Just three months before she would have graduated high school, Issa Rivera got kicked out of her house by her parents. For the next few months, she would struggle to survive without stable housing, staying at different friend’s homes.

However, couchsurfing would not be a sustainable solution as Rivera found out while staying in the gym in her friend’s apartment building. 

“I was sleeping there for a week straight,” Rivera said. “Then they called the police.” 

Parents of friends weren’t always accepting of a person staying with them long term either.

“It got really hard because after house-hopping, it was like, ‘Okay, why is your friend coming over so many times right now to stay for long periods of time?’” Rivera said.

The constant instability took a toll on her.

“It was hard to get out of school every day and wonder, ‘Hmm, where am I gonna sleep tonight?’” Rivera said.

Most high school students, whether they have a job, hours of homework, caretaking, or other extracurricular activities after school, eventually make their way back to their homes every night. However, every day, about 4% of California students don’t have a place to “go home” to, according to the California Interagency Council on Homelessness. While that may seem like a small percentage of students, it adds up to almost 250,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade.

In San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) alone, there are 2,403 students experiencing homelessness, as defined by “Section 725(2) of the McKinney-Vento Act which defines ‘homeless children and youth’ as individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to SFUSD’s Students and Families Experiencing Homelessness (SAFEH) program.

Youth homelessness has increased by 11% in San Francisco between 2022 and 2024, according to a report from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Despite ambitious efforts, such as the $50 million Rising Up initiative launched by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, which aimed to cut the youth homeless population in half, factors such as high housing prices, addiction, and abuse have continued to drive young people from their homes and have rendered such programs unsuccessful. 

When considering all of the factors that lead to student and family homelessness, the unaffordability of stable housing comes to the forefront. Even in programs like the Rising Up initiative, their rapid housing efforts landed 75% of their participating youth in residences outside of San Francisco, displacing youth as an unintended consequence of the lack of infrastructure available to quickly place unhoused individuals in affordable homes.

“The cost of living here is the biggest contributing factor for homelessness here. It’s difficult for not only youth but anybody to be able to make enough through their work to support themselves and live in the place that they work,” said Michelle Woo, the director of family and community services at StarVista, a non-profit organization that offers shelter and independent living skills training to homeless youth.

According to Woo, many unique challenges face homeless youth, including how it is more difficult for them to find work than adults.

“For youth who have less experience, less education, it’s going to be harder for them to get those kinds of jobs. The majority of our youth are employed, the problem is that they’re underemployed and that they’re just not making enough,” Woo said.

Woo has noticed that many people take their housing for granted and points out that homelessness can occur very suddenly and from minor causes.

“It can happen to anyone, and it doesn’t take a whole lot. It takes maybe just one missed paycheck, or one bill that was way more than what they were ready to pay,” Woo said.

Chantel Perry works in a youth homeless shelter in San Francisco and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in social work. She points out that mental health, poverty, racism, and other institutional factors play a major role in making a person susceptible to homelessness at such a young age. Many of those factors are uncontrollable and start from birth.

“Even before you’re born, how your mother handles you in the womb, your parents being able to have a stable house – all that impacts the child,” Perry said.

For students facing housing insecurity and homelessness, it is hard to balance schoolwork and survival.

“There are a lot of things you need in order to be able to get to school, to be in the right mindset to sit in the classroom and digest information – maybe you need a printer to print out your paper – just need a lot of different resources. Whatever challenges a student may already have are exacerbated,” Woo said.

Like in many high schools today, Rivera’s classes required her to use a computer to complete assignments, even though she didn’t have access to Wi-Fi.

“I actually didn’t get to finish high school, so I graduated later in the summer,” Rivera said.

Having an unstable and unsupportive environment can push many young people away from education entirely.

“Some people don’t have that motivation, because why? If nobody’s supporting you, if nobody really cares, then it’s like ‘Why do I even need to do this?’” Perry said.

Homelessness is more than just having unstable, unsafe, or dysfunctional housing. It comes with food insecurity, transportation issues, isolation, mental health consequences, threatened safety, and many other byproducts.

Homeless people are often stigmatized as “crazy,” which can even lead to them denying psychiatric care, according to a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry. However, few attempt to empathize with how housing instability can lead to declining mental health.

“If you’ve already had an existing mental health condition, there’s a huge risk of it getting worse,” Woo said. “When you’re experiencing homelessness, you are in a vulnerable state. You do not have safety, and your exposure to things that can be traumatic is increased multiple times over.”

That is why Woo attempts to help homeless youth regain their sense of confidence and sense of self, so they can reconnect to those around them.

“One thing that’s overlooked is helping youth rebuild their confidence in themselves and in other people. There’s a lot of internal struggle that they’re experiencing. Losing your housing can affect someone in a very fundamental way and so they’re trying to work through how to trust people, how to trust their community, and even maybe their family as well, if that was a part of the reason why they lost their housing,” Woo said. 

Another negative association that haunts the homeless population is heavy drug use and laziness.

“The media says homeless people are lazy, that they don’t want to get up and get a job. But they don’t look at the mental health perspective. Homeless people, yes, they look like they might be on drugs, but you have to look at that and question, ‘Why? Why are they like that?’”

However, homeless people come from all backgrounds and conditions.

“I’ve met people who have PhDs or who had a family, but things happen that impact them, and a lot of people can hold judgment on those people,” Perry said. “Each person has a story. You can’t generalize a whole group or a population based on what you think.”

For some homeless people, selling drugs might be one of the few ways to survive. 

“At first, I felt like I was alone, and then I found a group of teenagers that were out there selling drugs, stealing from stores, and selling things on the street to get by and just live. So I started hanging out with them, and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, my mom, she doesn’t want me in the house either,’ ‘I haven’t been home in like, six months,’ ‘I haven’t been home in eight months.’ It was like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a lot of other people in my same situation,’” said Bella Smith,* a recent high school graduate in San Francisco, who spent months on the streets.

While stories about homeless people committing acts of violence often receive much attention in the press, in reality, homeless people themselves are much more vulnerable to assault, with a study of homeless adults in San Francisco revealing that 32.3% of cisgender women, 27.1% of cisgender men, and 38.1% of transgender people reported sexual or physical assault within the previous year of the survey. 

Smith recounts encountering a 54-year-old man while homeless, who offered to let her stay in a room in his house. Even though the offer was suspicious, Smith was in a desperate situation and went with him anyway.

“He was very abusive, very verbally abusive. He would keep me in his car and basically make me his little girlfriend. A lot of time passed and then he would constantly make sexual remarks,” Smith said, who was barely 18 at the time. “I didn’t leave after that, because I was just like, ‘Where am I gonna go?’”

However, an opportunity to escape presented itself when a woman noticed how Smith was being treated. She offered for Smith to stay with her and her sister, but that situation turned out to be toxic as well.

“She ends up being horribly weird too. One of her rules was that I couldn’t lock the bathroom door even while I was taking a shower or using the bath, or she was like, ‘I’ll punch you straight in your jaw,’” Smith said.

Smith was forced to leave that house as well after an incident of violence.

“I remember she came back, and I ran out the back fence to leave, but she wanted to fight me, so we fought, and it was a bunch of drama,” Smith said. “I was just feeling super hopeless.”

Youth surveyed by the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing also reported facing various crimes in 2022.

According to the UCSF Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative, sensationalizing these violent incidents can lead to the dehumanization of homeless people and the criminalization of being homeless by banning survival tactics like camping in public or sleeping on the street.

“People need to not judge and instead, try to understand and do their research – there are so many articles out there about trauma, mental health, and homelessness. Because some people are fortunate, they don’t really have to understand since it’s not their problem, but if you just try to understand the problem, you’d have more compassion,” Perry said.

In San Mateo County, the youth homelessness count “almost certainly undercounts the true population of students experiencing housing instability,” according to a study by the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities.

“The system that we use to count homelessness does not do a very good job at capturing the true prevalence of youth experiencing homelessness, because most of those tactics that they use are like they go out to the street, they go to encampments, but the youth aren’t there,” Woo said.

If the population of homeless youth and adults is an undercount, it is harder to advocate for the proper amount of resources needed to support all those actually unhoused. Due to insufficient funding, StarVista does not have the capacity to assist all youth who apply to their programs.

“Even though we do provide 24/7 staffing on-site, we don’t have the capacity to accept any and all youth – like there are some youth who may just have needs that are beyond what our staff is able to provide, because we have very limited staff on-site at any given time,” Woo said.

Youth who make it through the process are selected to live in their 10-bed house. But, there are many situations where youth do not even qualify for programs like StarVista.

“They may not always have all the documentation that they need. I think that’s another big problem. Sometimes when they leave their housing situation, they’re not going to bring their birth certificate, and there are some youths who don’t have an ID, they don’t have a driver’s license. How do you prove who you are? There’s a lot of those kinds of more logistical pieces that prevent them from seeking out those more traditional resources,” Woo said.

Adults often dictate what kind of aid they think homeless youth should receive, according to Perry, but listening to young people themselves is actually key.

“People that are not actually involved in this population try to think they know what it is that youth or people need, but it really needs to go back to really being more humble and going into the communities and asking people what they need,” Perry said. “Just because you are on substances or homeless doesn’t mean you’re not an individual.”

Her motivation to work with homeless youth comes from her desire to see people grow.

“You have to give them the tools and support them and guide them. For me, it’s about not giving up on clients, even the most difficult ones, and helping them through their journeys because for so many families and youth, people have given up, but a lot of the time their behaviors are traumatic responses,” Perry said.

To this day, Perry says she has old clients who reach out to her with updates on how they’re doing. 

“That makes me feel warm. They tell me stories like, ‘Man, I used to do this, I used to curse, but you never gave up on me,’” Perry said. “That’s one thing I’m passionate about, is being able to show families that no matter how hard this may be, I want to help you through this difficult journey, and help you get to your goals.”

Homelessness is not always as obvious as the man with an unkempt beard and a shopping cart at the corner. Sometimes, even classmates who show up to school looking happy can be going through a hard time.

“People are really good at hiding things. They say, ‘Look out for the signs,’ but sometimes the signs aren’t even there. When I was homeless, I was still going to school for a few weeks, and I didn’t look like I was sleeping in a park or a gym. I looked put together, I had a smile on my face,” Rivera said. “Don’t be scared to just go up to your classmates and ask, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ or ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ because they’ll remember that.”