who answered the survey questions in a way that allowed researchers to analyze their responses.

No way, however, of knowing to what extent we can generalize to the larger population that met DCAYA’s definition of “unaccompanied homeless youth.”

The definition is broader than the term might suggest.

And, to my mind, somewhat problematic because it embraces two populations that are likely to be homeless for different reasons and to need quite different types of services. DCAYA sometimes reports on them separately. Often not.

On the other hand, new regulations from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development expand the definition of “unaccompanied youth” to include young adults under the age of 25.

Since these regulations will govern the District’s applications for grants under the HEARTH (Homeless Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing) Act, it makes some sense to adopt the same upper age limit for the survey.

In any event, young people qualified as homeless and unaccompanied if they were under 18 and “living apart from their parents or guardians” or between the ages of 18 and 24 and both “economically and/or emotionally detached from their families” and without “an adequate or fixed residence.”

All told, 330 youth surveyed met this definition. Though an additional 160 didn’t, more than half of them said they didn’t have stable housing two weeks and three months prior to the survey.

DCAYA did some calculations to estimate the number of local youth who were homeless at some point during the course of the year. At least 1,600, based on its survey results. But this estimate is very conservative, it says.

Using estimates gathered by the Congressional Research Service, the number would increase dramatically — on the low end, to just over 3,000 and on the high end to just under 6,000.

So we clearly need more and better data than we’ve got. But we’ve got enough to know that we’ve got a highly vulnerable population that needs an array of services we’re not providing — or not providing enough of.

Detailed analyses of the survey results indicate priorities. A few examples:

• Nearly half the homeless youth surveyed had spent the night before on the streets or “couch surfing” at the home of a friend of family member — mostly the latter.
• Only 48.9% of those under 18 were in school — or, it seems, a program that would prepare them for the GED exams.
• More than 81% of the whole group were unemployed — an extraordinarily high rate for D.C. youth, even in these bad economic times.
• A full 90% of the youth were black — maybe a function of the survey design, but suspiciously similar to the percents in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

DCAYA calls for more stable, long-term housing as “the primary component to moving youth forward.”

I’d have welcomed more such forthright, policy-relevant conclusions and actionable policy recommendations.

What DCAYA calls “policy recommendations” are actually discourses on a few general theme — hard to summarize, as indeed is the report as a whole.

DCAYA is understandably queasy about generalizing from its limited — and perhaps not representative — survey sample.

But it’s also, I think, made such results as it has harder to digest than they ought to be — at least, if it aims to reach “all those who want to see D.C. youth achieve more stable and productive lives,” as its press release indicates.

Still well worth a read and a fine basis for the further studies it recommends. Also a unique source of hard data for advocates and service providers who want to make a case for this or that.

You can get the gist in the executive summary, which helpfully bold-faces key findings and implications.

DC Bill Puts Priority On Homeless Youth

The DC Council seems again poised to amend the Homeless Services Reform Act — the basis for much of what the District does to address homelessness in our community.

The bill is nothing like so controversial as last year’s amendment, which, as you may recall, sought to restrict emergency shelter to people who could prove they were D.C. residents.

The new amendment was jointly introduced by Councilmember Jim Graham, Chairman of the Human Services Committee, and Councilmember Michael Brown, Chairman of the Housing and Workforce Development.

It’s got nine cosponsors — all sitting Councilmembers who had an opportunity to sign on except Jack Evans and David Catania.

Last month’s hearing on the amendment was a virtual love fest. All but two witnesses supported it as-is.

And those two had reservations about just one part — seats on the Interagency Council on Homelessness designated specifically for represents of organizations that serve homeless youth and homeless families. Not, I think, a make-or-break.

The strategic plan ICH issued last April pays a good deal of attention to homeless families — as well it should. Virtually nothing, however, about homeless youth who aren’t with adult family members.

Concern about them dominated the hearing. And it’s surely a legitimate concern.

As a majority of witnesses emphasized, homeless youth are distinctively different from homeless adults.

Many become homeless for different reasons, e.g., because they need to escape abusive situations, because their parents throw them out, because they “age out” of the foster care system or get released from detention without provisions for housing.

They’re still developing emotionally and cognitively — more vulnerable, but perhaps more open to help than people who’ve endured years of hardship, humiliation, downright hostility, etc.

They’re more likely to be in unstable housing situations — couch surfing in homes of friends and relatives — than in shelters or on the streets. And, for that reason, we’ve got no idea of how many there are.

The Graham-Brown amendment aims to give the DC Council a better fix on the problems and solutions — not only for homeless youth, but for other subgroups that the ICH strategy and homeless counts already distinguish.

It requires ICH to develop a new five-year strategic plan, plus annual plans for implementing it. The Council is supposed to get these as part of the administration’s annual budget proposals.

Many specific parts to the plan. Some seem to me very challenging — for example:

• A gap analysis of the shelter, housing and support needs of discrete homeless populations, along with numerical goals for housing production or rental assistance for each.
• A strategy for working collaboratively with surrounding jurisdictions.
• An account of trends in federal homelessness funding, plus an analysis of how local agencies and nonprofits can get more federal funds and, as if that weren’t enough, how said funds would be “utilized and prioritized.”

Heavy lifting, I think. But something along these lines could be feasible if all the senior District officials now nominally on the ICH actively participated — and committed staff support.

That in itself could be a heavy lift for agencies already struggling with budget-driven staff shortages.

I’ve remarked before that the DC Council seems better at making good policies than at providing the oversight and resources needed to make them work.

I fear that the Graham-Brown amendment may prove a case in point. But I hope it passes anyway.

We have nonprofits in the District that specialize in services for homeless youth. But our government needs to make serious investments in helping these young people out on their own get connected to caring adults and onto a pathway out of poverty.

Clearly also needs to do a much better job of making sure there aren’t so many homeless youth to begin with.

Can’t do that until it knows where it is, where it should be going and what it must do to get there. And the rest of us could use better data and benchmarks too.