“Twenty-two-year-old Tony Torres sags, exhausted, onto the pavement just beyond a skate park where kids from this affluent Seattle suburb, Bellevue, flip tricks off ramps to the beat of a boombox. This is a safe place to hang out until he knows whether he’ll get a bed on this night at the nearby YMCA, which donates its rec room as a shelter for young adults at night.
His odds of getting a spot to throw a mat on the floor are about one in seven.
Torres is joined by a few other worn-out looking young people, who sling their packs down and slump against the wall. They’ve all been on their feet all day, moving from park to park, job application to job application, library to library — anywhere they can hang for a few minutes before being asked to move along.
Young adults are the new face of homelessness.
It’s a group driven by two large converging forces: an economy that has been especially brutal on young people, and the large numbers currently exiting foster care.
Precise numbers are difficult to pin down. But based on a study done before the economy collapsed, an estimated 2 million young people age 18 to 24 will be homeless nationwide this year.”
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Watch a video on the subject by Mike Kane from InvestigateWest here:
Generation Homeless: Voices from the Street from Mike Kane on Vimeo.
(Article by Carol Smith from InvestigateWest. Photo courtesy of Mike Kane from InvestigateWest.)