Consider yourself lucky if you’ve never had to worry about having a place to sleep at night.
Now, imagine being a young person having to survive on the streets in a city like Toronto.
Last week, advocates convened at a summit to discuss the unique challenges of youth homelessness — and why the city of Toronto needs a “youth-first” homelessness strategy.
“What we’re hearing from youth is pretty clear,” said Negha Kanagavarathan, the event’s organizer, at a press conference. “The system is not built for them.”
I reached out to Kanagavarathan, the housing lead for the Toronto Youth Cabinet, to learn more. “We find that things that are one-size-fits-all — some supports like housing programs, case management, mental health — those things are usually geared towards people who have that [adult] independence,” she says.
While there are youth shelters, she says, “there's not enough of them. Youth also need more of that developmental support and education path and more guidance as they move along their journey.”
Kanagavarathan tells me that some youth who are experiencing homelessness don’t have government identification, adults to advocate for them, or even a phone. This all makes it difficult to access services.
Negha Kanagavarathan is the housing lead for the Toronto Youth Cabinet. (Courtesy Negha Kanagavarathan)
“We were talking to one youth who said that she had a job, and because she had a job, she was told by a food bank: either you drop your shift or you can't come to the food bank for the intake,” she says. “Even when youth are trying, they're being left out of these services because of rules or other things that aren’t made to accommodate their lifestyle.”
She says young people face unfair evictions, discrimination from landlords, and unstable jobs that impact their ability to pay rent. She adds that “youth within the homelessness system who are racialized or queer deserve more voice at the table.”
I was at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario’s conference in Ottawa last year, when it released a report about homelessness in the province. At the time, there were over 80,000 people experiencing homelessness — and the analysis projected that the number could double within the next decade and grow to 300,000 in the case of an economic downturn.
Of that 80,000, a quarter were under age 24: those aged 0-15 made up 12 per cent while youth aged 16-24, represented 11 per cent of the homeless population.
In a province as wealthy and prosperous as Ontario, nearly one in every four people who are unhoused are children and young people. I was surprised at the lack of public outcry.
Toronto’s unhoused population more than doubled in three years. A record number of Canadians used food banks last year and a third of those users were children. While rental prices have fallen slightly, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment in Toronto is still over $2,000 a month. According to the Ontario Living Wage Network, Torontonians need to earn $26 an hour in order to make ends meet. How many of us had $2,000 a month for rent at 22?
Combine that with a historically slow job market for young Ontarians, with thousands lining up at job fairs, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Meanwhile the Children’s Aid Society, the agency that’s charged to look after the province’s most vulnerable, is experiencingmanychallenges. The child protection agency has been accused of “warehousing” children in unlicensed settings including hotels and Airbnbs at a huge cost — money that could otherwise go toward more targeted supports.
No matter how we try to avoid these conversations, not every child comes from a loving home where they feel safe and protected. We live in a society where we extoll the sentiment that “children are the future,” yet we refuse to confront the reality that some kids feel safer on the streets than they do inside their own family home.
I almost became one of those young people living on the streets.
I’ve been living on my own since I was 16. Had my grandmother not been alive to co-sign on my first apartment, I don’t know where I would have been. She died a year later, and I could feel myself inching closer to that reality with every apartment. I worked full-time at a fast food place to support myself and to continue high school. When I finally made it to university, my living situation became so dire that I almost wound up homeless. Thankfully, I was able to find space in a rooming house.
I was very lucky. But if I was to live that again today, I would have fewer options — and I’m convinced that my story would have turned out negatively.
While I lived mostly with roommates, my first solo apartment, in downtown Toronto, was $600 a month. Unheard of in today’s market.
At the summit, policy makers heard from young people about the importance of early intervention and mental health supports. Kanagavarathan tells me that it’s essential that policy makers listen to those lived experiences and to create policies that can prevent homelessness in the first place.
“The system is largely focused on crisis response, where it's things like shelters, emergency beds, and that's obviously very important,” she tells me. “But for youth, prevention is so critical. So we need more intervention at schools and child welfare and other communities so that even before the whole homelessness experience occurs, we can jump in and make sure that it doesn't happen.”
Becoming homeless as a young person can create a lifetime of unstable housing. Those who experience homelessness as children, are “more likely to experience chronic homelessness later in life.”
According to Youth Without Shelter, young people make up the fastest growing homeless population in Canada. In Toronto alone, anywhere between 1,500 to 2,000 youth have no place to sleep at night.
That’s 2,000 people at risk of a lifetime on the streets.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
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