City should focus on young homeless

Why did the Department of Housing and Urban Development choose San Francisco as a demonstration site to end youth homelessness? HUD’s Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program is a pilot for 10 communities nationwide, and more than 150 of them applied for grants like the $2.9 million that HUD awarded San Francisco in January.

One reason is that San Francisco pairs tremendous potential with staggering need. An estimated 21 percent of people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are youth and young adults under 25, and 89 percent of them are unsheltered, making San Francisco the nation’s city with the highest percentage of unsheltered youth and young adults. Our local policymakers are parents as well as politicians, and we should all agree that it is a public crisis and a moral outrage for college-age people to spend their time and energy surviving in the streets without a safe place to sleep.

Fortunately, local momentum is growing to make gamechanging investments in housing. The Tipping Point Community’s $100 million effort to cut chronic homelessness in half will also cut public costs by housing those who would otherwise cycle expensively between our sidewalks and our public systems. The Heading Home Campaign’s $30 million private-public partnership to end family homelessness by 2019 will resolve homelessness for 800 families who would otherwise live in shelters or the streets.

As a homeless service provider, we celebrate these key investments leveraging our city-funded programs with the resources (and resourcefulness) of private-sector partners. As a youth service provider, we call on the city to make a greater investment in youth, and to leverage that investment with state general funds and ballot measures, as well as private-public partnerships.

If we underinvest in youthspecific programs — or make adult-centered investments that impact youth derivatively — then our unsheltered young people will simply age into adult homelessness. And we will have perpetuated the problems we set out to solve. Ending adult homelessness is a shortterm Band-Aid if we don’t talk about ending youth homelessness as a long-term prevention mechanism.

How should San Francisco end youth homelessness? The $2.9 million HUD award is the public-sector equivalent of a seed round. It’s a cash infusion that must be leveraged with other resources as part of a multiyear, multi-sector partnership. The HUD money is a springboard: It is not a solution. We need a targeted mix of investments to protect the generation of young people squeezed between the postrecession boom and our housing affordability crisis.

Supervisor Jeff Sheehy recognized this when he called a public hearing on youth homelessness last week. Together with Supervisors Sandra Lee Fewer and Hillary Ronen, he heard testimony on disparities in how the city spends its resources. The Youth Commission, for example, recommended that reauthorized Children’s Fund dollars be proportionally applied to “transition-age youth” (18-24). This would quadruple the current investment to $10 million. Ronen reiterated the board’s unanimous support for a youth navigation center and pressed for resources to make it a reality.

The travesty is that youth are sleeping in the streets — or making choices forced by predators to avoid the streets entirely — because we’re not investing proportionately to meet their distinct needs. The homeless department’s mayoral mandate is to end homelessness for key “subpopulations”: adults, including families and veterans, and young people. Solutions-focused talk about ending homeless must make youth an equal part of the public conversation — and a proportionate share of the budget. Otherwise, we’re sinking costs, not saving futures.

We know what we need to end youth homelessness, and in an era of shifting federal priorities, we cannot expect HUD to do the work for us. We have decade-old recommendations from the Transition-Age Youth Task Force for a housing plan. These strategies aren’t getting any younger, and neither are our young people. It’s time to invest in ending homelessness, by ending youth homelessness.