Current CA Legislation on Youth Homelessness
To kick off the 2019 legislative session, we thought we would highlight newly introduced bills involving policy that affect youth experiencing homelessness in some direct ways and some that are more indirect in their potential impact. We’ll be exploring these bills through the categories of education, housing and shelter, and programs and services. Each highlighted bill is hyper-linked to the original legislation.
Education
Combing the themes of shelter and education, one of the bills gaining a lot of media attention is Assembly Bill (AB) 302 introduced by Asm. Berman in which all community college campuses in California would be required to allow their students overnight access to campus parking lots to sleep along with 24 hr. parking attendant staff for safety. While this proposal doesn’t solve systemic affordable housing issues, it has done much to bring awareness to recent statistics that show 19 percent of community college students in California have experienced homelessness in the past year, nearly 1 in 5 students.
The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act is a federal grant program that assists districts with ensuring that K-12 students experiencing homelessness are able to enroll, attend and succeed in school. In order that school agencies and school liaisons for homeless children and youths, “are complying with the requirements for the education of homeless children and youths under the act,” AB 16 would attempt to assist state and local educational agencies in fulfilling the requirements of the McKinney-Vento act by providing funding to hire additional homeless coordinators for the state, requiring local educational agencies (LEAs) to identify all children and youth experiencing homelessness and providing training and technical assistance to those LEAs to better serve students experiencing homelessness with the goals of enrollment, attendance and success.
AB 806 was introduced by Asm. Bloom and would broaden the scope of foster and homeless youth who are granted priority registration and specific financial aid programs at California State Universities and community colleges and can apply for priority registration at University of California campuses. This bill would include formerly homeless youth to receive these benefits well as access to a student liaison who assists with helping the homeless and foster youth through the registration process and continue support once enrolled.
Other education-related bills recently introduced are AB 2 introduced by Asm. Santiago et al., to expand the existing California College Promise program which provides funding to community colleges so they can waive some or all fees for first time college students for one year who meet the requirements in their FAFSA or Dream Act applications. This bill would expand this funding to cover fee waivers for up to two years for qualified, full-time students. However, we know that most of the costs of attending college are not tuition, but housing, transportation, food, and books, limiting the amount of relief this bill would have on students. In addition, AB 148 by Sen. Glazer would establish a Student Success and On-Time Completion Fund to help incentivise participation in this program.
To bring an educational perspective to the table, AB 58 would require the Governor to appoint a State Department of Education representative to be a member of the Homeless Coordinating and Financing Council which identifies resources to reduce homelessness in California. And AB 337 would give emergency caregivers travel reimbursement so that they can transport foster children to their school of origen to provide ongoing stability for them.
Housing & Shelter
AB 307, authored by Asm. Reyes, would put funds toward developing and administering a grant program that would support young people experiencing homelessness by providing supportive services and establish or expand housing programs. Funding would prioritize service providers or agencies that participate in developing a local, youth-centered, coordinated entry system. Wanting to expand on an a current program, AB 995 by Asm. Ting, would expand the Transitional Housing Program-Plus, which currently allows former foster youth to access transitional housing between the ages of 18-24, to be able to have access to transitional housing if they exited the foster system on or after their 16th birthday.
Senate Bill (SB) 568, the College-Focused Rapid Rehousing Program authored by Senators Portantino and Roth would provide students with supportive services in locating and transitioning to stable housing while remaining in college. The Multifamily Housing Program proposed in Asm.’s Rivas’ AB 14 would have funds specifically allocated for housing for homeless youth or families as well as long-term policies to ensure the prioritization of loans for housing projects in low-income neighborhoods. AB 139 authored by Asm, Quirk-Silva puts the needs of homeless individuals and families into consideration for future zoning and planning projects by gathering information from coordinated care services to project the housing needs of folks who are in contact with those services.
Senator Wiener has introduced SB 48 which would advance a bold stance, “... that every person living on California’s streets has the ability to promptly secure shelter that is safe and supportive…” The bill is aptly called the Right to Shelter bill and also includes some progressive ideas around issues common to people who access shelters- even defining what “the right to shelter” should include, such as being able to remain with one’s partner, have a place to safely sleep and keep one’s belongings, not needing to sign up for shelter daily and having access to supportive services that would allow for some stabilization of one’s life. SB 258 by Sen. Hertzberg addresses grants that would go to shelters in order to provide provisions and services to pets owned by individuals experiencing homelessness such as shelter, food and basic veterinary services.
Programs & Services
A standardized definition of homelessness has long been seen as a big challenge within Continuums of Care and amongst service delivery and funding amongst agencies and nonprofits who work with folks experiencing homelessness. In AB 67, Asm. Rivas suggests that the Homeless Coordinating and Financing Council review the current definitions of “homeless”, “homeless individual” and “homeless person” within the federal McKinney-Vento Act and consult with “state entities that provide programs and services to individuals and families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness” to develop a standardized definition of “homeless” and “at risk of homelessness” for programs and services to utilize.
Research has supported the over-representation of LGBTQ youth in the numbers of youth experiencing homelessness as well as the adverse effects on the mental health of youth experiencing homelessness as well as being further marginalized based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Asm. Lackey has responded to this fact by introducing AB 984 to add an LGBT Youth Suicide Prevention Program to the existing homeless youth emergency service projects in cities with large portions of homeless youth, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Finally, Asm. Calderon has introduced AB 344, the New Beginnings California Program to provide those in assisted living programs employment opportunity as well as job-readiness resources for to those not yet ready for employment.
There are a lot of crossover issues in these bills, which is a good thing! This may suggest that ideas for solutions to youth homelessness are taking on a more multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach. For instance, seeing more attention to combining policy for foster and former foster youth along with youth experiencing homelessness is more efficient as we know that unless there is ongoing support there is a high likelihood of foster youth becoming homeless. We are hopeful that these bills continue to move through the legislative process to be able to make positive impacts on California communities that need it the most.