As the race towards re-election is ramping up for Mayor Martin Walsh’s campaign, his office has been announcing an array of new projects and proposals across Boston. The administration’s latest initiative aims to address the problem of youth homelessness, and work to find solutions citywide.
Walsh addressed the issue in a statement Tuesday. He announced his administration’s plan to hire a consultant who will put together an action plan on the matter. In six months, Walsh hopes to have gathered information on the city’s homeless youth, studied the shortcomings of Boston’s current system and identified ways in which the city can do better. “One young person who lives without a stable home is one too many,” Walsh said.
The Walsh administration has made homeless in Boston a key issue since 2014. The administration has already begun to address specific sub-groups like the chronically homeless and homeless veterans. Officials said they hope to use what they learned from those initiatives to address this next demographic.
The issue of youth homelessness is absolutely unique. Factors like rising housing costs that might force adults into homelessness often don’t apply to younger people. Instead, their problems tend to be familial, which can be much harder for the government to address, especially on a large scale.
Further, homeless youth are often moving, crashing on friends’ couches and moving frequently — making them very hard for the City to keep track of.
There are also different issues afflicting adult homeless people than there are afflicting young homeless people. Research has found as many as 40 percent of homeless youth to be LGBT, though in total, less than 10 percent of youth are LGBT. This disparity is unfathomable, often driven by younger populations’ increased risk of things like victimization and mental health issues that tend to contribute to homelessness.
Definitive citywide numbers for homeless youth do not exist, but we do know that Boston Public Schools enrolls almost 4,000 homeless students. That means over 5 percent of the district’s population doesn’t have a reliable place to sleep each night.
It shouldn’t have taken the City of Boston until the Walsh administration for youth homelessness to become a priority. It shouldn’t have taken several more years after that to start thinking about homeless youth. And we shouldn’t have to wait now to find a consultant who will then take six more months to come up with a plan. The wheels of government turn slowly, but there are some issues so important that we should be able to rise above these bureaucratic barriers to find a solution — and this is one of them.
When it comes to young people, for whom it only takes a few days or a few weeks for their entire lives to change, it just doesn’t make sense to be putting this issue on the back burner. Homeless youth do not have that kind of time.
It’s impossible to rank the importance of different demographic groups. Prioritizing one kind of homelessness over another kind cannot be done objectively. However, when our schools are plagued by homeless youth who aren’t getting the help they need, it is clear that something major has fallen through the cracks.
The City hopes to create a plan that will collaborate between existing nonprofits and City officials. This is absolutely the right way to go about this. There are so many resources that already exist around Boston to address the problems of youth homelessness, it would be foolish to forge ahead without working with these groups to maximize the efficiency of what’s already happening.
This initiative is a good move by the Walsh administration — so as long as their follow-through is every bit as impressive as their proposal.
