Down for the Count: Getting the Numbers on Youth Homelessness
To prove they can adequately respond, youth homeless organizations must be able to quantify the size of the problem in their communities. But it’s an understatement to say that counting homeless youth is an enormous challenge.
Numerous municipalities have sought a homeless youth census in recent years, with point-in-time counts and other methods to estimate how many youth were not stably housed and under the care of an adult.
Practically speaking, efforts have amounted to going out on the streets and observing youth who are homeless and getting numbers from shelters and other places a youth might go to receive services. If anything, that has led to a detrimental undercount, says Vignetta Charles, a former researcher with Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who spearheaded Baltimore’s first count in conjunction with Baltimore Homeless Services.
“Baltimore Homeless Services would conduct its biennial census and—with no indictment of them at all—would come up with very few numbers of homeless youth, like 10 or 15,” says Charles, who is now senior research associate at ETR Associates in Scotts Valley, Calif. “They were following guidelines and going to shelters and food pantries, all the places where homeless people were congregated, weren’t finding youth because they weren’t coming there. But ask any kid, ask any teacher, ask any youth services worker and you’d know youth homelessness was a serious problem in the city of Baltimore.”
Charles says that in a pilot initiative, Hopkins researchers went along with census takers and did a parallel count in January 2007. “We found nine times the number of homeless youth they did.” More of that and subsequent counts are enumerated in Uncounted and Discounted: Homeless Youth in Baltimore City.
The difference was using a broader definition of homelessness, she says, and looking in other places youth might be besides shelters. Adults are visible because they are often on the streets, but youth tend to sleep on friends’ couches or in the homes of sex work clients and otherwise do their best to avoid detection. Some other municipalities, such as Seattle, have surveyed youth who said they were turned away from shelters because they lacked any form of ID.
“The reality is that challenges of estimation are many,” Charles says. “It’s not easy to count. Homeless youth are a hidden population, and they are hidden on purpose.”
A complete picture of youth homelessness may be elusive, especially in rural settings, where on-the-street counts are impractical. Nevertheless, to justify putting resources into their care, those serving any potentially homeless youth must do all they can to reasonably assess their numbers. Charles and others advise the following as philosophical guides to conducting counts.
Broaden the definition. Charles said in counts in Baltimore, her team frequently encountered 20-somethings who were, by adult definitions, able to get jobs and take care of themselves, but who had been discharged or ran away from foster care with almost no independent living skills. Clark County researchers also looked at juvenile detention facility records in coming up with its estimates of youth homelessness.
Change where you look. Charles advises doing parallel counts with any municipal agency tasked with doing a homeless census, but also to partner with other youth-serving organizations, including homeless education coordinators, to find out where youth are. On street outreach missions by Philadelphia’s Covenant House, for example, outreach workers look in public restrooms, train stations and parks—and they ask other youth to identify places their unstably housed friends hang out.
Count again. Clark County’s research firm recruited 123 volunteers to count homeless youth, dividing their targeted areas on a grid and then randomly selected sections of the grid to be recounted. Because many youths’ experiences with homelessness are episodic, single point-in-time counts will always underestimate. Taking note of seasonal conditions that drive whether youth will seek shelter or stay on the street, some homelessness researchers make sure they count in more than one season.
Each one teach one. Youth-serving professionals are best equipped to help their municipalities estimate youth homelessness by teaching other systems how to recognize the signs of homelessness. Charles says that if a youth is frequently absent from school or tells a teacher she’s been staying at her grandmother’s house, simple follow up might identify that young person as homeless and quickly stabilize her living situation.
