Growing into homelessness

04:15 PM CST on Saturday, November 20, 2004

By RENA PEDERSON / The Dallas Morning News

It's the kind of scenario you used to only read about in Charles Dickens novels, where children are abandoned into wretched poverty and sucked into the seamy side of life.

In today's real-life version, the children placed in foster homes "graduate" at age 18 only to end up among the homeless. As many as 40 percent of the homeless in the United States report being in foster homes at some time.

Social workers say at least 500 young people who have "aged out" of foster care are now homeless in Dallas. These foster graduates usually have been in an average of nine homes. Some have been shuttled to as many as 65 homes. And as many schools.

Not surprisingly, "even those who manage to get diplomas still can't read the word diploma," admitted one caseworker. When they age out of the foster system, they don't have money. Or transportation. Or relatives willing to take them in.

So they end up as the freshman class of the homeless population, easy prey for street predators, pimps and drug pushers. Caseworkers say some arrive in Dallas with only a bus ticket – and end up spending the night with most any accommodating person they meet in the bus station or on the street. One new arrival last week naively went to stay with two different people he met at the bus station on his first night in Dallas, fleeing back to the station each time for safety.

It's difficult to gauge the full extent of the foster-homeless numbers in Dallas because many don't take first to the streets or shelters where they can be counted. They become "sofa surfers," sharing living quarters with other young people in the demimonde that includes prostitution and drug sales.

"It's sort of the great secret," says Larry James of Central Dallas Ministries. "The foster system becomes a feeder pipeline for the homeless population and a certain percentage ends up incarcerated."

The situation has touched the heart of Dallas County Judge Margaret Keliher, a mother of three. She says, "I keep thinking to myself, what would my kids do if they were put on the streets with no family to help?"

So she is trying to put together a new kind of housing program to help the foster-homeless and has her eye on a piece of property that the Texas Department of Transportation owns near the Cityplace DART station and bus lines. If the General Land Office will purchase the property, the county can collaborate with city and nonprofit groups to develop an apartment complex that could include transitional housing for 50 foster graduates.

(Memo to Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson: Here's your chance to be the hero who makes a lifesaving program happen.)

The beauty of the plan is that it would use market forces – the income from the 300 rental units at the site would pay for the foster units. The site also happens to be within walking distance of the Transition Resource Action Center, an innovative new effort to coordinate services for young people leaving foster care and juvenile systems.

"When these young people come out of foster care, they often have issues of abandonment and neglect that they have to work through once they are on their own. These children were in the foster system to begin with because of abuse and neglect, so they need all kinds of help," says Evy Kay Ritzen, the TRAC director.

The good news is that TRAC can help them learn job interviewing skills, apply for a state waiver for college tuition and apply for health care for their own children. Some clients are enrolled at the University of Texas at Arlington and the Dallas County Community College District.

There's much more to be done on this issue:

• TRAC needs more volunteer mentors, people who are willing to give just a little time and encouragement.

• The Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance is studying the idea of a separate shelter for young people so impressionable youth won't be at risk with more hardened street people.

• More foster homes and group homes are needed in the Dallas area – most children taken from abusive homes have to be sent to foster homes as far away as West Texas, making it difficult for caseworkers to assist them.

Most of all, what this freshman class of homeless needs is for more residents to think, as Ms. Keliher did, of their own children turned out to the streets with nowhere to go. Then those residents need to act.

Rena Pederson is editor at large of The Dallas Morning News. Her e-mail is rpederson@dallasnews.com.

The Freshman Class of the Homeless

More than 500,000 children and youths nationwide live in foster care on any given day. Each year, about 20,000 of them turn 18 and leave the system. Within four years of leaving foster care:

• Nearly half still lack a high school diploma.

• Only 13 percent have graduated from a four-year college.

• Four in 10 have become parents.

• Six in 10 have not kept a job for a year.

• Four in 10 have been diagnosed with emotional problems.

Resources

Transition Resource Action Center – a one-stop center for youths aging out of foster care and juvenile facilities – needs financial support and volunteers to serve as mentors. For more information, go to www.traconline.org or call 214-370-9300.