Youth Homelessness

Researchers think they’ve come up with a cutting-edge way to predict the likelihood of a given homeless youth running into trouble with substance abuse – and to devise individualized rehab strategies for those who nevertheless develop a disorder.

Tonight, more than half a million Americans – including nearly 100,000 homeless youth – will sleep in a shelter or in a public place. That’s more than the population of Atlanta, Georgia. 

Even before the pandemic struck, 1.5 million children had experienced homelessness at some point during the previous school year.

As a 20-year-old foster youth in a small town an hour outside Seattle, Lillie Thompson is doing all they can to make it on their own. Thompson attends monthly meetings with an educational coach and spent the last year taking community college courses in psychology, film and Spanish to prepare for starting a four-year degree this fall. 

Late last week, a bipartisan group of House legislators introduced a bill that would supply $2 billion to states for help in preventing youth or family homelessness during the coronavirus pandemic.

Point Source Youth, a nonprofit that helps local partners in 30 communities fight to prevent youth homelessness, is preparing to meet a key organizational goal by expanding its work into 20 more communities across the country.

A comprehensive new review of programs and practices aimed at tackling youth homelessness did not identify a silver bullet but rather suggested some promising areas for further study — and a crying need for more and better evidence of what works.

On a normal summer day, as many as 150 youth would hang out each day at SafeZone, a drop-in center for homeless youth in St. Paul, Minn. Its comfy couches, widescreen TV and air conditioning are a rare indoor respite for young people living on the streets or hopping around the couches of friends and family. 

Attempting to prove to a Santa Clara County court late last year that she had earned her monthly foster care check, a South Bay teenager couldn’t quite remember all the places she had applied for work.

Just a few years ago, Maddox Guerilla, now 24, was one of hundreds of young New Yorkers with no safe place to call home. Like many, Guerilla sought refuge in the network of drop-in centers and shelters dedicated to those younger than 25.