How the COVID-19 Pandemic is Affecting Homeless Youth
The infrastructure for providing relief and shelter to runaway and homeless youth (RHY) in New York City was too fragile even before the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the city. Though the number of beds available for homeless youth expanded from 253 to 778 since 2013, advocates for homeless youth have long claimed that New York City has given inadequate funding and resources to institutions that offer shelter and other services for homeless youth citywide.
Even with 778 beds before the Pandemic, in 2019, WNYC reported 4,600 young people under 25 in NYC are spending their nights on the streets or in homeless shelters. Non-profits like The Ali Forney Center were experiencing waiting times of up to 3-4 months for those applying for shelter.
Shelters across the city were already understaffed, underfunded, and unable to function at full capacity. Already buckling from the weight of federal budget cuts and the stress on the city’s infrastructure, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated a dilemma affecting thousands of young people in New York City.
Atop those already left without a parent or guardian, the UHF reports an additional 4,200 children and teens lost a parent or guardian in NYC during the pandemic, adding more young people into a flawed and underfunded system of foster care and potential homelessness.
A LACK OF RESOURCES
In the early days of the pandemic, several shelters that provided 24-hour service had to slash their hours to ensure their employees’ health. The decision resulted in shelters only supplying overnight services; people could stay overnight to have a bed off the streets, but they could not stay at the shelter during the day and were required to leave after a night’s sleep. The flux of homeless individuals that resulted from shelters functioning at half capacity meant that the homeless population of New York City had even less housing security day to day and night tonight. This left those without permanent housing more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 than the rest of the population quarantining at home. Homeless youth already have a significantly higher risk relative to the rest of the population of contracting chronic health problems. With the temporary elimination of the scant resources available to them before the pandemic, Runaway Homeless Youth faces an aggravated health crisis.
Homeless youth in New York City face a unique set of problems that make securing their health and safety all the more difficult. Namely, it’s a near impossibility to know just how many young New Yorkers are without stable housing. A recent survey from Chapin Hall found that around 42% of homeless youth are LGBT+ and that 95% are non-white; this puts many RHY in a precarious position where they are reportedly the target of police harassment within shelters. Given that the primary goal of any individual experiencing homelessness is survival and that a large percentage of RHY feel unsafe in traditional institutions for dealing with homelessness, homeless youth are challenging to accommodate. While the study from Chapin Hall claimed 4,584 homeless youth were either sleeping on the streets or in a shelter on any given night, homeless advocates and government officials estimate that there is probably around 20,000 homeless youth in New York City. RHY are an extremely at-risk demographic for disease, violence, harassment, malnutrition, and difficulty locating homeless youth makes providing health services extraordinarily complicated.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Given that RHY are at high risk of contracting health issues, difficult to account for, and, since March, have fewer resources for staying safe from COVID, an extremely infectious disease, significant measures need to be taken to ensure the safety of homeless youth in New York City in the midst of the pandemic. Craig Hughes from City Limits outlined the necessary steps the city needs to take to ensure the safety of homeless youth through the duration of the pandemic; in addition to providing funding to existing shelters and services to ensure that they can continue to function, the Department of Homeless Services must open new shelters and drop-in centers for 18-24-year olds to provide more beds and intake for RHY, and continue setting up satellite sites for homeless youth who’ve contracted COVID-19 to quarantine. Hughes also suggests hiring social workers, social service professionals, and harm reductionists, who are receptive to homeless youth’s unique struggles, to staff these facilities.
Shelters around the city are already taking measures to accommodate homeless youth during the pandemic. The Covenant House has laid out the changes in their administrative and intake process to adapt to the health crisis: they have set up quarantine spaces for youth who have manifested symptoms of COVID, keeping a two-week stock of emergency supplies, making cleaning supplies such as hand sanitizer and tissues available to staff and youth, providing COVID tests at all sites, and rearranging their staffing to provide emergency staff and remote workers to ensure each location can remain operational even during a health emergency.
If other shelters and institutions that provide relief for RHY follow the protocol outlined by the Covenant House and the city expands its efforts to assist its homeless population, the homeless youth of New York City will be collectively safer in this unprecedented global health crisis. The city’s RHY population already faces extraordinary difficulties in their day-to-day life; problems made only more severe by the outbreak of coronavirus and its effect on the institutions set up to protect them. To protect one of the most at-risk populations in the city, the city government, shelters, nonprofits, and volunteers need to take deliberate steps in keeping the streets and shelters safer for homeless youth.
