Youth Today: No Place Like Home?

By Karen Pittman, October 1998

As with childcare, we may be on the verge of finding the middle-class issue that addresses the increasingly serious problem of youth homelessness and youth home-boundness — young people living at home because they cannot afford otherwise. As the parent of a 23-year-old non-college graduate with learning disabilities whose $8.00 an hour salary simply can’t be stretched to cover transportation food, health plan co-payments and lodging, and a 20-year-old opting to live at home and save for graduate school, I find myself thinking about housing options.

Leaving home is an important developmental milestone. It used to occur fairly automatically with college attendance, marriage or landing a full-time, well-paying job. All of these occurrences are rarer today than they were even two decades ago. College graduates return home cyclically to cut cost. And the earning prospects of non-college bound youth — the forgotten half of the late 1980s, now the forgotten two-thirds, as we approach the millennium — have eroded so severely that they often do not move out unless they are forced out. Home-boundness is not the same as homelessness. But it makes affordable youth housing a salient issue for a large group of middle-class voting Americans.

Equally important, it allows a basic needs issue (affordable shelter) to be linked to broader youth development issues (separation and socialization). College-bound students get four things that ease the transition to living on their own: 1) a ritualized departure; 2) a ritualized arrival; 3) a built-in set of safe, reasonably supportive neighbors; and 4) a like skills package deal — including furniture, food, fun, light supervision and adult (but non-parental) support. Colleges supply much more than dorm rooms. They become domestic testing grounds.

Why can’t we offer non-college students (and non-boarding college students) the dorm experience? What is stopping us from building a youth housing system that offers safe, affordable room and board, along with a built-in social structure? Why aren’t cooperatives for non-college youth emerging as swiftly as for the elderly? One reason — income. Young people would either have to receive housing allowances (as they do in some countries), earn enough money or be prepared to work off part of the rent. But why couldn’t they? Why hasn’t this been an issue for CDCs? Where is HUD? Is this a role for YouthBuild? Why can’t young people renovate, earn shares in, live in and manage their own living structures? Why can’t older youth adults (24-30) be resident youth workers, receiving housing breaks and training in exchange for their services? Why hasn’t this been seen as a viable market, especially when there are "non-problem" young people in need of the full package?

Perhaps because youth housing, especially supported housing, has been closely associated with temporary, independent or transitional living. Increasingly, services initially provided for youth in crisis or transitioning from public care are in demand by a broader population of youth. The Rites of Passage program at NYC’s Covenant House, for example, is sought out by 18- to 21-year-old low-income youth who are too old to be covered by family welfare, but not ready for many government-sponsored, second-chance programs such as Jobs Corps.

Young people do not have to leave home to grow up. There are cultures and communities in which it is the norm to live at home until marriage, no matter what the age. But this is not the norm here in the U.S., where home-boundness or homelessness are becoming forced options for a growing group of young people.

Obviously, the situation is most severe for young people without families, those with family problems, those whose families living conditions are so crowded or precarious that staying is not an option and those whose earnings options are the most limited. There is always the danger that the solutions created don’t initially help those most in need. But the opportunity to rally broad support could, if done well, balance the risk.
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Pittman, K. (1998, October). "No Place Like Home?." Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. A version of this article appears in Youth Today.

Karen Pittman is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment.