Homeless youth
New survey shows student crisis in Silicon Valley
Using a broad definition for counting, the main aid group for street youth in Santa Clara County said more than a third of community college students in the county, as well as 17 percent of high school students, are so unstably housed they should be considered homeless.
The culprit for the high numbers, the organization said, is skyrocketing housing prices coupled with poverty that has been persistent despite Silicon Valley’s techindustry boom that makes median income there one of the highest in the nation.
“This shows there are a lot more kids who are actually homeless than most people realize,” said Sparky Harlan, head of the nonprofit Bill Wilson Center in the city of Santa Clara, which compiled the statistics. “It’s a crisis.”
Harlan’s center conducted the survey of students in the 2016-17 academic year by polling nearly 4,000 young people in six high schools, including one private school, and two community colleges. The report was released Tuesday.
Harlan said the survey
came to its high numbers by tallying kids who are “couch surfing” away from their families, hiding out of sight in cars or staying temporarily with friends or acquaintances — all categories that aren’t typically counted fully or at all in studies of the homeless.
The center, which handed out surveys on the campuses, not only asked students where they lived, but whether they knew others who were in such transient conditions. If they said they knew a person in similar straits, the student was asked to give the initials of the other person, in an effort to avoid double-counting.
Those who answered the surveys at the community colleges indicated 44 percent were transient in one form or another.
“Calling a kid sleeping on a couch simply unstably housed, which is the usual practice, does a disservice to everyone,” Harlan said. “They are homeless, and not calling them homeless is wrong.”
A similar tally in Connecticut in 2015, conducted by the survey firm YouthCatalytics, found that 17 percent of high school students there were homeless or unstably housed. Also, a 2010 study in a Colorado school district by University of Colorado researchers found 22 percent of high school students had been likewise transient during the school year.
Crescensia, a 30-yearold case worker at the center who goes by the one name, wound up couch surfing with a friend when her family lost its home in Sunnyvale while she was in high school. She said at a news conference Tuesday in San Jose, where the survey was released, that she was never counted as homeless and wound up in foster care.
“Looking back, I don’t think they (the family with whom she couch surfed) thought it was anything other than a long-term sleepover,” Crescensia said. “Couch surfing has a really nice sound to it. It sounds fun — but it’s not. Couch surfing is homelessness.”
Dave Cortese, president of the county Board of Supervisors, called the statistics “shocking” and said he hopes the survey will bolster the county’s efforts to fund more affordable housing and end homelessness.
The San Francisco Unified School District reports that of its 58,000 students in all grades, 2,100 are homeless or unstably housed. That represents about 4 percent of the total, which is smaller than the estimate in the South Bay but still too much, said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.
“It’s been pretty unfortunately consistent,” Blythe said.
San Francisco officials, with major donations from people including Salesforce head Marc Benioff, started a $30 million effort last year to end family homelessness in the city by 2019.
Santa Clara County’s overall biennial homeless count — conducted in January, like many other counties including San Francisco — showed that the county’s population of street youth had more than doubled since 2015, from 883 to 2,530.
That survey didn’t include the couch surfers. It was a one-day tally, taken visually by workers and volunteers who walked streets and went to places homeless people are known to be, such as shelters.
The new survey would indicate the pointin-time count missed a lot of people. There are more than 70,000 high school students and more than 80,000 community college students in Santa Clara County.
Santa Clara County has a median household income of $93,500, according to the Demographic International Housing Affordability Survey, which in July called that figure the highest in the nation. The real estate website Zillow lists the median price of a single family home in the county at just over $1 million.
Harlan intends to use the survey to bolster a campaign her group plans to roll out in October called “A Couch is Not a Home,” which will encourage adults in schools and other parts of the community to reach out to homeless youth and encourage them to call the Bill Wilson Center for help.
“We want to reach 1,000 kids in October,” she said.
The center on Tuesday also released a study it commissioned by researchers from the University of Southern California, who in January polled more than 200 homeless youths in San Jose, asking them why they were on the street.
That survey found that 45 percent had been kicked out of their family homes, 18 percent were part of a homeless family before they hit the street themselves, and 58 percent had been in a gang at some point.
Mike Pritchard, who counsels troubled and homeless youth across the nation, did his latest group seminar in Santa Clara County this month and said he is not surprised by the new figures.
“This is what I see all over the Bay Area and in many parts of this country,” said Pritchard. “People are being forced out of their situations, rents are being jacked up. It’s getting worse, everywhere.” Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron