1. LA Families and Youth Conference
Nan Roman, Keynote Remarks
February 8, 2012
Welcome to the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ National Conference on Ending
Family and Youth Homelessness, and thank all of you for coming. We deeply appreciate that
you have taken the time to come here and hopefully it will recharge your batteries, give you
some new ideas, reaffirm you in what you are doing that is working, and energize you for the
future.
When we first started this families conference it was because, as happy as we were about
the progress in framing and elevating the issue of chronic homelessness, we were concerned
that homeless families were not getting enough attention. We started holding this conference
as part of our strategy to build the case for ending family homelessness: to examine and expand
the data and research; to strengthen the network of people working together to advance the
goal; to help identify the growing portfolio of best practices and help people adopt them; and
ultimately to bring the attention to the topic that was needed to reduce the number of
homeless families in the nation.
That was a challenging goal, but I think you have accomplished a tremendous amount. The
profile of family homelessness has been raised; a framework for ending family homelessness
has emerged and been widely adopted; and despite the difficult economic environment,
progress has been made.
With respect to youth, we are in some ways where we were on families eight or nine years
ago. Youth homelessness is acknowledged to be a significant and serious problem, but very
little progress has been made over the past years in terms of raising its profile, clarifying the
path forward nationally, attracting resources, or reducing the numbers. That must change.
And we at the Alliance believe that to make that happen, we need to start with a clear
framework for ending it that sizes the problem, and lays out the solutions. So at this
conference we are going to start that process.
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2. But I will begin with families. This remains a very challenging time for vulnerable families.
In addition to incomes going down, housing prices are rising and likely to continue to do so.
State and locally funde d support services are being cut, and federally-funded assistance will
increasingly also be cut. There have been increases in homelessness among families, but these
appear to have been moderated by the availability of the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-
Housing Program (HPRP) money.
I want to say a few things about HPRP funds. They are of course almost gone. What did we
learn from the $1.5 billion devoted to prevention and re-housing? First, we know that a
substantial amount of the money went to prevention. We know very little in detail about the
effectiveness of this, and based on what we do know, it does not appear that the funds were
always as well targeted as they might have been. The characteristics of people who receive
prevention assistance should, logically, mirror those of families that are actually in shelter;
otherwise the prevention families probably would not likely have become homeless. And there
are too many places where the eligibility criteria for those receiving prevention funds were far
too high. On the other hand, the number of homeless families nationally did not go up during
HPRP, so overall it seems to have worked even if the impacts might have been greater had we
targeted more effectively.
In terms of re-housing, the success of that is clearer. Where there is data, it looks good,
with only a small minority of families returning to homelessness after receiving assistance, at
least in the short run.
In any case, HPRP is going away, and this gives us great concern for the future. Not only will
we lose our HPRP funds, but federal funds generally are also going to start shrinking. Need will
remain high and possibly increase as the cascading set of problems associated with the poor
economy plays out for families and youth. More are likely to become homeless, and indeed
this is already happening in many places.
Based upon what we have learned, how should we think about family homelessness and
what to do about it in an era of shrinking resources? Are there things that we can do so that we
leave fewer families un-served? Can we focus more on efficiency, effectiveness and targeting;
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3. proven ways to improve our impact? Can we do better at assessing more precisely what each
family needs? And since we know that it is impossible to precisely assess a family’s needs, can
we establish a fall back plan or process so that we catch those families for whom the initial
intervention is too “light.” We can try an intervention, and if it works, fine. But if it does not
work, we need to be prepared with the next step, and the next step, and the next step until the
family is stabilized. There is a name for this process, of course, which is progressive
engagement.
These are concepts that many of you will have heard before. At present, I think that they
have two major implications.
The first is that we are essentially talking about shifting from a program-level to a systems-
level approach. Assessment, assignment of people to particular interventions, the ability to
follow up – these are best accomplished at the system level. And of course, this is what
HEARTH Act implementation will also be advancing.
The second is that at both program and systems levels, we have to reassess whether we
have the proper array of models; whether we have enough of each of the models (or can get
there); and whether we are efficiently disbursing these models. This brings me to HPRP,
shelter, resources, and transitional housing.
We learned a few things from HPRP about rapid re-housing. One was that it works. It is not
perfect, and there has to be programming for those for whom it is not adequate. But it is
inexpensive and it works for the majority of people who receive it. It often works as well or
better, in terms of outcomes, than other types of homeless programs which are also
considerably more expensive. More expensive programs might be preferable or worth
considering, of course, if their outcomes were better, but this does not appear to be the case.
It is certainly true that we do not have extensive national data on rapid re-housing – rather
the data tends to be from individual cities (although its costs and outcomes are consistent).
Further, some say that the families being served by rapid re-housing programs are the easier-
to-serve families that communities think will benefit from a lighter touch. And I believe that is
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4. sometimes the case. But this is also true of transitional housing, which tends to have a high
threshold for entry, and a low tolerance for non-compliance with services, both of which work
against serving high-need families.
The point of this discussion is to say that in rapid re-housing we have a new intervention
that works to end homelessness for families, apparently very effectively and cost efficiently. In
fact, it outperforms the current system in many respects. The last thing we should do, as the
HPRP money runs out and we resume funding entirely from HUD Continuum of Care/HEARTH
and demand goes up, is to drop something that works well and serves more people and resume
doing things that are more expensive and less effective and threaten to leave more and more
families un-served. Where we can, we should be looking for places to shift resources and
activities to the rapid re-housing model, and many places and programs are already doing this.
Traditional transitional housing programming might then be used as a second stage for higher-
need people for whom rapid re-housing has not worked, in a progressive engagement system.
It is likely too expensive to be an initial or post-shelter intervention.
I want to mention one other reason it is important to be thinking about this. The recent
AHARs and point-in-time counts have identified around 40 percent of homeless people as being
unsheltered. We are not now meeting need and the need is going to go up. We cannot leave
more people out of our programs, especially if we think we have a way to help them. I would
also like to say that this is why we at the National Alliance to End Homelessness are not in favor
of HR 32, the bill the would expand the definition of homelessness to include all families that
are low income and doubled up. These families do have housing needs, but they are not
literally homeless and we already have more literally homeless families than we can help.
There are a few other observations I would like to make about rapid re-housing. First, it will
change and get better as we learn more about it. Second, there certainly has been an
inclination in communities to provide rapid re-housing money only to those who had a job or
otherwise seemed able to get right back on their feet. Families with more problems were
screened out. However, there is increasing evidence that more complicated families do just
fine with rapid re-housing. Third, there is no disconnect between doing rapid re-housing and
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5. providing people with services. There are many models for linking rapid re-housing with
services – transition in place, critical time intervention, ongoing case management, etc. Rapid
re-housing and services are not opposing goals. They are congenial.
The bottom line, as we move forward with HEARTH, the new ESG and tightening money, we
have an effective new tool with rapid re-housing and we should do more of it, not less; we
should do this in the context of a progressive engagement system so that there are options like
transitional housing immediately on hand for those for whom rapid re-housing does not work;
and we should use the savings to help more families and provide better services. The idea is to
be smarter, better, and leave fewer families behind – not to do less and let families fail. We can
do better.
I would like to turn now to homeless youth. While good work has been done on youth
homelessness, we are not where we want to be on the issue. We have not had information
about the size of the homeless youth population; we have not had a typology; and we have not
had evidence as to what interventions worked better and for whom. As a result we have not
been able to create the will to go to scale and have not been able to increase resources
appreciably. Whether we have had any impact on the number of homeless youth is unclear, as
we lack the data to make such an assessment. This situation cannot continue.
I want to present to you a first attempt at a framework that can describe the scope of the
homeless youth problem. But first, I have a disclaimer. The numbers I am going to present are
not nearly as strong as we would like them to be. We know that they will improve and that as
they do we will have to refine this framework. So we welcome feedback and see this is a first
step.
How many homeless youth are there? The number you have probably heard over the years
is 1.7 million. This number comes from the NISMART – the National Incidence Studies of
Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Throwaway Children. The 1.7 million number, which was
based on a 1999 survey, includes children under 18 who are reported to be gone from home,
but who are not precisely homeless as we understand that word. Nevertheless, this is the
source of this number and it is an annual number.
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6. Looking in more depth at that number, we find that of this 1.7 million, 300,000 kids are
home within 24 hours and 1 million more are home with a week. That leaves 400,000, broadly
defined, who are homeless longer than a week.
Do we or should we concern ourselves with the 1.3 million who quickly return home?
Certainly some of these youth currently get assistance from our homeless youth programs, but
they can serve only about 50,000 youth a year. One way to analyze these numbers would be to
say that we have a gap in services, and that we need to be able to assist an additional one-and-
a-quarter million young people every year. An alternative way to look at it might be that 96
percent of these young people are going home more or less on their own within one week. We
certainly could do a better job helping them; and we certainly should do a better job helping
them. But the more intensive focus of our attention should probably be on those 400,000 who
need more help to go home, or who cannot go home, since clearly the 1.3 million are going to
go home no matter what we do or do not do.
Accordingly, we focused on the 400,000 who needed more help. To understand the
population better, we applied a new typology created by Dr. Paul Toro, a prominent researcher
on homelessness among children and youth. I should be clear that although Dr. Toro
developed the typology, the decision to apply it to the NISMART numbers was ours, and the
framework that follows is the responsibility of the Alliance. For those of you who want to know
more, Dr. Toro will present the typology and Samantha Batko from the Alliance will present the
framework at a workshop following this plenary.
Applying the typology to the 400,000 single unaccompanied youth, and adjusting so that
the typology is consistent with the annualized NISMART data, we arrived at the following.
o 85 percent, or 327,000, of the youth are still connected to school or home. We
called them “temporarily connected.” Two-thirds of them will return home within a
month.
o The remaining 15 percent (about 55,000) are “unstably connected” to school or
home, or “unconnected” (about evenly split).
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7. What should we do to end homelessness for these youth? While the Alliance often focuses
on housing as a solution to homelessness, housing does not appear to be the primary solution
for many under-18, unaccompanied youth. Since many of them will return home within a
month, and since all youth need some connection with a caring adult, it appears to us that a
primary strategy is to reconnect them to family. This family may not be the one they had been
living with and of course it must be safe. It does not appear to be a good idea to capture them
into housing programs, because this delinks them from the adult connections they already
have. The youth are going to go “home”; we should help them get there quickly and safely.
The small percentage of youth who have no connection to school or family and who will not
be able to go home also tends to have more significant disabilities. For them, permanent
housing or permanent supportive housing is probably a good option, recognizing that adult
connection will still be needed.
The typology and data described above relate to single unaccompanied youth under 18
years old. With respect to single unaccompanied youth aged 18 to 24 years, a different
approach and a different set of data are required. We sized this group using adjusted HMIS
data. By this means we identified 150,000 youth, but as this is the sheltered population only
we believe the number to be an underestimate. In terms of a typology, we applied the single
adult typology developed by Dr. Dennis Culhane to this population to see the dimension of the
need. Using this method, we found the following.
o About 80 percent, or 122,000, will have short, non-recurring spells of homelessness.
o About 20 percent will have episodic or long stays, about half of each. This is about
28,000 youth.
o For all these youth, although they are older, family intervention and reunification
would still be an important strategy, since they are still developing.
o With respect to housing, for the short term group rapid re-housing is likely a good
approach.
o For the longer-term episodic and chronic groups, rapid re-housing may also be
appropriate but many will need more intensive housing interventions. For the 10
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8. percent, or 15,000, who are “chronically” homeless, transition-in-place housing or
even permanent supportive housing should be considered.
Finally, we considered homeless families in which a parent is under 24. Such families
generally use the adult homeless family system. Approximately 25 percent of homeless families
in a year have a parent who is under 25. We can estimate that at around 150,000 people per
year (this includes children, so not all of these are technically youth). While the adult family
system largely meets their needs, maintaining connection to adults is still critically important.
Also, the Alliance has been working with several groups here in Los Angeles and elsewhere on a
young families initiative funded by the Hilton Foundation. This project has made it apparent
that specialized programming that young parents – who are themselves still developing – need
is rarely if ever available. We could do a much better job of programming for this significant
group.
To take this complex picture and try to summarize:
o Many youth leave home every year, but most of them go back more or less on their
own.
o It appears that somewhere around 550,000 single, unaccompanied youth do not go
home so quickly.
o Of those, however, around 450,000 remain connected in some way to family or
school, and in any case their homelessness episode will be reasonably brief. That
episode could be even shorter if they had help re-connecting with their families.
o For nearly 100,000 unaccompanied youth, issues are more serious. Their connection
to home or school is more tenuous or non-existent. About 40,000 of them probably
have some disability or more serious problem. These youth also would absolutely
benefit from help to connect with their families. The more chronic ones probably
also will require more permanent housing subsidies.
In short, the picture on unaccompanied homeless youth is similar in some ways to that of
homeless adults – most of those who become homeless go home fairly quickly, but a minority
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9. has more serious problems and stays homeless longer. The difference between adults and
youth appears to be in the solution.
With respect to young homeless families, we know that we are already failing to meet the
needs of all families, but the responses I discussed earlier, with the addition of developmental
programming and family intervention will help these young households.
There are a few other important things I want to mention about homeless youth. First, it
seems clear that LGBTQ kids have some different problems, that very little programming meets
their needs, and that generally we are doing an extraordinarily poor job of assisting them.
Second, this typology does not really address the sexual exploitation of youth as both a cause
and effect of their homelessness. Both of these are areas in which a tremendous amount
remains to be done, and the Alliance is committed to addressing them.
It must be noted that it is of particular concern that such a large number of young people
under 18 are homeless, given that there are large federal and state child welfare systems that
have the responsibility for these children. I know that many people at HHS are also very
concerned about this and working to improve that response. We will hear more from them
during the conference.
Finally, I want to reiterate the data on which we are building this framework is weak. We
have consulted quite a few researchers and they generally believe that our numbers are far too
large. I hope that they are right. Some of you may feel that they are too small. The bottom
line is that we must have better data. You are the source of better data. Get involved in your
Point-in-Time Counts. Use HMIS. Collect data on young families. Push your Continuums to
collect more data. We need knowledge to move forward.
To close, thanks to all of you who are prevailing in the most incredibly difficult and
challenging time. You are striving to improve your programs in a time of high demand and
shrinking resources, with little certainty about the future. We do have a steep hill ahead of us,
as I think things will get worse as HPRP ends. However, I see ways to move forward.
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10. Because of your hard and incredibly innovative work, every year we are discovering new
things that work better. We can build and implement a framework on how to end youth
homelessness. We can adopt smarter strategies to help families. We can move from program
to systems approaches so that we use our resources as wisely as possible. We can gather and
use more data and research – information is a strong weapon for us, and we will definitely be
doing battle over the coming years.
I know that we can prevail, because we must prevail. Thank you for being with us.
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