INVISIBLE HOMELESSNESS

Local experts connect Angelica's story to other cases of homelessness

by Suzanne Hanney

Chicago homeless youth experts who hear about Angelica’s 20-year odyssey of invisible homelessness say they know her, even though they have never met her.

“There are elements of her story that resonate with almost everyone we see,” said Erin Ryan, senior vice president at The Night Ministry. “The theme in all of them is the disconnectedness from a network of support, fed by a mistrust.”

Angelica was put out of her home at age 12 after her mother read her diary entry that she wanted to crumble her mother’s medicine into her food – which would have been fatal. Earlier, Angelica had been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder. After a few years in the child welfare system of her state, she was medicated for borderline personality disorder and depression.

Mental health is all too often an issue that is ignored, says Cheron Massonburg of Breakthrough Ministries. The family attributes being shut out to teenage blues and only considers untreated mental health around age 22.

Massonburg saw a case similar to Angelica’s, where the young woman was closer to her father than to her mother. The father died and the young woman was overwhelmed by stress. She became homeless because she couldn’t contribute to household income like her brother – who was closer to their mother. Thinking her family didn’t care about her, she couldn’t even reach the bus stop on the way to work before returning home.

But there are usually issues that show themselves earlier, Massonburg said, like getting bad grades or not getting along with other students. “Especially if it’s a single parent home and they are working and trying to maintain a household and the kid is not acting out, sometimes things will be missed.”

She noted that mental health issues can be multigenerational: something the parents have also faced.

Two young men socially distance at one of the Night Ministry's youth shelters.

The Night Ministry

“More functional families have a difficult time understanding that youth are not always runaways and/or the youth don't have to be ‘bad’ to get kicked out,” said A. Anne Holcomb of Unity Parenting.

When her father was being abusive to her mother, the 14-year-old Holcomb couch surfed with friends from alternating cliques or slept in the school restroom. Only a couple of her teachers had a clue.

Near the end of high school, her father took her out of school in an RV to the Navajo Indian reservation, where he was so incapacitated he would not get out of bed and she had to change his diaper. As he spiraled down, he became violent and suicidal. Then, in college, he would call her on the dorm pay phone at 2, 3 and 4 a.m. She became homeless when he severed his ties with her because she decided to stay in college rather than come “home” to take care of him. As a result, he was hospitalized against his will, diagnosed with major depression and psychotic features.

“There’s always a reason youth become homeless, and usually the reason isn’t the youth,” Holcomb said. “It’s usually something that starts long before that. I am a big believer in historical trauma.”

Often the youth lives in a large family grouping and something happens to trigger the homelessness, Massonburg said.

Perhaps a series of things layer on top of each other, Ryan said. One issue can be coming out, since the LBGTQ community is disproportionately represented at 40 percent of homeless youth.

“But I don’t want to paint a picture of families as homophobic,” she said. “Families lack the resources to talk to each other about a family member who is gay, especially if they are trying to put food on the table. In the absence of that, the questions and the uncertainties and the fears lead to conflict and somebody leaves or is asked to leave.”

Pregnancy is another coming-of-age reason.

Either the new mom and baby are forced out or someone else goes, to free up one bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment for the crying baby, Holcomb said.

“Family housing is already inadequate and overcrowded,” Ryan said. “That 17-year-old suddenly either starts to feel like a burden or is told they are a burden and they say, ‘it’s easier if I go my own way.’”

Family disputes cause up to 98 percent of youth departures she sees, Holcomb said. It could be unrecorded domestic violence between the parents, or the young person experiencing abuse.

“The mother was single when she gave birth. Fast-forward 18 years and she has a new boo. He doesn’t want the kid there and says, ‘you’re 18, go out and get a job.’”

Or, the stepdad starts looking at the young woman.

Youth will leave the home for whatever reason to preserve their safety, and they make it work by sleeping on friends’ couches. But that informal network of support doesn’t get them the education or job training they need to move ahead, Ryan said. They spiral into worse and worse options. Being in and out of school and foster care can lead to juvenile detention, which is more disciplinary than connective resources. “Once you have touched one or more of those systems, your choices become more limited in terms of access to education or employment.”

There were 335 unaccompanied youth during this January’s government-mandated Point-in-Time count of streets and shelters, a 16 percent increase from last year, according to newly released data from the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) and the Nathalie Voorhees Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. However, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless noted in May that there were 16,451 homeless Chicago Public School students in 2018-19, 87.5 percent (14,403) of whom who were “doubled up” or couch surfing with friends.

Youth don’t fit the street homeless stereotype, Holcomb said. Instead, they crowd into a hotel room with 20 people or they stay with a “john” or with a friend until the friend’s parent kicks them out. They will sleep on a train or in an abandoned building.

When Holcomb doesn’t see youth in the shelter, she worries they’re in an exploitative situation. An older adult may let them stay if they use their Link (food stamp) card to fill the adult's refrigerator – and then kick them out anyway. Or maybe the adult wants to be the payee on their Social Security disability income or wants to claim them as a Link card dependent. When the youth gets thrown out, they can’t get their own Link card until a case manager unravels the situation.

Similarly, Angelica was couch surfing, went to the supermarket and paid for the groceries with a check her friend handed her. Angelica didn’t know it was a bad check -- and went to prison for forgery and theft.

“Angelica’s bad check sent her on a spiral,” Holcomb said. “If she was in a shelter, she wouldn’t have had that bad check.” However, youth avoid shelters and would sell their bodies first, she said.

James, a former Ujima Village Shelter resident, is now in his second year of college and has reconciled his differences with his family. “When I was homeless, before finding Ujima, I was just lost. I wasn’t actively seeking employment or pursuing dreams.” James is majoring in Criminal Justice and aspires to become a probation officer or a criminal defense attorney.

Unity Parenting and Counseling, Inc. photo

Youth moving into cities where they have no support networks – such as Downstate people leaving their families and coming to Chicago -- are fair game for predators, Ryan said. “There are studies that young people are approached within hours of being on the streets to sell their bodies. Sex work is often the only commodity young people have to trade.”

Younger women meet older guys who introduce them to the lifestyle, but the girl doesn’t get to touch the money, Massonburg said. She is pimped.

And if a girl tries to run away, the pimp will go after them, “because they look at them as stolen property: slaves, basically,” Holcomb said.

Angelica bounced in and out of a lot of situations in a way that seems chaotic to an outsider but would have made perfect sense to her, Ryan said.

“Angelica did the best for herself at every point along the way. She makes choices for herself because she needs to survive. The further down the spiral you are, the more limited your choices become. Once you have a criminal record, once you have a baby, the deeper you are, the more limited your choices are and harder to come out of it. That’s why we talk about chronic homelessness. Young people go down that spiral much faster.”

Many 17-year-olds who come to The Night Ministry say that they haven’t had any supportive adults in their lives, which Ryan contrasts with her own upbringing in a small town. “I couldn’t even see a PG movie without someone calling my dad. It was known to me that people cared and were connected to my parents in a way that made me feel safe, even if it was annoying. That kind of network support is important and if young people become estranged, we have to recreate that.”

One supportive adult can change the direction of a life, Ryan said.

Holcomb had several supportive adults, each of whom brought resources. There was the lady who encouraged her to go to college rather than remain a file clerk the year after high school, the bus driver who held a “trunk party” on the bus to furnish her dorm room, her hotel gift shop boss who suggested her for a promotion to manager, and the late Mitch Snyder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, who spoke to her for an hour after she told her story to media at the 1989 Protest Against Homelessness in Washington.

A participant in the Breakthrough Ministries permanent supportive housing program

Breakthrough Ministries photo

When young people find an adult who cares about them and points them to resources, they can “start to build a ladder out of the pit,” Ryan said, “but it takes an enormous amount of hard work and tenacity and resilience that often to adult service providers looks like defiance.”

The ones who make it out are independent thinkers, people who hustle and gather resources a little bit here, a little bit there. “The difficulty is, you are never going to find everything you need in one place. You need to cobble resources together in a way that works uniquely for you. That takes a lot of persistence and strength.”

But “normal life” is relative, Massonburg said. “This population learns to thrive in their new ‘norm.’ They spend lots of time regaining their sense of being and trying not to become isolated once they are housed. Most times these individuals thrive with wraparound services.”

Youth programs that end at age 18 or 21 are insufficient, Ryan said, when the adolescent brain doesn’t stop developing until age 26, the age when most insurance programs allow parents to cover their kids. “To think we are going to fully prepare a young person for adulthood and self-sufficiency by 21 is ridiculous. All of us had a whole village.”

What’s needed are more programs that focus on family stabilization and reunification, if necessary. “If we focused on prevention and building support early on, we would see less of this on the back end, but our system is built on the fracture and not the prevention of it,” she said.

More than shelter programs, two-year transitional housing with 24/7 support is needed, Holcomb said. Youth get weekly or monthly room inspections and can learn skills – like changing sheets weekly – that they may never have been taught.

Housing and a job are the two things young people say they want when they come to The Night Ministry, Ryan said. But they need career guidance, too. A minimum wage job will not sustain their lives.

“We want to invest in long-term solutions like employment, so they are not just caught in this hamster wheel of shelter and short-term supports. It’s much cheaper for us taxpayers than the alternative: incarceration and child welfare system involvement.”

Our Expert Panel

Erin Ryan, MSW, MPH, is senior vice president at The Night Ministry and oversees day-today operations, which include 20 units of permanent supportive housing for young people and 61 shelter beds for youth as well as medical outreach programs on foot, bicycle, van and large mobile bus.

A.Anne Holcomb, MS, is manager of facilities and resources at Unity Parenting and Counseling, Inc., which provides housing for homeless youth and families; low threshold, youth, emergency, overnight shelter and more.

Cheron Massonburg, RN, BSN, is senior director of the Adult Support Network at Breakthrough Ministries, whose programs include education and youth development, workforce development, housing, health and wellness, violence prevention and spiritual formation.