Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/homelessness-and-justice-project/page/3/)
Nataya Foss remembers being told that she would soon have to leave the shelter. She had been staying in one of Washington state’s few shelters for unaccompanied homeless minors, but because of restrictions that come with government funding, the shelter could house her for only three weeks. Her time was almost up.
When Abrea Ponce, 25, looks back on her childhood, she realizes things could have been different.
The San Diego mother and staff member at the San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless spent her critical teen years moving from couch to couch, hotel to hotel to avoid sleeping on the street. The events that led her to become homeless began long before she was a teenager, she believes.
At the age of 16, A.S. had just made his high school football team when his life was upended. His mother was moving overseas, and he would have to go live with his remarried father and four step-siblings in another part of town.
Relly Brown was so destitute in 2016 they could not even get a room in the abandoned house on the corner of Fountain Avenue and Cherokee Avenue in Los Angeles. They had to settle for the porch.
Youth homelessness is a pervasive problem throughout the United States, and its rate has steadily risen over the years. According to the Center for American Progress, youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) are disproportionately affected by homelessness compared to their percentage in the overall population.
Civil legal aid services are a necessary tool in preventing and eliminating youth homelessness. Though most young people do not initially identify...
By the age of 17, David Vanwetter had been in and out of detention perhaps a dozen times.
Washington state is vowing to keep young people like Vanwetter — often with complicated and troubled lives — from becoming homeless after they exit the jailhouse door. The state Legislature has ambitiously pledged to stop releasing youth from “publicly funded systems of care” — juvenile detention, foster care and mental health and drug treatment — into homelessness by the end of 2020. And that doesn’t mean putting them in a cab to a homeless shelter: Youth must have “safe and stable housing,” the law says.
The fight against youth homelessness drags on and on. It is not that the fighters are no match for a seemingly intractable issue that has haunted the nation for decades.
Dealing with homelessness is difficult under the best of circumstances, but some state laws make life even more challenging for runaway and homeless youth.
Medical sociologist Eric Wright’s work has taken him into parks, abandoned buildings, shelters and other places off the beaten path.