Serving Youth in an Economic Downturn
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.”
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