Characteristics and Experiences of Homeless and Unstably Housed Youth in 22 Counties: Common Themes and Local Variation

Background: Growing attention has been paid in recent years to the experiences of homeless and unstably housed youth.  Although studies consistently show that these young people are a highly vulnerable population with significant unmet needs for services and supports, major gaps in our knowledge remain about the characteristics of this population and how much those characteristics vary across the U.S.  Addressing those gaps is critical to informing the development of federal, state and local policy and improving service provision.   

Methods:  Voices of Youth Count (VoYC) is a national, multicomponent policy research initiative designed to deliver actionable evidence on youth homelessness. This paper includes results from a brief youth survey that was administered to homeless and unstably housed youth in 22 counties across the U.S. in conjunction with a point-in-time youth count to collect information about their demographic and background characteristics.  The 22VoYC counties were selected using a stratified random sampling approach that was designed to ensure geographic diversity as well as variation in urbanicity and homeless youth services infrastructure.  

Results:  A total of 4,139 homeless and unstably housed youth completed the brief survey.  Analyses of the survey data indicate that these youth are disproportionately youth of color and youth who identify as LGBTQ.  Nearly a quarter of the sample identified themselves as being pregnant or a parent. A majority of the youth have a history of systems involvement:  27% had spent time in foster care and 43% had spent time in juvenile detention, jail, or prison.  Almost half of the 18 to 25-year-olds were disconnected from education and employment in that they were neither working nor in school.  Our analysis also reveals significant variation in youth characteristics across the 22 counties. For example, the percentage of youth who spent some time in foster care ranged from 7 percent to 43 percent and the percentage of youth who spent some time in juvenile detention, jail, or prison ranged from 29% to 61%.

Conclusions and Implications:  Our results suggest that homeless and unstably housed youth comprise a heterogenous population and that there is a considerable degree of variation in the composition of that population across communities. This suggests that preventing and ending youth homelessness in different communities will require different approaches and that a range of services and supports are needed wihtin each community.