Youth Homelessness Is Giving Many of Us an Unequal Start to Adulthood

Take a moment to remember the exhilaration of turning 18. What did you dream of becoming? What identities and relationships felt newly possible? The first moments of adulthood bring the freedom to carve out our new selves, while processes like college applications, dorm life, and living alone act as invitations to self-discovery. At the same time, this transitional period is challenging and expensive. Some young people have the privilege of financial and family support to navigate it, while others lack such resources and are simply focused on survival.

While all young Americans embark on the journey of adulthood, their starting points are far from equal. Consider this: one out of every four foster youth, upon leaving the foster system, finds themselves grappling with homelessness within four years, and one out of every ten youth from the general population face such adversity annually. Instead of envisioning dorm life or exciting career prospects, these individuals confront the daunting reality of instability and the solitary struggle for shelter. The circumstances of one’s birth are beyond their control, yet the inequality in opportunities becomes starkly evident as they step into adulthood. At 18, American youth are already set on paths that can significantly shape their futures; homelessness is a formidable challenge that impedes the transition into adulthood.

Each year, 4.2 million youth and young adults experience homelessness in the United States, including 700,000 unaccompanied minors. Think again about your own eighteenth birthday. How many of us, with the luxury of family support and a safety net to fall back on, could honestly say we had it all figured out by then?

Take Allie and Mike,¹ two cousins who had contrasting experiences in terms of family support. Allie, raised in a supportive family with ample resources, received guidance as she prepared for college, help with shopping for dorm room decor, and a celebratory family trip before embarking on this new chapter. Her first steps in adulthood followed a classic formula that teachers, movies, and adults in general tell kids will guarantee future success. Mike’s story was different. Raised by a single parent with limited resources, he faced a harsh reality. When Mike turned 18, he was left scrambling to find shelter and secure basic necessities after his mother abandoned him.

While one cousin enjoyed the luxury of familial support, the other had to skip meals and walk miles to work just to make ends meet, with only himself to rely on. This stark contrast is not unique: not only do one in ten young people in the United States face homelessness, but half of all young people facing housing instability have had some sort of encounter with the child welfare system. Not having a family or social network during the years of transition into independence has a profound and devastating effect.

What so many take for granted is that for many young adults, the pursuit of secondary education and independent living, even of self-discovery, are processes someone who loves them has committed to paying for.

The reason inequality worsens during young adulthood is that 84 percent of young adults aged 18–24 are financially dependent on their parents’ help for expenses like household bills and cell phone costs. According to Pew Research Center, 69 percent report that their parents provide support and advice on jobs, finances, and health. That leaves 16 percent of young Americans in radically different circumstances than their peers. Additionally, according to data from Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, U.S. parents spend a total of $500 billion annually on their adult children, with the largest expenses being groceries and food ($54 billion) and cell phone service ($18 billion); typically, parents are covering the full cost their children’s bills. What so many take for granted is that for many young adults, the pursuit of secondary education and independent living, even of self-discovery, are processes someone who loves them has committed to paying for. In my work at Next100, I will be fighting to build policies that support the young people who have only themselves.

The Roots of Youth Homelessness

To better understand the problem, let’s take a look at some of the core causes of youth homelessness. Few of them on their own are especially unique to this population: rather, the culprit is the multiplicative effect of different kinds of instability from an early age.

First, let’s discuss the definition of “youth,” at least as it pertains to policy and law. But before even engaging with the assigned definitions, we must first acknowledge the inadequacy of both the terms selected and the lens through which the definitions have been approached. As with official definitions of “homelessness” itself, the terms are far too narrow to usefully describe the variance and instability of most experiences.

With that said, we must still engage with the status quo definitions before we can change them. And in the case of “youth,” in federal support programs, the bracket usually begins at 14, is always inclusive up until the age of 18, and is conditionally inclusive beyond that, usually to the age of 24.

Youth housing instability typically begins with early family disruption, which can take many, frequently overlapping forms. It can start with childhoods marred by family separation or instability, trauma, loss of a caregiver through death or incarceration, economic hardship, or eviction; and structural disadvantages, such as systemic racism, take their toll as well, setting the stage for a lifetime of instability. Limited support systems and the skyrocketing cost of housing makes it nearly impossible for many young adults without the support of family wealth or other assistance to find and maintain a place to call home. Low wages and a lack of access to affordable child care, mental health services, or job training exacerbate the problem and create a perfect storm, pushing young adults out of the workforce and into, or even further into, housing insecurity.

The weight of student loan debt only worsens matters, further squeezing a young person’s ability to afford rent and basic necessities. Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity add another layer of difficulty, restricting access to safe and affordable housing for already vulnerable young people. Compounding all of the above is the emotional toll of loss. A study revealed that 35 percent of homeless youth experienced the death of at least one parent or primary caregiver. This significant personal loss can destabilize family structures, limit financial resources, and leave young people feeling unsupported as they enter adulthood.

The disparity in family support further exacerbates the situation. While 67 percent of young adults receive some level of assistance from their families, when family can’t be relied on, little or nothing is available to fill the gap. So when parents or guardians are not present in a young person’s life, youth often lack this safety net. This vulnerability can make them more susceptible to exploitation, with some studies suggesting that 40 to 70 percent of homeless youth may engage in survival sex work to meet their basic needs.

Figure 1

For most of the young people struggling with these variables of instability, legal adulthood is the point at which matters come to a head and homelessness enters the picture as well. Emerging adulthood is a crucial period when essential skills like financial literacy and self-sufficiency are honed, but the foundation for this development crumbles when basic needs like secure housing are unmet. The statistics paint a stark picture of the consequences: out of 34,703 unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness, the vast majority (90.6 percent) fell within the age range of 18 to 24, with 9.3 percent being under 18 years of age. That’s thousands of people stepping out not into exciting new opportunities, but into an abyss.

The depiction of homelessness in the mainstream media does not skew towards the representation of young people, nor are practices like couch-surfing or moving between friends’ houses particularly visible to the outside world. Bias and ignorance collaborate to create an invisible crisis. A lack of support for a real problem is being compounded by the rising frequency of youth homelessness, and no corresponding increase in public awareness.

The Foster System-to-Homelessness Pipeline

Issues of housing instability are particularly challenging for youth with foster system experience. For many young adults in the United States, the promised “best years yet” often turn into their worst nightmares, where they confront the world alone and afraid. The struggle to secure housing and meet basic needs is a daunting reality, often not by choice but by circumstance, as supportive social networks and access to essentials remain out of reach. The foster system has rarely intervened in this cycle. What foster youth share is not the benefits of public intervention, but an unspoken language of struggle and resilience in spite of its absence.

What foster youth share is not the benefits of public intervention, but an unspoken language of struggle and resilience in spite of its absence.

In “Missed Opportunities in Youth Pathways Through Homelessness,” a University of Chicago study of 215 youth ages 13–25, ninety-four had histories of the foster system and astonishingly, for 44 percent of them, entry into the foster system marked the beginning of housing instability. Rather than being a source of stability, the foster care experience often results in chronic disruptions in relationships as youth navigate various surrogate family systems, often feeling disconnected from the stable support that familial bonds provide.

Pathways into homelessness for youth exiting out of care, though, are non-linear. Mine certainly was not. After seven years in the Oregon state foster system, I was adopted as a teenager, yet still found myself homeless at 18. My journey wasn’t the typical “ aging out” narrative: I ended up relying on short-term, temporary stays with friends and acquaintances and even lived at a retirement home, befriending gray-haired women who have become a chosen family.

For me, the primary cause of my homelessness was the absence of post-adoption financial support when I turned 18, as well as a lack of any regular check-ins to ensure I had what I needed to finish out my senior year of high school. The child welfare system assumed the adoption would provide permanency and then disengaged altogether, leaving me vulnerable. This neglectful pattern is echoed in research like University of Chicago’s “Missed Opportunities” report, represented by stories like Alanna’s, who spent seven years in the foster care system in Philadelphia before being reunited with her mother. Unfortunately, her mother’s mental health challenges resulted in an abusive household, and the system provided no support or post-reunification services to ensure her safety and well-being. We need a system that does not neglect, but support: her story as well as mine highlight the system’s failure to ensure safety and meet basic needs after reunification.

Moreover, I never received the financial means to meet my basic needs, and I lost my health insurance as well. I also found myself struggling to secure shelter amidst the scarcity. The reality is that turning 18 doesn’t instantly make anyone a capable adult who can figure everything out. According to a USA Today study, the majority of parents in the United States don’t expect young people to achieve financial independence until age 24, and in places like New York, families often set this expectation at 26. How does society expect us to manage on our own when we lack the financial means and support networks that many of our peers rely on?

How does society expect us to manage on our own when we lack the financial means and support networks that many of our peers rely on?

The bottom line is clear: this is a ubiquitous, invisible crisis that demands concrete change. And in my policy work at Next100, I will be focusing on a solution that puts the power directly into young people’s hands.

Cash Transfer Provides the Policy Paradigm Shift We Need

There are no quick policy fixes to the problem of inequality among young Americans. That said, a key element that has been missing from the status quo are policies that empower youth directly—not through proxies, not if they jump through the right bureaucratic hoops at exactly the right time, but policies that simply give them what they need, no strings attached. That’s what a good family does, right? To that end, an emerging approach of directly providing cash to young people, along with, but not on the condition of participation in supportive services, has demonstrated its efficiency and flexibility in empowering them to meet their basic needs and address housing challenges—and thereby break the cycles of despair.

During the pandemic, Congress allocated $400 million to states for what became known as Foster Youth to Independence programs, and we saw how effective it was when young people were given funds and the trust to use them as they needed. This funding allowed many young people to receive crucial cash assistance during times of crisis, and during a time when over half of their young adult peers returned home—a safety net unavailable to those aging out of the foster system or facing housing instability after a job loss. Redirecting these funds to support the most vulnerable had a significant impact. Approximately 40,000 foster youth gained access to resources, and eligibility criteria were broadened, benefiting more individuals. These redirected funds were instrumental in preventing youth from losing housing and ending up in the streets. The funds also extended financial assistance to include former foster youth up to age 24 and were a lot looser in eligibility rules, which allowed many people to get the support they needed.

Another example of redirecting funds in order to provide them directly to youth themselves can be seen in the states that have implemented pilot cash transfer programs. These pilots have transformed the opportunities available to these states’ young people. In Oregon, 63 percent of youth found stable housing after just six months of receiving direct cash transfers in one pilot program. The parallel to the familial relationship that young adults typically experience bears repeating here. The simple fact is that the policy of direct cash transfers mirrors the realities in countless homes today, in which parents provide whatever housing, food, and other financial assistance to their children that they can manage, and in exchange for minimal or no obligation. To underline the data to this effect already provided above, take a recent Pew Research study, which found that nearly 60 percent of young adults receive financial support from their parents, offering them a crucial safety net that is not available to all youth in all circumstances. Similar direct cash transfer pilot programs are underway in Washington, New York, Maryland, and California—all these states are making progress in centering young peoples’ voices, and have reaped the rewards of employing research-backed methods.

The simple fact is that the policy of direct cash transfers mirrors the realities in countless homes today, in which parents provide whatever housing, food, and other financial assistance to their children that they can manage, and in exchange for minimal or no obligation.

Family disruption creates gaps in the resources of vulnerable young people, but we can help to fill the holes with policies like cash transfer that respect the autonomy of young people to allocate their own funds—just the same way as a supportive parent with ample resources might support their child.

Ending the Pipeline

Investing in these young adults isn’t just the right thing to do: it’s essential for the well-being of our communities. While significant challenges remain—such as limited funding for youth-specific programs—by providing young people with the resources and support they need, we empower them to break the cycle of poverty and trauma, achieve their full potential, and contribute to a thriving society.

I’m convinced that prevention programs like direct cash transfers will make massive inroads on ending the pipeline of childhood to adulthood homelessness. Stay tuned for more of my research and analysis on why that is, and how we can go about making them a reality.

1. Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.