4.2 million youth experience homelessness each year

Youth Homelessness: Building Safety, Belonging, and Home

Every year, an estimated 4.2 million youth and young adults experience homelessness in the United States. For many, it starts long before they ever sleep outside: family instability, foster care placements, system involvement, and the slow erosion of safety and support.

At The Lost & Found Institute, we know that youth homelessness is not a personal failure. It’s a reflection of systems that have failed to provide stable housing, loving connections, and real options. We work alongside young people to build community, safety, and self-defined home — wherever they are in their journey.

Understanding Youth Homelessness

Youth homelessness looks many different ways:

  • Sleeping in cars, tents, parks, or abandoned buildings

  • Couch surfing between friends’ houses

  • Staying in shelters, motels, or unsafe short-term situations

  • Trading sex, labor, or relationships for a place to stay

Most young people who experience homelessness have already been navigating family conflict, poverty, violence, foster care, or juvenile justice involvement.

Youth who are homeless are also more likely to belong to groups targeted by structural racism, homo/transphobia, and ableism — including Black and multiracial youth, LGBTQ+ youth, and youth with disabilities.

Homelessness is not just about losing housing. It’s about losing support, safety, and a sense of belonging — and then having to survive without it.

What Youth Homelessness Feels Like from the Inside

For young people, homelessness often feels like:

  • Carrying everything they own in a bag

  • Choosing between unsafe options because there are no safe ones

  • Being watched, moved along, or criminalized for simply existing outside

  • Losing contact with school, services, and people who once knew them

  • Being told to “just go home” when home is where the harm happened

“I wasn’t choosing the streets. I was choosing to stay alive.”
— Youth with lived experience of homelessness

Homelessness isn’t just about lacking a roof. It’s about lacking trusted adults, stable relationships, and a community that refuses to let you disappear.

Infographic about youth homelessness statistics in the U.S., featuring icons of a person in a house, a person talking on the phone, a hand with money, a house with a checkmark, and a bird with a box. Highlights include 4.2 million youth experiencing homelessness, 90% report difficult home situations, 68% of sex-trafficked youth have experienced homelessness, 20-29% of foster youth face homelessness, and noting disparities among Black or multiracial LGBTQ youth. The infographic is from The Lost & Found Institute.

How Youth Homelessness Intersects with Other Systems

Youth homelessness rarely happens in isolation. It sits at the crossroads of multiple systems:

  • Foster Care ➜ Homelessness
    Aging out without a permanent family or support leads many young people directly into unstable housing or street homelessness.

  • Juvenile Justice ➜ Homelessness
    Youth leaving detention or incarceration often face housing bans, strained family relationships, and limited reentry support.

  • Behavioral Health ➜ Homelessness
    Unmet mental and behavioral health needs can make it harder to maintain school, work, or housing — and the experience of homelessness further harms mental health.

  • Homelessness ➜ Trafficking & Exploitation
    When basic needs go unmet, young people may resort to survival sex or be targeted by traffickers who exploit their vulnerability.

    To end youth homelessness, we must transform the systems that produce it — not just manage it once it happens.

Resources:

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