Youth Homelessness

Youth homelessness is defined in various terms across the United States. For instance, federal law describes homeless youth as any minor who “lack(s) a fixed, regular, and nighttime residence” which has been expanded by federal legislation to include youth age 21 and younger (M. A. Rahman, Turner, & Elbedour, 2015, p. 690). By contrast, California law applies to youth up to the age of 24. While this leads to fragmented research, there are two consistent trends: occurrence in youth and a lack of stable housing. Distinctions are sometimes made between youth accompanied by parents versus unaccompanied youth, although even when making this distinction researchers are inconsistent in their use of terminology, classification and description. Although this paper defines homeless youth in broad terms to address the inconsistencies amongst the literature, the analysis is focused on unaccompanied homeless minors and young adults in a variety of unstable housing conditions. This includes youth dwelling in shelters, couch surfing, and living on the streets.

By the 1980s, widespread appreciation of the existence of youth homelessness began to take hold, resulting in an acceleration in the documentation and study of this social issue. However, prior to this estimates of homeless youth across time are not well documented, reflecting the fluid nature of this social problem, as well as the differing levels of social awareness (Murphy & Tobin, 2014). “In addition, youth are harder to identify on the streets than adults because they try to blend in with non-homeless peers, resist being identified as homeless, and often choose not to use services available to them” (Narendorf, Santa Maria, Ha, Cooper, & Schieszler, 2016, p.