Gay and Homeless; The Numbers to Back It Up

The Empire State Coali­tion released the find­ings of their New York City Youth Home­less­ness Sur­vey the other week. James Bolas, the coalition’s edu­ca­tion direc­tor, asked me to com­ment on the findings.

The most sur­pris­ing resutl is that 28% of sur­veyed youth iden­ti­fied as les­bian, gay, bisex­ual, or trans­gen­der, and an addi­tional 11% declined to answer the ques­tion or were unsure of their sex­u­al­ity. While it has long been sus­pected that LGBT youth are dis­pro­por­tion­ately rep­re­sented in the home­less pop­u­la­tion, there has never been a study like this to back up the anec­do­tal evi­dence with num­bers. The National Gay and Les­bian Task Force released a 200-page report last Jan­u­ary describ­ing home­less­ness as an epi­demic among LGBT youth. There are only 75 shel­ter beds specif­i­cally for LGBT youth in NYC. This is unac­cept­able given that there are roughly 1,300 LGBT youth out on the streets every night. The sur­vey was con­ducted in June of 2007, con­clud­ing that 3,800 youth are home­less each night in New York City. This num­ber was cal­cu­lated based on sur­vey­ing nearly 1,000 home­less or at risk youth.

The Coalition’s work brings the issue of youth home­less­ness to the fore­front, and The City Coun­cil will begin hear­ings on the find­ings this month. This is huge because the offi­cial stud­ies on youth home­less­ness in NYC were painfully out of date and did not look into rea­sons for youth home­less­ness. The Brian Lehrer radio show on WNYC did a half-hour spot on the sur­vey results.  Reuters and The New York Blade also cov­ered the find­ings. The media cov­er­age brings some of the issues for LGBT home­less­ness, and homo­pho­bia gen­er­ally, into main­stream con­ver­sa­tions. Being queer fig­ures into a com­pli­cated set of rea­sons that youth end up on the streets. Three-fourths of the youth sur­veyed are peo­ple of color, almost 30% spent time in fos­ter care, and over 40% spent time in the juve­nile jus­tice system.

Many grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion have been scram­bling for LGBT home­less­ness to be ade­quately addressed. The Empire State Coalition’s sur­vey will give NYC orga­ni­za­tions addi­tional lever­age to rally the insti­tu­tional sup­port and fund­ing to bring ser­vices to those hit hard­est by homophobia.