on Oct 30, 2024

Youth Launch Bold Strategy to End NYC’s Foster Care to Homelessness Pipeline

This press release was originally issued by Fair Futures’ Youth Advisory Board on PR Newswire. 

 

The Fair Futures’ Youth Advisory Board (YAB) – comprised of 19 young adults impacted by the child welfare system – is engaged in an ambitious effort to ensure all youth exiting foster care in New York City have access to safe, high-quality, and integrated housing located in desirable communities.

 

Roughly 500 young adults exit foster care every year in New York City, on their own, not having been adopted or reunified with their birth families. Thrust into one of the most competitive housing markets in the world, studies have found that one fifth of the City’s foster youth experience homelessness within six years of leaving care.

 

With many of the YAB’s members struggling to find high quality housing themselves, the group decided to make the issue a top policy priority in 2024.

 

“Last year, our advocacy won more than $30 million in the City’s annual budget so that all foster youth have Coaches to help them thrive,” said YAB Director Anthony Turner. “This year we are focused on building on our success, and ensuring foster youth have access to the housing they deserve.”

 

This summer, the YAB, its parent organization The Center for Fair Futures, The Children’s Village, Good River Partners, and HR&A Advisors launched a research process aimed at delivering solutions on how to finance foster youth housing at scale.

 

HR&A Advisors, one of the nation’s preeminent real estate development and public policy consulting firms, is conducting an analysis focused on how to blend public and private capital and existing rental and service subsidies to provide youth with quality housing. Ten youth leaders engaged in a housing design fellowship to guide housing recommendations that they want to see. The final report will be released in early 2025 with the dual goals of driving policy change and serving as a blueprint for impact investing opportunities to develop foster youth housing. The effort is being supported by The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and an anonymous funder.

 

The Children’s Village, a key partner, has pioneered mixed income housing development for NYC’s youth and families. Earlier this year, the nonprofit opened the doors of the Eliza, a 14-story, deeply affordable housing development in the desirable, racially integrated community of Inwood, Manhattan.

 

“Where you live and where your children go to school is the most dependable predictor of second-generation success in the United States,” said The Children’s Village’s President and CEO Jeremy Kohomban. “NYC’s children separated from family and now exiting foster care alone as young adults deserve to live in a location where I would live, nothing less.”

 

Good River Partners, a public benefit firm, is leading a national effort to scale housing for transition-aged foster youth.