Displacement, school changes, racism and mental illness are among the risk factors plaguing today’s youths. The Next Generation, a new Street Roots series, explores issues like these and opportunities to respond.
The Next Generation, a Street Roots series on homelessness and housing instability among the next generation, will look at the health and well-being of children and young adults, locally and nationally, and explore the opportunities to ensure that yet another generation doesn’t fall into homelessness. Street Roots received funding from Meyer Memorial Trust's Housing Advocacy Portfolio to develop dedicated reporting for The Next Generation series.
It’s been nearly four decades since modern homelessness worked its way into our collective awareness. Unlike the Civil War or the Great Depression — extraordinary conditions that caused massive waves of “itinerant poor” — the rise in homelessness in the 1980s was borne of social politics and global economics. And in just 40 years, it has reached crisis proportions.
Most of the people we see on the streets today were just young teenagers, or younger, 40 years ago. The majority of people included in Multnomah County’s 2019 Point In Time homeless count were between the ages of 25 and 54. Some of those tallied weren’t even born by the time suppressed wages, higher housing costs and gutted social services began undercutting family safety nets. Others were only infants in their parents’ arms when the federal government divested in affordable housing in the 1980s, creating a lagging shortage that continues to this day.
Most of the 92 people who died homeless on Multnomah County streets in 2018 would have been mere toddlers 40 years ago when the Reagan administration largely repealed the Mental Health Systems Act, slashing federal support for people living with a mental illness. States and block grants couldn’t keep up with the need for services. Today, studies suggest approximately one-third of people experiencing homelessness have a serious mental health disorder.
An entire generation, and then some, has grown up with and within this crisis.
A 2019 report compiled by the Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative and the Northwest Economic Research Center indicate that during 2017, about 38,000 people experienced homelessness across Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties. The report also concluded that up to 107,000 households were experiencing housing insecurity or were at risk of homelessness.
Another generation is right behind them. That is what Street Roots’ The Next Generation series is all about: We know what causes homelessness. So what are we going to do with that knowledge?
According to the Children First For Oregon annual Status of Oregon Children and Families report, Oregon’s childhood poverty rate is 16.5%, but there are pockets in our state where childhood poverty approaches 30%, coupled with lower rates of learning proficiencies and higher rates of criminal justice involvement.
Across Oregon, we already have nearly 23,000 students, kindergarten to 12th grade, experiencing homelessness.
Today, if you ask any Portlander what homelessness looks like, you’ll get an answer informed by the images all around us. The description will probably involve one of the thousands of people surviving unsheltered throughout our city, in scenes displayed on our sidewalks, trails and on-ramps.
And they’re right, but it’s only the surface. Latent homelessness is all around us. It’s in our low-income housing shortage and our out-of-reach rents. It’s in our dropout rates, racial prejudice and gender discrimination. It’s in our cyclical gentrification and displacement — our lost communities. It’s in our sky-high tuition rates and student debt, and deep within our foster care system. It has taken root in our criminal justice system, our addiction crisis and our failures in addressing mental illness.
That is what this series is about. The threat of homelessness is there, waiting. So what are we going to do about it?
In the late 1990s, a new term was attached to our evaluation of youths’ well-being: adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. ACEs include abuse, neglect, homelessness, parental substance abuse and foster care.
And they are disturbingly common. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 61% of adults surveyed across 25 states reported that they had experienced at least one type of ACE, and nearly 1 in 6 reported they had experienced four or more types of ACEs.
The CDC associates these traumatic experiences with chronic health problems later in life. It also links related consequences, such as food and housing insecurity, to toxic stress, which can change brain development and adversely affect attention span, decision-making and learning. Those affects are later linked to children’s inability to form healthy and stable relationships, as well as maintain employment, manage finances and deal with depression. Studies have concluded that problems in later life are further compounded by the higher prevalence of ACEs.
According to the National Head Start Association, children in poverty are 2.3 times more likely to suffer from three or more ACEs. Some health and behavior analysts have posited that poverty itself is an adverse childhood experience.
The Head Start program focuses on helping families with at-risk, low-income children, ages 3 to 5, prepare for kindergarten. With few exceptions, families must be at or below the federal poverty level to qualify for Head Start, which for a family of four is just over $26,000 in annual earnings.
Portland Public Schools Head Start combined with Albina Head Start have approximately 1,300 children enrolled in advance of starting kindergarten over the next two years in the Portland Public Schools district. PPS typically accepts about 3,000 students into kindergarten each year. At the PPS Head Start this year, 130 of its 760 enrollees are homeless. That’s up slightly from an average of 100 each year, said Carol Lowry, PPS Head Start family and community partnerships manager.
“The majority of them are doubled up in substandard housing,” she said. “We also have families in shelters, RVs, tents and cars.”
Lowry said that even in children only a few years old, they are seeing more challenging behavior such as aggression and self-regulation issues. PPS Head Start, like all Head Start programs, has mental health personnel.
Head Start is a nurturing program, one that works with the whole family to help them navigate the school system, develop relationships with the children, and support families in reaching their goals. But it is undercut by simple logistics: transportation. They provide TriMet tickets when available, but there is no busing program for Head Start, and not all parents are able to make multiple trips each day to take their children to and from schools.
“We feel that there are kids that we can’t get to because they can’t get here,” Lowry said.
Social workers and teachers do home visits with families in the program and help them identify a goal to work on. For many of them, it’s housing, Carol said, which can also come at a cost.
“I think it’s really hard in Portland because when they do find housing, it’s typically not with us anymore,” she said. “It’s typically in Washington County or Clackamas County. We help, we give them tools, identify resources, and then we lose a lot of families.”
Displacement is hurting children, according to the counselors with Portland-based Friends of the Children. The organization mentors vulnerable youths, often from families that have experienced generational poverty or traumatic experiences, starting from kindergarten through high school graduation. The program is free to the families selected for mentorship. Friends of the Children works with children throughout Portland and Vancouver neighborhoods.
Gentrification and displacement, when families can no longer afford to rent in their neighborhood, has been a disruptive force for youths who suffer from a loss of community and place, said Meghan Buckner, associate program director with Friends of the Children. And it puts pressures on schools and their ability to be responsive to the influx of displaced youths.
“With gentrification, we see a lot of our youth move out to East County, and those schools are not prepared,” said Buckner, who has been with the organization for 12 years.
“I had a youth that moved out to East County, and they were getting into significant trouble because the school wasn’t responding in a way that was going to work for that youth. They didn’t have the resources available. They weren’t prepared for the increase in size of student body, the number of families moving out there because it was the only place they could afford anything.”
Brian Pham, associate director of partnerships and resources, has been with the organization for 11 years.
“Our families can’t even afford housing in certain places any more,” Pham said. “That’s why our kids are scattered all over town.”
Pham recalled one youth he worked with who couch-surfed with his family for six years because they couldn’t find anyone to rent to them.
“I was chasing them down all over town,” he said.
Randy Corradine, director of educational equity for Friends of the Children, said some of their youths are going to multiple schools across districts in a one- to two-year span. The youths often act out and are often misunderstood, and then punished as a result. This has been particularly true for youths of color. According to the 2017 Black Students in Oregon report by ECONorthwest, black students are more likely to experience poverty than white students and to experience chronic absenteeism and are disproportionately placed in special education and alternative school programming. And students of color have been historically subjected to higher rates of discipline and suspension.
“It’s the reality of limited resources,” Corradine said. “How they show up in the classroom may not represent their attention span, etc.
“They’re dealing with grown-folk issues while they’re little: Where am I going to eat? What is my family going to do next? Where are we sleeping next? So the level of stress and trauma in their body, and then to be criminalized because their behavior is seen to be criminal, and then you add on top of that blackness, which is already criminalized, and male. … It’s not trauma informed.”
School mobility, the term commonly used when students change schools mid-school year, is linked to lower academic performance and increased rates of absenteeism and dropping out of school. According to a 2017 audit of the Oregon Department of Education, more than 70% of Oregon students who did not graduate on time were low income. And students who changed districts during high school — more than a quarter of all high school students — had graduation rates roughly 30% lower than students who did not.
People ages 16 to 24 who are out of work and out of school are considered disconnected youths. As of 2017, according to the United Health Foundation, there were nearly 4.6 million disconnected youths in America, about 1 in every 9. This disconnection jeopardizes mental and physical health in later life, in addition to potential earnings and self-sufficiency, according to the foundation.
It’s more than emotionally or physically costly. The foundation estimates that disconnected youths cost approximately $93 billion a year and $1.6 trillion over their lifetimes in lost revenue and increased social services.
Systemic racism and other institutionalized barriers are challenging to many youths from the day they are born, said Kate Sacamano, Friends of the Children’s communications director.
“The greatest challenge that we face are all of the system barriers that really are impeding our youth from accessing their education, health care, basic services,” Sacamano said.
“So a lot of the work that we do is couched in that framework that there are systems in place that are very detrimental to youth and families. And while the work we’re doing is one-on-one is with the case, we’re also trying to uncover and address and work within the systems to makes sure that they’re changing the way they do things in order to better serve our youth and prepare them for the future.”
Twenty years ago, the average age of a person in the region’s Homeless Youth Continuum was 18. Today, it’s almost 23.
The change reflects both a shift in the people who are on the streets and the higher age of people served, up to age 24, based on a better understanding of brain development and maturity, said Dennis Lundberg, program director for homeless youth services and runaway youth services for Janus Youth Programs.
Janus Youth is one of four agencies in the continuum collaboration, which also includes New Avenues for Youth, Outside In, and Native American Youth and Family Center. Janus works with about 6,000 children and families each year, providing street outreach, assessment, emergency and short-term shelter, transitional and independent housing, and case management to help get youths off the streets.
Lundberg has been with the organization for more than two decades, working directly with the streets, where the uptick in the age of homeless youths has brought with it a striking increase in the severity of the needs.
“We’re seeing people with acute mental illness,” Lundberg said. “Folks just aren’t going to need a short intervention; this is going to be a long journey for them. We’re seeing a lot of suicidality, a lot of cutting, And while we’ve certainly seen that kind of thing historically, it seems to our staff, and throughout the continuum, that it’s much more overt. It’s like we’re seeing a lot of people hurting for long periods of time. There’s very little chance of reconciliation with family. Those bridges have been burned. Folks who don’t have a lot of skill sets for work, their challenges for employment are going to be tough. There’s often dual diagnosis, severely mentally ill but also self-medicating with alcohol or drugs.”
Executive Director Dennis Morrow has been at the helm of Janus since 1980.
Morrow is emphatic that the issue be reframed to put the onus on society, not the child.
“There’s not a single kid on the street who woke up one morning at age 13 or 15 and said, I think this is the way I want to live the rest of my life. It might have been the choice they were given, but it’s not a choice they made,” Morrow said.
“If you want to look at the underlying reason for youth homelessness, you’ve got to say it’s a massive failure of our families and our family systems in this country. But nobody wants to do that, so it’s a lot easier to just say they’re doing it to themselves, that’s what they wanted, they’re getting what they deserve.
“To fix it, you have to look at what’s broken,” Morrow said. “And it’s not the kid.”
Morrow said his organization has found that if they can connect with a youth on the street, build a relationship, and get them to a point where they accept case management, the system works.
“If you’re able to get a homeless youth into housing with appropriate back-up services — mental health, substance abuse help, employment — they have an astronomically high rate of retaining that. We’re talking 85%-plus retention.”
And by Morrow’s calculations, getting youths off the streets saves taxpayers millions of dollars each year.
“When people say, why should we spend all this money on youth? Well, hello: That is your next generation of homelessness,” Morrow said. “It doesn’t end adult homelessness if you keep the youth out of it, but every youth you keep off of the street — we’re like the farm team. As a society, we’re growing kids up to be in that system, in the adult homeless system. And once they’re there, getting them out is much harder.”
To that end, Lundberg notes there’s been significant progress upstream, in identifying and responding to risk factors and trauma in youths, better training around sex trafficking, earlier interventions, and success leveraging resources for more housing-first options for youths. But there are still problems with resources, such as lack of options for people living with a mental illness or the oppression of social attitudes, such as families disassociating with youths who come out as LGBTQ+. Nationally, an estimated 30% to 40% of youths on the streets are LBGTQ+.
“Just that group of youth walking out on to the street, they’re at risk as soon as they step out the door,” Morrow said. “I think the services are designed in away that are open and supportive, but the world isn’t yet.”
Althea Seloover is the director of investigation and prisoner support for Youth Justice Project of the Oregon Justice Resource Center. She works on cases from the initial trial level up to with individuals who have served decades behind bars for crimes they committed while they were juveniles. In her work, she hears about the childhood dynamics of people now in their 40s and 50s, as well as the recent experiences of youths today who get caught up in the criminal justice system.
“What I’ve seen really consistently is that prior to becoming justice-system involved, kids are either couch surfing or they’ve hit some sort of head,” Seloover said, describing a host of dynamics, including children who are disruptive to the family and parents who can’t care for their children because they have their own struggles.
“In the cases I’ve worked on, it’s usually at least 80% of kids that have experienced some homelessness prior to becoming justice-system involved.”
Again, the issue of fitting in, of having a place in the community, comes up.
“Oftentimes there is a desire to be a part of something,” Seloover said of the juveniles she’s worked with. “A desire to belong. So when you have these dynamics of instability, homelessness, transiency going on, then you oftentimes end up hanging out with other kids who are in similar positions.”
Juveniles in the criminal justice system who age out of the Oregon Youth Authority but still have time on their sentence go into adult incarceration under the Department of Corrections.
“And when they get released, wherever they’re at in terms of outside support, employment skills, et cetera, that’s where they’re at. It’s absolutely not uncommon for folks to be released to a shelter or to Oxford housing, which still has that element of transiency.” Seloover said. The Oxford House model is a shared living arrangement that focuses on addiction recovery and sobriety.
Resiliency, hope and trust are words that often come up when you talk with people who work with children at risk. The resiliency of the youths themselves, the hope that they have for the future, and the trust it takes to help them realize their potential.
Morrow, with Janus Youth, believes that with positive development, all youths have the inner resources to do good for themselves.
Seloover believes that progress can be made if the successes in earlier intervention were supported by adequate resources and curiosity — curiosity to ask the questions and better understand why children are acting the way they are, so their needs are better met.
Corradine, with Friends of the Children, said success looks different for different youths, and that the deficiencies of the system don’t outweigh the potential inside each child. Corradine said he trusts young people, and it’s the adults’ responsibility to set them up to be successful.
“Who’s breaking the cycle? They are. Who are the innovators? Who’s going to do all that? They are,” Corradine said of the children. “Put them in a position to be the leaders that will disrupt and break that cycle. That’s what we see, every day.”
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org; follow her on Twitter @jozuhl
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