One of the youth who participated in Chapin Hall’s Voices of Youth Count (VoYC) study was 23 when he was last interviewed and had just secured a job at a retail store in the suburbs of Chicago. Facing challenges in securing housing, he was still cycling between couch surfing, staying at temporary shelters in the city, and sleeping in the stairwells that were close to his new job.
Born and raised in Cook County, Illinois, his pathway into homelessness before the age of 19 was anything but linear, moving from Illinois to Florida, then to Michigan and back to Illinois. While seeking stability and support, he described extreme family conflict, his mother’s mental health problems, and a family intolerant of his own mental health challenges as critical conditions leading to homelessness.
Employed and surviving, the precarity of his housing puts him at odds for success. And the Supreme Court recently made it easier to punish him criminally for finding himself in this situation.
The crisis of youth homelessness is a broad and hidden challenge. It manifests in different ways than adult homelessness typically does, with youth more likely to couch-surf or live in unsafe buildings where people conducting point-in-time counts don’t go. Evidence from Voices of Youth Count, the first and only national incidence and prevalence study on youth homelessness, as well as other data on youth homelessness show that the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of the City of Grants Pass, Oregon, is a decision that shortchanges the futures of youth experiencing homelessness.
Every year, 1 in 10 youth ages 18 to 25, or about 3.5 million individuals, experiences homelessness. Youth without a place to call home or with housing instability are mired in survival mode, rather than undergoing healthy transitions to adulthood. This can have long-term negative implications for their health and well-being.
Chapin Hall research shows that youth pathways into homelessness start early. Just over half of youth named chronic parent-child conflict or rejection by a parent as the start of their homelessness; other prevalent reasons included bad experiences in foster care, having a parent with a mental health condition and/or addiction, and the death of a parent or guardian.
In the April oral arguments on Grants Pass vs. Johnson, justices spent considerable time debating the very definition of homelessness. Does homelessness mean sleeping in a tent in a public space for a set number of days? How are people stargazing or babies sleeping outside in blankets considered exceptions? Are there enough shelter beds available for youth experiencing homelessness, and is this shelter provided adequate?
Ultimately, a majority of the court ruled that localities can impose criminal penalties for acts like public camping and public sleeping, even if they are not able to demonstrate that there are opportunities for people to sleep elsewhere.
The court’s decision in favor of Grants Pass will have profound and far-reaching impacts on how state and local governments address homelessness in the U.S., and it doesn’t seem as if struggling youth were even considered. During the oral arguments related to the case, youth experiencing homelessness were not mentioned at all despite the fact that youth homelessness is a leading pathway into adult homelessness. Only in the dissenting opinion did Justice Sonia Sotomayor acknowledge youth. She noted that “people experiencing homelessness are young and old, live in families and as individuals, and belong to all races, cultures, and creeds,” citing the “complex web of causes,” including “family dysfunction and rejection, sexual abuse, juvenile legal system involvement, ‘aging out’ of the foster care system, and economic hardship.”
Through the justices’ lines of questioning, and the decision the court ultimately issued, we see that the definition of homelessness discussed in the Grants Pass hearing was too narrow. As seen in the graphic below representing San Diego County teen Baylee’s experience of homelessness, a young person may face a multitude of sleeping arrangements that make her “status” of homelessness difficult to define.
Existing federal definitions further complicate the justices’ narrow definition of homelessness. The three primary federal agencies that fund federal assistance for youth experiencing or at risk of homelessness all have varying definitions of youth homelessness.These agencies include the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The definitions vary based on whether they consider 1) youth’s overall safety versus requiring that a youth’s environment is fit for human habitation 2) youth who do not have a permanent place to reside but who have temporary availability to stay in someone else’s home (i.e., living doubled up, couch surfing), and 3) youth who are staying in motels due to a lack of adequate living accommodations. These federal definitions currently fail to encompass all forms of homelessness, which can prevent youth experiencing it from accessing critical services.
The ruling in favor of Grants Pass fails to consider and address the complex reality of what homelessness and housing instability currently looks like for individuals navigating the confines of accessing existing service pathways — particularly youth.
When questioning the “adequacy” of available temporary shelter space in state and local governments, it is important to consider that many youth seeking to access shelters and housing services face barriers such as obtaining required identification documents, long waitlists, pregnant/parenting restrictions, lack of LGBTQ+ affirming shelters, and language barriers.
Any encounter with the criminal justice system can have detrimental consequences on a young person’s mental health and future. Imposing fines is pernicious and harmful to a young person experiencing homelessness when they cannot afford to rent an apartment or even a room. Accrued unpaid fines can further tarnish existing credit, disqualifying youth from critical employment or housing opportunities. Any mark of a criminal record also carries devastating collateral consequences in accessing educational institutions and building future wealth. Fining and arresting youth for sleeping outside when there is nowhere else to go without addressing existing barriers to housing has not only proven to be more expensive, but will only work against our current housing system and extend pathways of instability and uncertainty.
Youth should not be punished for decades of entrenched systemic failures to address urgent needs. There must be a shift to support evidence-based solutions that effectively prevent and ultimately end youth homelessness.
As housing costs continue to outpace incomes, young people will need increased access to deeply affordable housing and support such as housing choice vouchers and permanent supportive housing. Increasingly, jurisdictions across the country are also looking at direct cash transfer programs as a possible solution to prevent and end homelessness. With partners, including young people with lived experience, we at Chapin Hall have designed and evaluated such programs with a goal of lifting young people out of homelessness and providing them with “wraparound” services like mental health counseling and housing assistance.
Communities can also use research-based risk assessment tools, along with local data, to improve prioritization decisions for limited housing resources in coordinated entry systems. Improving screening and intervention models across key public systems in collaboration with community organizations can make it possible to identify and support youth at risk of becoming homeless and curb the inflow of youth into crisis-response systems. Until youth are guaranteed safe, stable, and deeply affordable housing coupled with affirming services, they will continue to find alternative solutions that are focused on survival rather than long-term thriving.
