Youth homelessness has been a low priority for federal funding and largely an afterthought in communities' efforts to fight homelessness. Instead, young adults have been thrown into the system for chronically homeless adults, despite their very different needs and the dangers they face in adult shelters.

As many as 1 in 10 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 -- or 3.5 million young people -- experience homelessness over a 12-month period, according to the Voice of Youth Count survey, a new study by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.

One way this inattention to youth homelessness manifests itself is in the way that HUD determines the extent of homelessness in the country. On one night in January every year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) coordinates a nationwide count of the number of people experiencing homelessness by gathering data from shelters and transitional housing programs and sending volunteers into the streets. Until 2013, however, HUD did not explicitly count youth ages 18 to 24 (instead lumping them in with adults), and it wasn't until 2015 that HUD's official point-in-time counts included "unaccompanied young adults" in their own category.

Moreover, the way that HUD defines homelessness still results in a gross underestimate of homeless youth. The problem with the federal numbers is that HUD doesn't consider homelessness to include couch surfing, which advocates say is the predominant experience of homeless youth.

The definition of homelessness matters because of its impact on the resources available -- a principal purpose of HUD's annual count is to help communities allocate their funds for preventing and ending homelessness. Undercounting homeless youth means that localities are in turn underestimating the extent of the problem and limiting what they spend on shelters and services targeted to youth.

Read the full article about homeless youth by Anne Kim at Truthout.