Foster Youth Homelessness: The System Failed Them Before They Were Adults
Article excerpt
Foster youth age out of the system with nowhere to go, landing on streets where they face trafficking and predation. Zoning restrictions prevent shelters from opening in many neighborhoods, while funding cuts have shrunk the safety net further. Cynthia, who lived through youth homelessness herself, describes how the gaps in care push vulnerable teens toward a lifetime of instability, a failure that begins not when they turn 18, but years earlier in a system designed without exit ramps.
Homeless Teens Face Trafficking Threats, Zoning Barriers, and Funding Cuts that Push Them Toward a Lifetime of Instability
Cynthia has lived experience with youth homelessness. The opening of this piece is drawn from her own memories and those of friends she lived alongside during that time. What follows is both memoir and journalism. It’s a firsthand window into the realities facing homeless teens, including the trafficking threat described by Safe Place for Youth CEO Erika Hartman.
“Don’t you ever feel sad?”
The voice echoed out over the slow-rolling clouds, beyond the smoky film and blinking lights from the nearby power plant. The buildings traversing the Conchester Highway were always covered with an unmistakable residue, the unwashable stain of pollution and waste. The sun wasn’t bright enough to pierce through the thick, blurry edges of the sky and brighten the day. The battered sign from the rundown motel she came out of became yet another dot inside the faded hue. Gun metal gray is the shade her grandmother used to describe it, and nothing could be more fitting than that.
She wondered now, if she did feel sad, with her bookbag tugging her shoulders like an old friend. 17 was shaping up to be a slightly depressing year. Her grandmother died. Her mother abandoned her. The school wasn’t quite sure where to put her. On paper, she had a residence listed, but that house hadn’t had running utilities in almost five years. Showering at Planet Fitness and walking around aimlessly was not exactly the life plan she had envisioned.
She bounced from one unstable housing situation to the next because no matter where she moved to and no matter what she did, she always felt like a stranger in her own skin. Perhaps this was a void only a mother could fill, she decided. Kind of a grim reality to embrace when facing a sunless summer. What if there was no silver lining after all?
Yet, when she turned to look behind at the idling car, she shook her head and smiled, a quiet act of rebellion, small but defiant like her.
“I never feel sad,” she assured the driver, and then narrowed her eyes to the winding road.
She knew he wasn’t truly concerned about her sadness.
He just wanted her to get in the car.
This is what trafficking looks like. Not a headline. Not a statistic. A girl with a bookbag and nowhere safe to go.
“We have young people that come to our site and let us know that they can’t leave because they’re concerned that there’s a trafficker looking for them,” said Erika Hartman, CEO of Safe Place for Youth, which operates under the acronym SPY.
Safe Place for Youth is the leading service provider for youth experiencing homelessness in West Los Angeles. In a podcast interview with Invisible People, Hartman detailed the progress and pitfalls of young people exiting foster care and the juvenile detention system and facing the looming threat of becoming homeless.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: 50% of Chronically Homeless Adults Were Homeless Youths.
Youth homelessness happens for a wide variety of reasons. From throwaway kids to orphans, to immigration issues, and single-parent poverty, falling through the cracks of a system that was designed to fail is easy. Getting out of the cycle once you’re part of that system is nearly impossible. One of the most vital pathways to ending the homeless crisis is addressing the problem where it often starts, in childhood and young adulthood.
Did you know that 50% of chronically homeless adults endured their first bout with homelessness as children, and that experience becomes the foundation for the rest of their lives?
The explanation for this is simple. Housing instability impacts every aspect of someone’s life, from education and health to mental well-being and social status, and just about everything in between. It is difficult to maintain anything stable, be it a friendship, a job, or a GPA, without the foundation of a stable home. When homelessness happens at these pivotal stages of life, like youth and young adulthood, it sets the tone for a lifetime of trauma, and not just on a personal level. When there is widespread chronic homelessness, whole communities suffer. Therefore, it is mutually beneficial to resolve this issue.
Youth homelessness isn’t exactly the same as adult homelessness, as Hartman was quick to point out, which is why there needs to be separate funding to find long-term solutions. One of the pitfalls Hartman identified was in the recent push to intertwine adult and youth service funding.
“There’s been a real push to tuck youth homelessness back into the adult system, and it was a really hard-fought goal for us to ensure that there was a youth system,” Hartman continued.
Youth homelessness faces the following unique tribulations:
The foster care to prison pipeline
Welfare system to homelessness pipeline
Uniquely vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of forced or coercive labor
Lack of trust in adults
Inability to obtain an adequate education
Difficulty maintaining employment that pays a living wage due to just starting out in low-wage settings or entry-level positions
Trauma and social isolation at the key stages of emotional development and more
It Is Difficult For Young People to Secure Stable Housing By Themselves
Imagine how hard it is for a 16- or 17-year-old to lease a car or rent a hotel room in 2026. Now, what if their lives depended on getting approval for a rental agreement they’re not even old enough to sign? It does, in many cases, and places like motels and low-cost temporary accommodations are often hotbeds for people looking to prey on vulnerable teens and young adults who cannot survive in any other place.
Legal restrictions, poor or no credit history, and age discrimination are among the many reasons unhoused people under 25 continue to endure unsheltered homelessness.
Oftentimes, youth outreach programs require these individuals to have addiction disorders or to be teen mothers to qualify for services. When programs that house our unsheltered children do get implemented, they face a rather unexpected hurdle, community opposition.
How Zoning and NIMBYISM Adversely Impact Foster Youth
You would think if there was one thing people could agree on, it would be young people’s right to a stable environment. However, NIMBYISM and harmful narratives complicate things.
“Community opposition is a big one,” Hartman said when asked about the challenges of housing homeless youth. She added that her organization faced pushback for placing a youth homeless shelter next to a school.
The false equation that homelessness is a choice is placed on homeless children as well, even though more than a million of them are under the age of six and are unable to make independent decisions whatsoever.
The rising tide of homeless criminalization is in no way limited to just adults. A genuine fear of being forced into the juvenile detention system through anti-homeless laws is fueled by previous experience with law enforcement and abuse or corruption from adults. Without trust, many homeless youth are reluctant to reach out for help.
If they find the courage to ask for help, it might not be available in the form of safe, stable housing due to zoning restrictions and NIMBYISM, which make it borderline impossible to open a youth shelter, let alone maintain one.
Don’t Close More Doors on the Future. Talk to Your Representatives About Ending Youth Homelessness
As you read this, millions of people under the age of 25, 4.2 million to be precise, are fighting the silent battle of not having a stable place to live. Meanwhile, funding for programs that help homeless youth is being stripped down and funneled into other systems.
The reallocation of money for vulnerable people will always come with repercussions. Right now, it is costing us our future. Tell your representatives.