On Their Own

Youngsters without family support can easily go from foster care into homelessness

BY GABRIEL FRAYNE JR.

James Hayes doesn’t flinch when he remembers the day his Brazilian foster mother stabbed his face with a pair of dull scissors and then proceeded to pummel him when he wouldn’t stop crying. “Instead of being like, ‘Hey I’m sorry!’ she started hitting me and yelling at me and telling me to stop crying and this and that,” he recalls, not unmindful of the scars on either side of his mouth that are now his most visible reminder of his native Brazil. “So I stopped because I didn’t want to get hit anymore, my mouth hurt. And then she put salt and vinegar on it, and that really hurt.”

About a year later James was adopted by an American family from California, where, at the age of 9, he was introduced to 18 new brothers and sisters. Unfortunately for James, years of abuse had taken its toll; he reverted to stealing, lying and other hostile behaviors, and soon his foster care odyssey resumed, this time in a new country where he was still learning the language. When he turned 18 three years ago, James “aged out” of the foster care and residential placement system and set about searching for his own housing in the county with the highest housing costs in the nation: Marin.

Predicaments such as James’s have become increasingly familiar to homeless advocates both nationally and locally. Several recent studies point to the fact that young adults who go out on their own with neither family support nor governmental aid face a growing risk of homelessness. A study just released by the University of Chicago found that youths aging out of foster care are three times more likely to be unemployed than their counterparts with families, and of the former, one in seven winds up homeless. Yet this figure pales in comparison to the 68 percent of Bay Area foster youth who are at risk of “graduating” into homelessness, according to a report from the United Way of the Bay Area. And according to Zara Babitzke, the executive director of Ambassadors of Hope and Opportunity, a Marin nonprofit that works with homeless young adults, in the past year alone Marin has seen a 40 percent increase in homeless youths ages 18 to 22 who were formerly in foster or residential care, though the Marin Department of Health and Human Services was unable to confirm this number.

There is no one explanation for the apparent increase in youth homelessness nationwide, but there is clearly a relation between several trends. To start with, young adults from all walks of life are less financially stable and independent today than they were, say, a quarter century ago. Time magazine reported earlier this year on a University of Michigan study, which found that even Americans ages 25 and 26 received on average $2,323 a year in support from their parents. On top of this greater economic insecurity, there has been a perceptible “spike” in the last year or two in the number of youths aging out of foster care, according to Michele Byrnes of Honoring Emancipated Youth, a project of the United Way of the Bay Area. Byrnes attributes this spike to the crack epidemic and subsequent increase in foster placements that began in the 1980s. Not least, youths who transition from the child welfare system to instant adulthood often find themselves cut off from any government services and facing an increasingly tight housing market, especially in the Bay Area.

“When kids leave residential placement they have no place to go and there’s no safety net for them, no guidance for them, there are no community connections. They’re cut loose,” says Babitzke. Or as James Hayes describes it: “It’s like being taken out to the deep end of the pool and let go.”

However, not everyone paints such a grim picture. Patti Cala, director of the Marin Independent Living Program, a federally funded agency that helps foster youth find employment and housing, bluntly states that “[Babitzke’s] statistics aren’t correct.” According to Cala, the youths she works with rarely wind up homeless because “we don’t allow that to happen. We don’t allow a kid to emancipate with nowhere to go.” Nonetheless, the United Way’s report found that in the past year Marin County continued to have a shortage of transitional housing set aside specifically for youths aging out of foster care, which may help explain why, by Cala’s own estimate, about 40 percent of her clients found housing outside of Marin.

Presenting accurate figures on homeless youth in Marin is a speculative undertaking inasmuch as homelessness anywhere is a fluid situation, all the more so with this age group. Babitzke insists that the various public agencies that deal with emancipating youth “do not want the community to think there are big gaps in what they are providing for youth who need help and that they are not meeting a critical need.” There are others who share her perspective. “A lot of kids will not go through [institutional] systems. They don’t trust them for whatever reason,” says Ethel Seiderman, a longtime child advocate who currently works with the Parent Services Project in Marin. “This group of kids trusts adults that reach out to them. They’re not going to come and knock on the door. You need to be out on the street, meeting them where they are.”

OWEN HADDOCK, A longtime resident of Novato and executive board member of the Marin Foster Parents Association, considers social work an honorable profession but he prefers not to use that label to characterize his own encounters with homeless and at-risk youth. “I see myself as a part-time parent and friend who knows how to work with their needs for confidentiality,” he explains, recounting his 20-year involvement with street kids and foster families that began when he came to the aid of a sexually abused boy who was the son of his wife’s co-worker. That first intervention, he says now, “was like stepping into a swamp.”

On an unusually cool Saturday afternoon Haddock has offered to take me on a tour of the haunts he frequented in his early years working the streets, before he settled down to the more mundane tasks of drug and alcohol counseling and advocating for foster families. He is a white-haired, avuncular man in his 60s who still speaks with a slight drawl from his native Tennessee, and one senses a certain messianic intensity in the way he points out an unassuming house once occupied by drug dealers or describes the “dyed-hair, body-pierced” denizens of Marin’s street culture. He motions toward a tall, leather-clad youth sitting alone outside a Peet’s coffee shop. There doesn’t appear to be anything amiss in this youngster’s life, but Haddock assures me that homeless youth often congregate in cafés because of the “alternative lifestyle” ambiance and, besides, they can while away the day undisturbed.

As it turns out, cafés are a big part of the tour. Cruising down Third Street in San Rafael in Haddock’s late-model Mitsubishi we pass the Shaky Grounds Cafe (“used to be a hangout but it’s a little too clean now”), Starbucks (“no way”) and on to San Anselmo to check out what was perhaps his most frequently visited venue: Cafe Nouveau. We park beside the police station and make our way through a bustling street fair toward this one-time magnet for dyed-and-pierced youth, but when we arrive at a narrow red brick structure, alas, Cafe Nouveau no longer exists, having been replaced by an upscale bakery and café. “Neighborhood organizations are running off these places,” notes Haddock. “The one thing they care about is property values.” Back at the police station Haddock asks a female officer if she has had much contact with homeless youth congregating in the town’s public places. “Not so much anymore,” she responds matter-of-factly. “We’re deterring their negative behaviors.”

For all his evident concern, Haddock is not unreceptive to the officer’s message. “Housing is really, really, really difficult with these kids,” he tells me, “though it depends on where they are in terms of their behaviors. If they have addictions, if they have other bad behaviors, housing is going to be difficult, because you put them somewhere and then they get thrown out because they damage the property somewhat, or they bring loud parties or something like that.”

Haddock agrees that the ugly stereotypes that stigmatize the homeless population at large do not necessarily apply to homeless youth. As a rule they are neither indolent nor mentally ill nor hopelessly strung out on drugs, though this latter is certainly an issue. (One young woman Haddock helped during the last six months—driving her from an assisted living facility to her drug recovery support meetings—recently relapsed and disappeared. No one seems to know where she’s living these days.)

POLICE OFFICER JOEL Fay’s job is to keep tabs on the homeless mentally ill on the streets of San Rafael, counseling and directing them to appropriate services. “I used to deal mainly with adults over 30,” he says. “But just recently, say in the past six months, I have noticed a lot more younger people, maybe in the 19 to 25 age group, out on the streets. I can’t explain why.”

They may be aged out of foster care or merely from families that lack the means to support older children. Some have been rejected by their families on account of sexual orientation, others are estranged from their parents for more individual reasons. What they have in common is simply the lack of wherewithal to keep a roof over their heads.

“They are ‘couch surfing,’ living in cars, on tops of buildings, under the radar of mainstream institutions,” Babitzke notes in explaining why homeless youth often seem “invisible” in the affluent communities of Marin.

One such case is 19-year-old Alex Wright. Nobody knows exactly where Alex is hanging these days, but his older sister Susan, who attends an Ivy League university, has been trying to locate him for several months. Both Alex and Susan were taken away from their abusive biological parents at a very young age and placed in separate homes. When Alex turned 14 his foster mother became seriously ill and his behavior became increasingly erratic and out-of-control. Unsure what else to do, his foster parents placed him at Sunny Hills residential treatment center in San Anselmo, where he lived a fitful adolescence until he ran away at age 17. As Susan tells it, “He basically ran away and became homeless, shifting between friends’ houses and sleeping on the street.”

Susan believes her brother may have a drug problem and obviously has other issues he needs to work on as well, but that his situation is far from hopeless. “I had people to help me get to a place I was happy with and he’s going to need the same thing,” she says. At the same time she is realistic about the fact that young adults—especially those who have spent part of their lives in institutional settings—value their autonomy: “Alex would never do well in an atmosphere that tells him how to live his life, even though he would benefit from life skills classes...[What he needs is] a place that is going to help him get what he wants, when he decides what that is, instead of telling him what he should want.”

That mind-set is nearly universal among homeless and near-homeless youth who share a deep contempt for the expectations that go with the label ‘homeless.’ “My friends tell me, man, I just don’t want to be with hard-core homeless people, I don’t want to do this and that,” says James, bristling at the idea of living in a regimented shelter. (A common refrain among homeless youth is “not homeless, just houseless.”) What homeless youth really need, says the United Way’s Byrnes, is “permanently affordable housing with support services attached to it.”

It was just these circumstances—the abysmal lack of low-cost housing in Marin and the lack of support services for homeless youth—that inspired Babitzke to found Ambassadors of Hope and Opportunity in January of this year. Prior to that she had worked for Sunny Hills Children’s Garden on transitional programs for youths until funding cuts curtailed her work. Through AHO, Babitzke continued to work with 25 young adults, helping them find housing in the “normalized community” and matching them with peer mentors in the work world.

Brian and TJ are two of the young adults helped by AHO. Brian, who had lived in a couple of residential treatment centers before turning 18, credits Babitzke with “saving him from homelessness” by finding a host family with whom he currently lives. He plans to work and save money toward an apartment, while taking classes at College of Marin.

TJ was referred to Babitzke by James Hayes, who now does some youth outreach work. Unlike other AHO teens, TJ grew up in a family but had burned many of his bridges. Prior to turning 18, he was in a drug treatment program out of state “where I learned a lot but not enough about how difficult and challenging it is to be a responsible adult.” TJ says he’s learned about problem solving and making good decisions through AHO and now, “although life is still hard, I have support.”

Molly Kron got involved with AHO long after her own homeless experiences. She’d been a dropout and runaway living on the streets in Denver when she was helped by an organization like AHO. Eventually she was able to reconnect with her family and continue her education. Molly was completing a thesis at Dominican University on government policy regarding youth and child homeless when she met Babitzke. She is now helping to develop a peer mentor program for young adults referred to AHO.
The Marin Independent Living Skills Program is also actively engaged in providing foster youth and former foster youth the kind of support that others their age normally get from their families. ILS workers meet with interested youth on a regular basis to help them set goals, look for work or financial aid for college, and, of course, find housing. Their services are available until the client turns 21.

• • • •

RELATIVELY SPEAKING, JAMES Hayes is a success story. He is working at a café in San Rafael and living in transitional housing, though he expects to have a regular place soon. He recently enrolled in an acting class at the College of Marin, but he says full-time college is a “luxury” he can’t afford. Nonetheless, he remains optimistic, smiles easily and finds humor in some of the struggles he’s experienced in recent years. One anecdote he likes to tell about his very first apartment illustrates the pitfalls of being young and on your own and bereft of any family support.

“I got set up in Santa Rosa and two of my roommates graduated college so they moved out and then one of them was like, OK, I’m going to move to Oakland,” he recalls. “I was stuck in the house so I moved out but I didn’t even think about asking for my deposit or anything. I lost money big-time there.”

Ambassadors of Hope and Opportunity can be contacted at 415/381-7173. E-mail is zarab@comcast.net. Information about Marin Independent Living Skills Program can be found at www.alternativefamilyservices.org.

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