Bring invisible unhoused youth from shadows

As a kid, I thought being invisible was a superpower. Being a Navy brat who moved every two years meant my social life had to start from scratch with every move. But the older I got, the harder it became to make friends and fit in, so I did my best to just blend in and not draw attention to myself.

It was a useful survival skill for me. But for young people experiencing homelessness, being invisible makes their lives far worse.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s December 2023 Annual Homelessness Report to Congress, about 34,700 people under the age of 25 experienced homelessness on their own, without family that year with about 3,200 of those youth being under the age of 18. Given California has the largest homeless population in the country, it’s no surprise that the state also has the largest number of unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness as well. According to the same report, there are 10,173 unsheltered unaccompanied youth in California, accounting for 49% of the population nationwide.

But the problem is these estimates vastly underrepresent the actual number of unhoused youth, and as a result, misguide how the federal government and local communities set priorities for funding and resource allocations to address their needs.

HUD calculates its estimates

based on a count of people in shelter and unsheltered locations on one night, known as point-in-time. These counts occur across the country and are conducted by local organizations or public bodies typically in January or February every year. The data is then submitted to and aggregated by HUD.

However, many young people who should be counted are not because they aren’t staying in the locations that are surveyed. Instead, many live in hotels, motels, cars or double up with family or friends — rendering them invisible to housing authorities.

So just how many young people are being missed? It’s hard to say, but by looking at other data sources, we can get at least a sense of how many are being left out. Take schools, for example. The federal McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act stipulates that students who experience homelessness must have adequate access to education and other services. According

to the U.S. Department of Education, during the 2020-21 school year, 1.1 million students experienced homelessness. Compare that to the national 2022 point-in-time count that indicated there were 30,090 youth experiencing homelessness on one night in January 2022 — roughly 3% of the Department of Education estimate. Notably, the larger estimate doesn’t account for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Bay Area, for example, onethird of unhoused youth surveyed in San Francisco and Alameda counties said they became homeless at the start of the pandemic, according to a 2023 UC Berkeley School of Public Health report.

While the differences in the definition of homelessness might account for some of the variances in these two reports, there is a significant number of young people missed by the point-in-time count.

Even large academic studies on homelessness render young people invisible. In a recent UCSF study of California adults experiencing homelessness, only about 127 or 4% of the 3,198 participants were young adults 18-24 years of age. That figure is even lower than the point-in-time count for California, which estimates about 5% of the state’s homeless population to be unaccompanied youth. And yet, despite the small number of young people included in the study, they still had the highest rates of mental-healthrelated hospitalizations and suicide attempts. Young people are struggling, but because their presence in the study was so small, unhoused youth are near-invisible and likely ignored by policymakers.

It falls to HUD and lawmakers to make the invisible, visible — to look for and truly see young people experiencing homelessness. If point-in-time counts continue to be the primary metric that informs critical funding decisions to support this population, then it needs to be accurate.

Getting it there is not an easy task, but there already are some successful strategies out there.

In 2017, researchers used a nationally representative phone-based survey to estimate the number of youth experiencing homelessness. That same year, another group of researchers demonstrated how to locate and count youth by working with the juvenile and adult justice systems, coordinating with youth-oriented community-based programs and investing in creating state guidelines for finding youth.

In 2018, researchers at the University of Chicago used youth-centered techniques across 22 Illinois counties to successfully find and count young people experiencing homelessness. These strategies are portable, scalable and could be used by HUD and other policymakers to get a far more accurate count.

Congress could also pass the bipartisan Homeless Children and Youth Act, introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2021, which would align the HUD definition for homelessness with those served by other federal agencies and programs serving children, youth and families.

I’ve invested more than 20 years in understanding the issues of youth experiencing homelessness. I know making them more visible will result in better mental and physical health outcomes. As for me, I eventually realized that my superpower of invisibility wasn’t so super after all. If people couldn’t see me, they couldn’t help me. I want to see those “invisible” young people experiencing homelessness because I know that we can help them.