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Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall attempted to count the country’s homeless youth in 2017, and found that one in ten young adults ages eighteen to twenty-five had experienced some form of homelessness for a period of twelve months or more.
That all boils down to an estimated 3.5 million young adults and 700,000 youth who have experienced prolonged homelessness at some point in their lives.
Because for the majority of these kids, the choice is between homelessness and, for example, “Do I want to stay at home and get raped every night by my uncle?” in the words of Christian Garmisa-Calinsky, who ran a nonprofit that found housing for street kids in San Francisco. “Or like it was for me: Do I want to stay home and get my bones continually broken by my mother?”
a restaurant run by a burlesque performer named Magnolia Thunderpussy that specialized in erotic-themed desserts is now a microbrewery called Magnolia Brewing that caters to the sort of clean-cut crowd that Haight regulars would once have decried as yuppies.
Michael Niman, a journalism professor at Buffalo State College who spent time studying this community, said he found that homeless travelers tended to be overwhelmingly white. “To travel as a vagrant is white privilege,” he said.
One formerly homeless woman I spoke with put it bluntly: When you travel, you have something to do. You have a hobby. Otherwise, you’re just homeless.
we place an impossible expectation upon them: if you chose to be homeless, then you can also choose to not be.
Because with little to no guidance going into the streets, once they get there and experience what they believe to be freedom for the first time in their lives, it is hard to leave without adult intervention.
Looking back, I’m ashamed that my first thought in that moment was my stupid top, but I can say that the hug I shared with Dave that day was the last time I took dry-cleaning into consideration when it came to human beings.
I was technically an adult, working an office job, wearing professional clothing, and paying rent, but my view of the world was still that of a sheltered child. There was good and there was bad, an order and a plan for everything.
What gets lost far too often in the conversation about homeless youth is that, at the heart of it, the majority of these kids are just that: kids.
In her lilting Quebecois accent, Audrey thanked them for being her friends, one of her final acts before she was killed. She did not know, in that moment, that Lila had already taken her wallet.
Cases of intrafamilial sexual abuse involving children are particularly difficult to prove, according to the Center for Sex Offender Management, with the perpetrator imposing a level of secrecy around the abuse that the child is unwilling or too scared to breach.
It’s not uncommon for family child molesters to limit their abuse, grooming and isolating just one child from the rest of the family. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the half brother, who at the time was not even four years old, wouldn’t have been able to comprehend it if something awful was happening to someone close to him.
Both respected and well-established instructors in tantra, the Carters met at Harbin Hot Springs, a clothing-optional resort north of Napa.
When the first responders came upon the scene, Coco, ever loyal and steadfast, stood guard over her master’s body, blood dripping from the eye she would eventually lose.
Whenever there’s a romantic relationship at the center of a murder case, people always imagine some sort of Bonnie and Clyde ride-or-die situation. His dedication to her fits that trope, but not much else does.
Lila had at least six miscarriages in the two years they were together, Haze said, and the last one nearly killed her.
In a way, Haze admitted later, his and Lila’s dependency on drugs meant they had to be dependent on each other.
While it may be warmer and less rainy in Southern California in the winter season, Northern California is more equipped to care for the homeless when the cold strikes.
The last homeless tally in San Francisco put the count at about 7,500, with about one-third of those individuals being thirty years of age or younger and almost 50 percent being forty years or younger. In 2016, voters passed a ballot measure banning tents on city sidewalks, but failed to pass the ballot measures that would have funded more housing for the homeless—meaning that while voters supported getting the homeless off the streets, they didn’t particularly care about where they’d go after that.
There are far too many reasons why these kids end up on the streets—abuse, trauma, addiction, substance abuse, mental illness, bad parents, a broken foster care system—and there’s no way to fix them all, short of hitting a giant “Reset” button on the systems we have in place.
For too many, the family they form on the streets is the only family they have, and from that deep bond comes a desperate and unwavering allegiance. There are two sides to that: On one side, there’s love, support, comfort, and friendship. There’s safety in numbers, there’s teamwork, there’s strength. But for those who have experienced such little love in their lives, when they finally find it, they will cling to it at all costs.
You get told a lot of awful things as a journalist, especially when your focus is crime and criminal justice. I’ve had an inmate at a county jail fall into my arms in tears; I’ve had mothers describing the messages they receive in dreams from their dead children.
Every street kid knows of another kid who knew a kid who heard of a situation like this: some homeless kid getting drugged and kidnapped and forced into prostitution. One girl in San Francisco had a friend who had been injected with heroin and kept captive for days before she made a break for it and got out of the house.
The unfortunate truth is that this sort of exploitation probably happens more often than we know. It’s just that the kids that it happens to are most likely kids who are already missing—kids who aren’t going to report a crime.
A UC Berkeley study tracking homeless youth in San Francisco over the course of six years found that street kids experience a mortality rate in excess of ten times that of the state’s general youth population, but the public rarely hears about these statistics.
The annual Rainbow Gathering can draw up to thirty thousand people and takes place at a predetermined, consensus-approved location each July.
And they trash it.
All are welcome at Rainbow Gatherings, including “housies,” people who live indoors,
A Rainbow Gathering is a guaranteed week or two of access to necessities that these kids usually have to fight for—food, shelter, medical care. But more than anything, Niman said, with the Rainbows, street kids get to exist as themselves, unapologetically.
As a rule, Rainbows never publish the location or coordinates of their camp, and they go to great lengths to inform only those who plan on going.
Like assholes
Maybe it was bad drugs, but almost everybody at the Rainbow Gathering has been around others in such a state long enough to recognize it for something more: “Schizophrenia,” someone whispered as Echo quietly sang Bob Marley to herself.
What I learned at this gathering was that, for a lot of the kids, traveling and living on the streets was how they figured it out. It felt preposterous, this notion that being homeless would help in the long run. But for some of these kids, it’s what they needed to do.
Whatever the outcome or actual facts of what happened to that girl, sexual assault was enough of a concern that some Rainbows led a “consent is sexy” campaign that included talks at the evening circle and painting “no means no” on rocks.
Travel is surprisingly easy for those with limited resources but limitless time. Though hitchhiking has dropped off markedly since its heyday in the 1970s, vagabonds and wanderers can still get around by just sticking out their thumbs. Train hopping remains popular as well, especially among the more adventurous, even in a post-9/11 world of increased security.
And with the advent of social media, it’s become easier than ever for travelers to find like-minded communities wherever they go, and to get advice on how best to get to where they want to go.
And herein lies the conundrum that is Haze Lampley. From speaking to him, I had no doubt that he’d witnessed something traumatic and violent that had affected him deeply. But I had no way of confirming whether it was this shooting that he remembered so specifically.
“That’s the part that people forget with homeless youth: when they run away and live on the streets, they run the risk of getting raped and beaten every day. Yes, it’s a risk. But at least it’s a risk. Sometimes at home, it’s a guarantee.
