Financial Matters: Housing Security and Eviction during the Transition from Foster Care to Adulthood

Background and Purpose. Secure housing contributes to individual and family well-being and full participation in life. Securing housing in early adulthood can be difficult for young people earning low incomes and with little or no family support, including youth exiting foster care to adulthood. The life course perspective suggests that perceived relationship quality with birth parents, economic social role transitions, and social stratification based on race are key factors in housing security during the transition to adulthood. However, these factors have not been studied among young adults aging out of foster care. Additionally, literature gaps on young adults’ housing outcomes after exiting care require a further inquiry into multidimensional housing trajectories and investigation into eviction. This study aimed to fill these gaps using Midwest Evaluation of Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth data with five waves collected between 2002 and 2011 during the Great Recession.

Methods. Latent class analysis (LCA) was conducted in Mplus to create the outcome variable for the housing trajectory model. The LCA included five indicator variables from waves 3, 4, and 5: with whom respondents lived, number of household members, occupancy type, and experiences of homelessness and/or eviction. Goodness of fit statistics (i.e., AIC and BIC), entropy (0.84), and average latent class probabilities indicating the degree of differentiation between classes (.93, .92. and .94) specified a three class solution. The subsequent multidimensional housing trajectories were named insecure (n=40), precarious (n=254), and secure (n=310). The insecure group was dropped from regression analyses due to the small sample size. The eviction outcome variable was binary (evicted or not evicted) and comprised affirmative responses to having been evicted at any time between waves 2 and 5. Logistic regression was used to analyze the housing trajectory and eviction models.

Results. This study identified young adult’s latent housing trajectories after foster care exit, established an eviction rate and count of repeated evictions, and examined the relationships between young adult’s perceived relationship quality with their birth mothers and fathers, time-varying economic measures, race and ethnicity, and housing trajectories and eviction. State of foster care residence, sex, education, children, housing subsidy, and income at wave 4 were associated with housing trajectories (i.e., secure versus precarious). Young adults’ eviction rate was 21%. Among the evicted group, 79% of young adults were evicted once and 21% experienced 2 to 4 evictions. The study demonstrated compelling evidence for relationships between economic hardship at ages 21, 23 or 24, and 26, and eviction. Homelessness, occupancy type at wave 3, and food insecurity at wave 4 were also related to eviction. Perceived quality of relationship with birth mothers and fathers and race and ethnicity were not associated with housing outcomes.

Conclusion and Implications. Although most young people who exit foster care to adulthood primarily experience housing security, a sizeable portion experiences insecurity associated with economic measures. Expanding housing subsidies for youth transitioning from foster care to adulthood may mitigate precarious housing trajectories and employing interventions like universal guaranteed income to reduce economic hardship may allay eviction risk.