This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
8 min read
In his first year at the University of California, Davis, Liam commuted three hours a day from his family’s home in the Bay Area to campus and back again. The round-trip train tickets were expensive, but not as pricey as renting an apartment in the Central Valley college town. Then, partway through the school year, conflict with his family upended Liam’s living arrangement.
“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” he says. “It wasn’t like anybody was supporting me, and the money that I did have was very little.”
Liam bounced from place to place before landing at Aggie House, where he spent the next nine months living a short distance from campus with roommates who were also struggling to find a place to call home. Aggie House isn’t a typical university dorm or homeless shelter: It’s a collection of low-cost apartments, created and run by UC Davis students, for classmates who are facing housing insecurity.
As high costs and low vacancies squeeze property markets across the country, housing remedies for college students exist to support young people during a particularly volatile stage of adulthood. Start-ups like Depaul USA and the Neighborhood Coalition For Shelter run initiatives such as the Dax Program and NCS Scholars that provide room, board and mentorship to college students.
Yet a crucial, sometimes overlooked dimension of this assistance is the nationwide network of young adults stepping up for each other by establishing and operating housing solutions dedicated to their age group. Some cater specifically to students; others welcome anybody in their late teens to early 20s who needs a place to stay. Bound by a sense of solidarity, these spaces foster a sense of belonging and camaraderie as young people navigate school, careers and the challenges of early adulthood.
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“I think sometimes, in general shelters, it can be harder for people to understand what a student is going through,” says Hayven Angelique Pfister, a fourth-year human biology student at UC Davis and the external co-president of Aggie House. And because all the residents and volunteers there share the experience of being students, she says, “it’s easier [and] more comfortable.”
A young person in the U.S. may experience homelessness due to a combination of serious family issues and broader systemic challenges. Common factors include family conflict, abuse or rejection — particularly for LGBTQ+ youth — alongside economic instability, a lack of affordable housing and aging out of public systems like foster care.
The upshot is that about 3.5 million people between the ages of 18 and 25 face homelessness each year in the U.S., a situation that makes them particularly vulnerable to harms such as trafficking, violence, extremely poor physical and mental health, incarceration and suicide.
“Young people experience a lot of trauma before homelessness, and they’re experiencing more trauma while they’re homeless,” says Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, a public education and policy advocacy organization focused on preventing and ending youth homelessness in America. “That’s why our perspective is: The earlier you can identify a young person experiencing homelessness and get them into help, you can hopefully prevent more compounded trauma.”
The key to addressing homelessness among those under 25, Bardine says, is partnership with other young people. “They know where young people hang out,” Bardine says. “It’s easier for them to build that trusting relationship with young people because they have lived it.”
Students established Aggie House at UC Davis in 2021 as part of a network of shelters on three California campuses that aim to ensure no student is left without a place to live. Many people erroneously assume that people who experience homelessness don’t work, Pfister says. “We have a lot of people who are working, who are getting financial aid,” she says. “They still can’t afford to get housing. They still can’t get what they need.”
Aggie House offers accommodations for up to a year, and residents pay rent — usually $200 to $300 monthly, which is 90 percent less than the average cost of rent in Davis. Rent increases by $50 monthly to incentivize people to move on. Guests must be UC Davis students, and are vetted through an application and interview process to determine their need for housing, with many having been referred through a center run by the university that aims to ensure students’ basic needs are met.
The shelter is run entirely by undergraduate volunteers on 7 p.m. to 11 p.m shifts, whose role is partly to help build social connections. A few nights a week, the volunteers take turns preparing dinner for residents. One of Pfister’s favorites she made was a sushi bake with layers of salmon, rice and seaweed. Over meals, residents and volunteers chat about pop culture, school, religion and politics.
Meanwhile, over in the basement of the white-clapboard First Parish church around the corner from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 22 bunks are staggered in three tiers, separated by lime green walls and white polka-dotted privacy screens. From October through April, and again for a shorter summer season, Y2Y shelter provides housing for up to 30 days for people between the ages of 18 and 24. Unlike Aggie House, Y2Y doesn’t specifically cater to students; many guests are LGBTQ+ who lost family support, or aged out of foster care.
Y2Y was founded by two Harvard students in 2015, in part to address safety concerns among youth in adult shelters, according to Caleb Oh, Y2Y’s administrative director who is studying math and statistics at Harvard University. Y2Y offers an alternative for young people who don’t get into nearby all-age emergency shelters, or feel unsafe using them. Young adults facing homelessness often avoid adult shelters and child welfare systems because of fears of exposure to substance use or sexual assault, or because of past negative experiences.
“Being unhoused is incredibly frightening, incredibly isolating,” Oh says. He’s been told by people who have stayed at the youth-led shelter that the environment is less stressful than alternatives. “What Y2Y can provide,” he says, “is just being social and having a community.”
At weekly youth advisory meetings, guests give feedback on the shelter, catch up and play board games. Student volunteers from universities and neighborhoods across the Boston area serve as case managers, helping guests navigate housing support programs and connecting them with other services so they have a next place to stay. This summer, four guests moved into rental units, five went on to transitional housing and four went to a different shelter with professional case management.
“I think what we get right is putting not just our guests first but attempting to let them put themselves first,” Oh says. “We are more facilitators than anything.”
One of the biggest challenges for youth-led shelters is capacity. Y2Y only operates through the winter and part of the summer, when students are available to staff the shelter, and there’s a waitlist for openings. Likewise, because the shelters’ volunteers are students, they have limited bandwidth to give while balancing school. Volunteers are also learning as they go, unlike professionally trained staff at other shelters.
But that youth-led perspective can also be a significant advantage. Liam says the upperclassman volunteers who supported him had navigated the same systems he then had to face. After he arrived, his student case manager helped him make sense of financial aid, enroll in health insurance, get a job, save up money and eventually find an apartment, which he now shares with roommates. He moved in about a month ago.
The post Young Adults Are Building Safe Spaces for Unhoused Peers appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
