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For months, he woke to the sound of cars. Sometimes the incessant roaring kept him up at night, but sleeping under an overpass was better than sleeping under nothing, so 19-year-old Israel Cook learned to manage.
“No human should be living under conditions like that,” he said of the stretch of U.S. Route 29 in Gainesville, Virginia, that he lived beneath this summer. But where else did he have to go?
Most days, he readied for work in the dark, freshening up with baby wipes unless rain offered a chance for a makeshift shower.
“I’ve been homeless for six years,” Cook said this summer. “This is life now.”
As the nation continues to deal with the “growing homelessness crisis,” the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a record $3.1 billion this year to support the Continuum of Care Program, the shelter system that spans the country.
But that program predominantly serves adults and families. For unaccompanied teens and young adults experiencing homelessness, there’s little age-appropriate support. That’s meant Cook, and too many youth like him, have had to face homelessness alone.
Cook said he was just 13, still in middle school, when his mother sent him to live with his father, a Navy veteran, in rural Virginia.
Homelessness dogged them for years, Cook said. Despite entering ninth grade a year late, he managed to finish high school a semester early with a B average, and he did it while sleeping in tents, warehouses, shelters made from boxes and pallets he strung together, or, if he was lucky, the houses of sympathetic strangers. He now works 48 to 52 hours each week, yet stable housing remains elusive.
Cook makes about $2,400 a month. The fair rent price for a one-bedroom apartment in his ZIP code, as calculated by HUD, is more than $2,000 per month. When he finds rent he can afford — he once got his hopes up for an apartment five miles out of town that cost $1,200 a month — he’s never found a landlord willing to rent to him.
“A lot of places don’t want to lease to me because I’m too young and I don’t have anybody to sign with me,” he said. And though he can’t say for sure, he suspects some landlords won’t rent to him because he can’t provide a current address.
Calling 211, the national hotline that connects people with essential services, only led Cook on a multi-hour-long “wild goose chase.” The hotline agent ultimately referred Cook to a few adult homeless shelters more than 15 miles away, an impossible distance considering his primary mode of transportation at that time was by foot.
And youth like Cook don’t belong in adult shelters, said Darla Bardine, executive director for the National Network for Youth, a nonprofit organization working to end youth homelessness. Not only do adult shelters often fail to meet the specific needs of young adults, she said, but they can also be dangerous for young adults sleeping and living alongside people decades their senior.
“Didn’t they know he was 19? That’s crazy. [Adult shelters] are not youth-appropriate,” Bardine said. “[Adult shelters] have no idea the barriers that youth face.”
According to Bardine, the best place for a young adult in a situation like Cook’s is a youth-specific shelter funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
“Young people need youth-specific programming that understands the brain is developing until you’re 25,” Bardine said. “As mature and smart as [Cook] is, he’s still 19. He’s still making bad choices as all 19-year-olds do because his prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. He needs support that is developmentally appropriate using a positive youth development approach and trauma-informed care.”
Many HHS-funded youth shelters also provide transportation and have staff to help young people develop life skills such as budgeting, forming goals and navigating social services, she said.
Nationally, there are 31,478 federally-funded beds dedicated to youth, including those supported by HUD. That number doesn’t come close to meeting the need. Each year, an estimated 2.3 million unaccompanied teenagers and young adults experience “explicit homelessness,” usually meaning that they are sleeping on the street, in shelters or in cars.
That’s more than 70 unaccompanied homeless youth for every shelter bed intended for them.
“We just can’t serve everyone,” said Judith Dittman, CEO of Second Story, a nonprofit that runs a youth shelter in Virginia.
So where might Cook go? “There are no good choices,” Dittman said.
A key reason there are so few beds for youth is the limited funding for them. In the 2022 fiscal year, HUD and HHS gave out a combined $109 million in grants to support shelters serving youth. In comparison, grants to support adult and family shelters — all from HUD — totaled nearly $3 billion that year.
“If this had more funding, there would be a program in Gainesville,” Bardine said. The way Congress earmarks support for homeless people, she said, represents “a massive disparity.”
Second Story stopped accepting new youth into its transitional living program, which offers long-term, stable housing for youth, after it lost its HHS grant in 2022. It relies on private donations and its own reserves to continue operating.
“We don’t want to take from one pot of money to another,” Dittman said of congressional decisions about funding. “An 80-year-old [homeless person] still needs a bed. But I like to think serving young people cuts off the pipeline to chronic homelessness.”
Research estimates 85% of people who experience long-term homelessness, defined in the study as longer than 12 months, come from the “youth-to-adult” pipeline. A single chronically homeless person costs taxpayers, on average, more than $35,000 a year, according to data from the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Unhoused and Undercounted
Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.
Another study, commissioned by YouthLink, a nonprofit that helps provide homeless youth with basic needs in Minneapolis, Minnesota, found that only 6% of homeless youth it assists would need to gain financial independence by age 20 for taxpayers to break even.
“There’s so much research,” Bardine said. “It’s like invest [in youth] now and save money later. It’s like the numbers are there, the data is there.”
For Cook, what six years of homelessness showed is how frustratingly hard it is to escape without government help.
“It feels like I’m doing everything right,” he said. “Yet the difficulties still feel endless. … If you’ve been homeless for more than six months to a year, you can’t get out of it. That’s your life unless a miracle comes.”
In October, he felt he’d finally gotten one. A friend is letting him live in what used to be an antique store that had fallen into disrepair. It took Cook three weeks to get the plumbing and electricity working, but it’s a place to stay.
“For the short term, I suppose,” Cook said.