CityHallNews.com

Now For the Count
How many kids are sleeping on our streets? That's the $50,000 question

By Becca Tucker

They don't push shopping carts filled with their worldly belongings and you won't trip over them sprawled on the sidewalk. Unless they're holding a cardboard sign announcing that they're broke and would like your change, the tens of thousands of kids in our city who don't have a bed of their own blend in pretty well with those who do. This spring, fifty outreach programs in all five boroughs are teaming up to count, as best they can, the "street-involved youth" - travelers, runaways, throwaways, couch surfers, orphans, kids who turn tricks for a place to sleep - hidden in plain view.

This has been done before, in Las Vegas, Denver, Seattle, and across the river in Camden, Trenton and Jersey City, but never on this scale. While the entire state of New Jersey is home to an estimated 13,000 homeless youth, New York City alone has somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand, depending on whose outdated guesstimate you use.

"I'm sure that Cleveland doesn't get as many kids getting off the bus in their Port Authority, coming to find fame and fortune, as we do here in New York," says Lewis Fidler (D-Brooklyn), chair of the City Council's Youth Services Committee. "There's no question that some of these kids, we're going to find, are not native New Yorkers. Do we have more of these kids than our population has generated? Probably. And I think that's why it behooves us to do more about it."

To that end, the Council allocated an additional $2.6 million for shelter beds serving homeless youth this year, and $50,000 to a nonprofit called the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services to conduct the survey.

No one was more surprised than the Empire State Coalition.

Homeless youth have access to information without which the survey would never get off the ground: they know where to find their friends.

"We'd been talking about it for awhile," said Margo Hirsch, the coalition's executive director. "We wrote a letter to City Council just saying, 'Oh, we've been thinking about doing this,' and the next thing we know, they put it in the budget!"

"No notice, no negotiations," says the other half of the Empire State Coalition, project director James Bolas. It was just, "We're giving you this to do this.'"

Fortunately, they already had a model for the survey - developed by a New School professor - that had already proven successful in New Jersey. They also had a virtual army of nonprofits appointed to act as their manpower. Called the New York City Association of Homeless and Street-Involved Youth Organizations, the task force includes every major homeless youth outreach program in the city. At the last planning meeting, they ran out of room when sixty people showed up to brainstorm.

Canvassing the streets will be a massive volunteer effort, but even so, everyone involved seems to agree that $50,000 is not enough money - not even close.

"We're trying to do this on a budget that is 10 percent of the normal budget for these kinds of counts," says Hirsch. "The state undertook a thirteen-county count of sexually exploited youth, and that was a $500,000 budget for a six-month project. John Jay is doing a citywide look at sexually exploited youth, and I think their budget is like $500,000. We're trying to do something on $50,000 that other people are struggling with on $500,000."

"Could you do it better for 100 than 50? Yeah. Could you do it better for 200 than 100? Yeah," acknowledges Fidler. "But that didn't seem to be an overriding concern of the task force when they met. They were pretty happy, you know, this is first-time funding. They were pretty happy for it to be acknowledged that this is a critical issue in the city."

The bulk of the $50,000 will go toward data storage and analysis. Hirsch and Bolan are not being paid beyond what they normally make. Only a few thousand dollars will be left for the gift cards and food vouchers that will serve as an incentive to young people to complete the survey, and as a thank-you to the homeless "peer educators" who will be out canvassing the streets.

"One of our goals would be to be able to provide stipends so that it is worth young people's time," says Hirsch. "Whether they're volunteering to do it or not, their time is valuable, so we're trying to find the additional money to get those stipends." The Empire State Coalition is applying to Columbia for "a few dollars," and they are stretching every last dollar by looking for deals on vouchers and gift cards.

Reaching out to homeless youth volunteers is the only way to do anything like a comprehensive count on the budget the Association has been given.

Time and money for training is limited, and kids who have lived on the street have already got the street savvy they will need to stay safe late at night in dangerous areas, and will have an easier time developing a rapport with the youth they are going to be questioning.

"To train someone, a stranger, to go out - it's dicey, it's risky, for them and for the young people," says Bolan.

Homeless youth also have access to information without which the survey would never get off the ground: they know where to find their friends. "We really want to use a peer model," explains Bolan, "because they're going to know where their friends are. So it's not just a program count, because that's been done before, and it doesn't catch them all."

They call it "snowballing" - the process by which youth who are in the system identify their peers outside the system. This is the only way to find the "invisible" homeless kids who are doing just well enough that they have not been compelled to seek out services or sleep in shelters, who would otherwise slip through their web.

"It's really hard to identify them because they don't look homeless, they don't sleep on the street, they maybe don't even go to programs sometimes," says Theresa Nolan, New York City's director of runaway and homeless youth services at Green Chimneys, which was founded in 2000 to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. (Twenty-five to 40 percent of the city's homeless youth population identifies as LGBTQ, according to a 1996 study by the National Development and Research Institutes.) "So you can't even count them through program attendance. They're just kind of figuring out their way around."

"They're couch surfing, or they're staying with a trick," explains David Nish, associate vice president of Safe Horizon's Streetwork project for homeless youth. "So it's not like you can go to the shelter - young people don't necessarily want to go to adult shelters, so you can't be counted in that way." Nish points out that counting any homeless, youth or adult, is tricky. "You're trying to figure out how you can get an accurate and meaningful count when every moment, things change."

Whether they are headed cross country or uptown, the particularly transient nature of homeless youth poses the logistical issue of double-counting. "It's both ends of it: the ones we can't find, and then the ones we find repeatedly," says Nolan. The Association is playing with the idea of giving each survey participant a "unique identifier," like a number, so that they will remain anonymous, but if they are encountered at multiple locations they will not be counted more than once.

Dates have yet to be set, but the survey will likely span between ten days and two weeks in late spring - partly because the Association needs time to synch up all the moving parts, and partly because that is when the population is actually at its most stable.

"It's not quite summer, so they haven't sort of hit the road, those who are travelers," explained Bolan. "It's not winter, so they're not, you know, hunkered down on someone's sofa, or in a basement or whatever."

The social service workers who spend every day with homeless kids have a pretty good idea of what the survey will show. They have known for a long time that there are thousands more kids on the streets than the public is aware of; that some of them aged out of foster care at 18, before they were ready to live on their own; that many of them engage in survival sex for food or a place to stay; that today's 21-year-olds are not ready to be lumped in with adults in shelters; that there are 24-year-olds who have experienced trauma who still jump up and down at the sight of a teddy bear.

"I think that the difficulty is, it's sort of like preaching to the choir," says Nolan. "It's the people that really care about this who know that it's a really huge problem, but the people that don't know about it don't know." Yet.