In a previous post, I discussed one big reason for the increase in tent cities for the
homeless: the defunding of critical parts of the mental health safety net. In
this post, I’m going to talk about another one: unplaceable foster children who
age out of the system.
I was first made aware of this problem by a
counselor in Texas. Then I noticed a headline that said much the same thing she described was
going on in California. According to the counselor, some residential treatment
facilities have recently been closed by the governor of Texas. The ostensible
reason was that there were accusations made against people there of abusing children, but instead of fixing that problem, they closed them down.
Unplaced
foster children there may now live in
unregulated rentals, on the floors of churches, in some donated spaces or in
hotel rooms. At one place, girls aged 12-20 don’t go to school, don’t
have rules or clean up. The place itself is usually filthy. The girls are also
allowed internet access so they often “run away” to meet various men, and most aren’t
on birth control.
Meanwhile,
in California, things are just as bad. According to
reporting by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley,
hundreds of Los Angeles’s county’s abused children ended up in hotels like
the Biltmore
Hotel downtown. In December 2021, the then-director of the city’s child welfare
agency quietly struck a deal with the hotel’s operators to house foster youths
and their social workers at the cost of $89 a night.
The children placed in the hotels are
usually among those with some of the most significant untreated trauma and the
gravest histories of violence. Though group homes frequently have security and
teams of staff members, children in the hotels have often been supervised by a
single social worker, sometimes with scant knowledge of their backgrounds,
little training to de-escalate potential violence and no on-site colleagues
when things go wrong, according to DCFS policy documents. Assaults on staff
members are not unusual.
In
two cases, in particular, the kids ran away from an unregulated placement and
ultimately died in shootings.
Many children are put into the
foster system after being removed from an unsafe home. This can mean that
children all over the country are entering the foster care system who may have
had parents who were drug addicts, abusers, or criminals and are prone to acting out and
violence, which makes them nearly impossible to place in foster homes. When
they turn 18, they are no longer wards of the state and many are then out on
the street.
According to the National Foster Care Institute, after
