Chapin Hall

Every day, teenagers and young adults in the United States face housing instability. We know that even brief periods of homelessness can disrupt progress for young people at key developmental periods in their lives, keeping them from fulfilling their potential.

In 2016, Chapin Hall interviewed 215 young people ages 13-25 experiencing homelessness across five diverse counties in the U.S. One of those counties was Cook County, where Chicago is located. From the 40 youth we interviewed there, we learned what contributed to and what could have prevented their homelessness.

All of our interviews began with this question: “If you were to think about your experiences with housing instability as a story, where does your story begin?” The death of a parent or caregiver was named by 45% of the youth in Cook County – a higher rate than at any other sites where we conducted interviews.  For too many youth, a parent or primary caregiver death left them to meet their basic needs alone.

Here’s what else we learned from Cook County youth:

• Black youth disproportionately experience homelessness; 60% of the youth interviewed in Cook County were African American, while 65% of the homeless youth identified during a Cook County point-in-time count were African American.
• 40% had been physically harmed by someone.
• More than half of the youth with child welfare histories named entrance into foster care of the beginning of their own homelessness.
• Just under one-fourth of participants experienced family homelessness.
• LGBTQA youth, foster youth, and youth with juvenile justice histories had experienced more adversity.
• For many, homelessness began at 18 when parents expected them to be financially independent. Turning 18 was a high-risk period.
• Youth from Cook County had higher rates of high school diploma/GED attainment (70%) than youth in other counties, but reported having to choose between continuing their education and remaining unstably housed or working low-skill, low-wage jobs.

Overall, young people made it clear that they didn’t see homelessness as a single event, but rather as resulting from chronic struggles related to poverty, family instability, addiction, and mental illness. And their accounts of homelessness point to persistent instability and loss starting in early childhood.

We can do better for Cook County’s youth. Each of these findings from youth interviews points to an intervention, a prevention strategy, or a needed policy change or service. When asked what they needed to achieve stability, the young people had answers: affordable housing, living-wage jobs, education, counseling, and informal supports.

Since Bryan Samuels became Executive Director of Chapin Hall in 2013, he has elevated work to end youth homelessness. He developed the approach to the seminal body of research, Voices of Youth Count, which defined the prevalence and conditions of housing instability for young people in the United States. The work explores, through the experiences of young people, what leads to homelessness, what young people do to survive, and what can be done to prevent youth homelessness.

In this six-minute video, Bryan Samuels provides an overview of Chapin Hall’s findings about youth homelessness in Cook County. In these findings are the seeds to solutions.

To share information about characteristics of Chicago youth experiencing homelessness, we invite you to download and share these data visualizations:

Many Youth Experiencing Homelessness are Parents Download	Youth Experiencing Homelessness Who are LGBTQA Download
Many Youth Experiencing Homelessness Have Been in Foster Care or Juvenile Detention Download	Majority of Youth Experiencing Homelessness are Black Download

Download One-Pager on Youth Homelessness in Cook County

For more information about our work on youth homelessness, please contact Dr. Amy Dworsky.