San Francisco Builds Housing for City’s Hard-to-Find Homeless Youth and Young Adults
Feature Article, November 2013 Newsletter
Sleeping on San Francisco streets, twenty-year old Adamar discovered a few things, like a 4am Sprinkler system that woke him one morning in the park outside City Hall. Adamar also discovered Larkin Street Youth Services HIRE UP employment program for homeless young people, and hasn’t slept on the streets since.
Adamar and San Francisco’s nearly 5,700 young people who are homeless or marginally housed are not only hard to house, but also hard to find and identify in the first place—often living off the grid. However, Coco Auerswald and Jess Lin at the Berkeley School of Public Health have teamed up with the City government in order to make the annual, required Homeless Count more effective to track down and identify where young homeless people are, and how many the City needs to connect to education or employment through programs like HIRE UP with a place to live.
Auerswald and Lin are interested in improving California’s homeless youth count numbers. They are currently working on two projects, one technical assistance for communities across California working to improve their counts of youth, and another small project on developing experimental methods to count youth in San Francisco.
Auerswald said finding youth on homeless count is really critical. “Young people need to be included in the homeless count,” Auerswald said, “in order to make their experiences visible and to help policymakers address their housing issues.”
The federal government requires San Francisco and all counties to conduct annual counts of its homeless populations to inform agencies how much money to give for homeless services. This year was the first time the federal government required jurisdictions to report homeless TAY separately from homeless adults.
“We know some jurisdictions like San Francisco now have better numbers of homeless youth and young adults,” said Auerswald and Lin, “but other places struggled more with meeting the new requirement.”
Auerswald and Lin’s state-wide evaluation of local district’s homeless count measures found that most counties in California under-counted the number of homeless young people in their jurisdiction. “About two-thirds of California jurisdictions counted less than ten minors in the streets,” said Lin, “and most did not have a youth-focused homeless count.”
This year was the first time the federal government required jurisdictions to report homeless TAY separately from homeless adults. In San Francisco’s 2011 homeless count, only 38 unaccompanied minors were identified. Homeless youth are often more difficult to identify as they often don’t co-mingle with the adult homeless population, congregate in different areas of the city, are less likely to respond to adult surveyors and may not consider themselves homeless. A more intentional strategy in the 2013 Point-in-Time Count identified 914 homeless youth in San Francisco.
But the state-wide evaluation also showed many practices that helped communities to better include youth in their counts and to get a better sense of what type of people on the street. “San Francisco has been a leading place for advocating for youth needs,” said Auerrsald, “and being really innovative and responsive to issues around homelessness,” including having young people involved by employing them to count other young people, and surveying their peers. A number of other communities worked with youth themselves to get input on where and when the count should take place, and what survey questions would be appropriate for young people.
Auerswald and Lin are now working on a technical assistance project with the California Homeless Youth Project to share the best practices from their evaluation, and will be collaborating with communities across the state to help them include some of these best practices in their next counts.
Both plan to support the San Francisco’s 2015 youth count as part of our statewide technical assistance project. They are interested in developing more experimental methods to count youth, using more inclusive and broad criteria of what constitutes a homeless youth or young adult. Their new experimental count wouldn’t replace the federal count, but it could be helpful for local planning.
“Our goal is to create a local count that includes youth who are literally homeless by the federal definition,” said Auerswald, “but also helps San Francisco to get a better sense of the needs in our city by including young people who are unstably housed, couch surfing, etc.”
Though the homeless count denotes a need that is nothing new, the City has taken several steps forward to address this need. Seven years ago, the Mayor’s Transitional Age Youth Task Force highlighted the pressing need of housing for TAY, and tasked the Mayor’s Office of Housing to create a TAY housing plan out of workgroup made up of services providers, young people, Human Services Agency and Department of Public Health.
“It’s really important to get community needs into the City’s housing plan and how we focus our dollars,” Anne Romero at the Mayor’s Office of Housing said. “Because of the Mayor’s Transitional Age Youth Task Force, the needs of TAY housing are in the current plan.”
The goal was 400 additional housing units for TAY by 2012, which was then combined and consolidated with the City’s housing plan for 2015. Originally, the TAY housing work group didn’t think 400 units for TAY would solve the problem, according to Romero, but it was definitely achievable.
Since then, Romero says the City has identified additional 220 units units. Of those, 95 units have been completed, 92 are in active pre-development, and 32 units are in pre-development. These units include large TAY housing projects like the Edward II hotel, Booker T. Washington community center, and Aarti Hotel in Tenderloin, on top of TAY units newly slated for Ocean Avenue and 5th and Harrison sites.
The Community Housing Partnership agency that will develop the building at 374 5th Street, at the corner of Harrison, will create 44 units of TAY housing and the agency also has plans in early 2014 to convert a 2,800 square foot commercial space at the site into a training and development center for its workforce programs for youth.
Both the Bevan Dufty the Mayor’s Point person on Homelessness and Youth Commissioner Mia TuMuch lauded the 5th Street project promise for San Francisco’s TAY earlier this year in the Bay Area Reporter.
“The job training center in the building, I think, is going to be a real game changer for young people,” said Dufty in the Bay Area Reporter. “The mayor is very committed to expanding housing for TAY youth.”
Other City projects for TAY housing are making progress. A lawsuit challenging the Booker T. Washington environmental approval delayed the construction of 24 TAY housing units for two years, yet construction should begin shortly. The Edward II hotel project of 24 TAY housing units should also break ground later this month. The City has also slated 25 TAY housing units at housing project on Ocean Avenue near City College.