Garden State Topic: Lack of Housing for Young People Hits Home in NJ, Nationwide
Youths with nowhere to go need counseling, education, safe places and adult mentors.
This month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released results of its “point in time” survey, for which local teams count all the homeless people to be found on one night in January. In New Jersey, there were 13,025 people without permanent housing that night, including 2,695 severely mentally ill people and 592 veterans. More than 1,500 of them were found in Newark or elsewhere in Essex County. Those totals don’t parse out all of the young people who have no place to go, the young adults who aged out of foster care without families, who got kicked out of their homes for being gay or pregnant, or who are couch-surfing because their parents can’t or won’t shelter them. Counting homeless young people is a challenge in any …
