Why Are the Homeless So Young?

I n 1958, most homeless people in Chicago were at least 50 years old, and only around 10 percent were under 35. Three decades later, nearly 40 percent of Chicago’s homeless were younger than 35 years old, and other cities showed similar patterns. The falling age of the homeless was alarming in the 1980s, but according to federal data, the problem is even worse now. Today, an astonishing 47 percent of homeless persons are under 35, and more than one-quarter are younger than 25.

What makes this phenomenon especially interesting is that housing costs alone cannot explain the age shift. While it certainly explains why homelessness is more common in some cities than others, it offers little insight as to why the homeless population skews so much younger than it used to.

Substance abuse, on the other hand, may help explain part of the shift.

The question of whether and to what extent drugs cause homelessness is typically interpreted narrowly, considering only the homeless person’s own history with addiction. What gets overlooked with this perspective is how addiction among parents and caregivers can raise the likelihood that their dependents will eventually experience homelessness.

The first heroin epidemic in the United States began as a trickle in the 1950s and became a flood in the 1960s. As historian David Courtwright has shown, adolescent drug use skyrocketed during the postwar heroin boom, and as these young, new addicts began having children, cities reported startling changes in foster-care admissions. The New York Bureau of Child Welfare recognized that the foster system was receiving “more seriously damaged” children who had been traumatized by “alcoholic, drug-addicted parents.”

Ten years later, civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin was pleading for parents to adopt black and Puerto Rican children, who made up “the overwhelming majority” of the poor souls “languishing in institutions and foster homes” in New York City. These two demographics also accounted for around three-fourths of the city’s heroin addicts. Another decade later, “youthful nomads” were spilling onto the streets and turning abandoned buildings into “clubhouses,” where they spent their time “getting high all the time, just getting high.”

Similar trends occurred during the crack epidemic, which hit inner-city African Americans especially hard. The rate at which black children entered foster care doubled during the 1980s, and child-neglect petitions in New York City grew nearly fivefold. Parental drug use was responsible for 75 percent of the city’s abuse and neglect cases. As Martha Burt recognized in her 1993 book on homelessness, the “indirect effects of cocaine abuse may increase the risks of homelessness for abusers and nonusers alike.”

As youth homelessness became a growing concern, research often pointed to parental substance abuse as a factor. One significant study on the family characteristics of homeless adolescents found that 65 percent had at least one alcoholic parent and 44 percent a parent addicted to hard drugs. A 2008 study of homeless youth similarly noted that “nearly half of all parents had a substance use disorder.” According to a recent UC Berkeley study on youth homelessness among marginalized groups, about one-third of Indigenous and Latino respondents directly attributed their first experience with homelessness to familial substance abuse or the lack of culturally accessible treatment programs for addiction.

The homeless are younger today than they have ever been. To explain this mystery, researchers emphasize family strife, abuse, and foster-care placement, all of which are undeniably relevant factors. What often gets ignored, though, is how substance abuse underlies many of these problems. This is precisely what we mean when we refer to addiction as a “root cause” of homelessness.

For decades, homelessness policy in the United States has sacrificed recovery services at the altar of housing. Yet many have reported wanting treatment for substance abuse but are being denied access due to a shortage of beds. To finally end the cycle of homelessness, we must ensure that recovery services are available to anybody who wishes to break the chains of chemical dependence.