Holiday Homelessness Story That Matters
This time of year, news media overflows with sappy stories about gifts and goodies bestowed on people without homes. That trope manages to erase the public’s guilt, but doesn’t ease the dire circumstances of homelessness millions of kids and adults are coping with. Pardon my scroogy-ness. But stick with me.
My new colleague, Nathan Yuan, just put a warranted wet blanket on this holiday season with his latest story, Gaps in social services are leaving homeless youth with ‘no good choices,’ recently published by The Center for Public Integrity, a prestigious investigative news organization.
Yuan, graduated with a bang last spring from Naperville Central High School. As outgoing newspaper editor, he wrote and published a story that, in addition to being well-reported, was a scathing exposé on hundreds of Illinois public schools failing to identify (and therefore failing to serve) thousands of students experiencing homelessness. Naperville, the tony city west of Chicago, along with Aurora, happens to be the home of homeless students’ rights, an accomplishment that I was, and continue to be, immensely involved in.
Way back in the mid-1980s when I began working in the world of homelessness, being new to social services, I wondered about the lack of, well, anything to help young people without parents/guardians who found themselves homeless. In Illinois, where I lived most of my adult life, a dire dearth of emergency beds for youth — some laughable number like 13, 75, or something of that level — made it clear that these kids didn’t merit any consideration. It’s that bad or worse in most other states.
Not to say that the situation for adults or families was or is much better. But for youth, forget it.
Yuan, a freelance journalist, hits an unreported hot-button issue for millions of invisible young people. His story focuses on a youth living under a Virginia overpass, homeless for six years, for the ordinary reasons many youth become homeless. To give it perspective, we learn how abysmal the system to help youth in these situations really is.
Plenty jumped out at me with this story:
- An estimated 85% of adults who end up homeless for a long time (one year or more) come from the “youth-to-adult” pipeline. I’ve guessed that the number would be high, but 85%, wow!
- Calling 2–1–1 for help finding shelters might be not such a great thing for youth to do. Chances are they’ll get a referral to an adult shelter, not youth-appropriate for many reasons, some might surprise you.
- The drastically underfunded “system” to help youth get back on their feet, a cost-effective effort considering the expensive and debilitating alternative, is shameful.
These and so many more revelations are contained in Yuan’s story. It’s well worth the read.
As fate would have it, Nathan and I have connected. He’s got fire in his belly to work on the almost-invisible issue of family and youth homelessness. As someone who’s spent over 3 decades in that trench, I’m more than happy for the company. From what I’ve seen, he won’t need much help in pursuing his desire to push systems — education, housing, health, etc. — to do right by those pathetically ignored. We’re honing our strategy to direct our efforts where we can be most effective.
Oh yeah, Israel, the kid living under the bridge, he finished high school with a B average, despite his horrific living conditions. Now he working 48+ hours a week, earning a measly $2,400 mo., a paycheck that doesn’t seem to get housing anywhere. And he can’t get anyone to rent to him.
Happy holidays.
P.S. You can do something holiday-ish to help. Here’s my story on that.
