Young and Homeless in Rural America

[RandySF]

There is very little data tracking homelessness in rural areas around the country, and it is the McKinney-​Vento liaisons who most often, if sometimes imperfectly, fill the gap. In 2018, Montana, for example, experienced a 145 percent increase in the number of homeless students not because many more kids suddenly became homeless but because a new statewide McKinney-Vento coordinator upped her efforts. The district right next to Plantz’s, which is demographically similar, still reports fewer than 10 homeless students a year. And Ohio as a whole reported that 1.8 percent of its students experienced homelessness in the 2019-20 school year, a number that Valerie Kunze, assistant director of vulnerable youth programs for the Ohio Department of Education, acknowledges is an undercount. “You have places reporting 0 percent, and there’s just no 0 percent,” she told me.

But even with its many flaws and inconsistencies, the reporting by McKinney-Vento liaisons, aggregated by the Department of Education, represents a crucial and rare effort to quantify the problem of student homelessness, especially in rural areas. The D.O.E. definition of homelessness is broader than the one used by, for instance, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and better able to capture what homelessness usually looks like for rural youth and families — Blake’s family living in a cramped camper on a hill or families doubled up sometimes in unsafe situations hidden from sight — as opposed to living on a street or in a shelter. In 2019, the last year of reporting before the pandemic, HUD’s annual “point in time” count on a single night found 53,692 parents and children experiencing homelessness. Over the course of the same school year, the D.O.E., using data from McKinney-Vento liaisons, counted 1.4 million school-age children as homeless.

But even with its many flaws and inconsistencies, the reporting by McKinney-Vento liaisons, aggregated by the Department of Education, represents a crucial and rare effort to quantify the problem of student homelessness, especially in rural areas. The D.O.E. definition of homelessness is broader than the one used by, for instance, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and better able to capture what homelessness usually looks like for rural youth and families — Blake’s family living in a cramped camper on a hill or families doubled up sometimes in unsafe situations hidden from sight — as opposed to living on a street or in a shelter. In 2019, the last year of reporting before the pandemic, HUD’s annual “point in time” count on a single night found 53,692 parents and children experiencing homelessness. Over the course of the same school year, the D.O.E., using data from McKinney-Vento liaisons, counted 1.4 million school-age children as homeless.



https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/magazine/rural-homeless-students.html

[AZLD4Candidate]

1. Homeless and child. . .and homeless and veteran are words that should never go together

unless the the words "should never be" are put in the middle of the sentence.

[Irish_Dem]

2. The richest country in the history of the world should not have hunger and homelessness.

A testament to the greed of this country where much of our wealth is held in the hands of a few.

[John Ludi]

3. In my rural area of SW WI

the posts on the local FB groups of people facing homelessness are multiplying rapidly. I'm in a somewhat unique area that has gentrified over the past couple decades and housing has become increasingly scarce and expensive, but even with that element at play there was never the amount of people at this level of risk. It's largely been a lot of the more "marginal" people here; the people with substance abuse issues or evicts and such...but collapse begins at the margins and prior to this point a lot of these folks were able to find some small piece of something to cling to.

[modrepub]

4. You Can't Count What You Won't See

Pretty simple. You don't see a problem, you don't have a problem.

So many folks seem to think homelessness, drug addiction and crime are high population area problems. But I wonder if it's just because it's concentrated to such a high degree you can't ignore it or maybe the local governments are more responsive and capable than their rural counterparts.

One only has to check sites like Go Fund Me to see the dirty underside in many rural areas. There you'll see folks struggling to pay for medical care, trying to keep their household functioning after an unforeseen car or appliance breakdown, paying utility bills or paying for a funeral. It's all there if you've got the curiosity to look for it.

[WhiteTara]

5. Our rural town has about 2000 inhabitants

And we have at least 80 homeless young people in our midst. There doesn't seem to be any attempts to rectify the problem.

[dembotoz]

6. older and homeless counts too

staying with a friend, couch surfing.....
I have someone staying in my home who has.....problems......
She shows up on no data base as homeless, because alas...I am her safety net.

this problem is way under counted

[dalton99a]

7. Kick

https://archive.ph/jc71G

[SWBTATTReg]

8. Most rural or small towns don't have the infrastructure to really support a population of homeless,

unfortunately. If anything, from our experiences here in STLMO, the local towns around STLMO, when they had any homeless that their police depts picked up, they drove them to STLMO and dumped them in the City, a really pathetic way of dealing w/ their own homeless populations, by dumping them onto someone else.

That way, these pathetic cities could claim that they didn't have a homeless population problem, when in reality, they did. A lot of these 'bedroom communities' are like this, they have large aging populations and won't allow the construction of senior care facilities or the like, NIMB (not in my backyard), ironic when it's their own senior citizens being harmed by these NIMB folks.

A shame and so much for America's generosity and caring.