A national study of youth clients of urban health clinics found that nearly 41 percent of homeless youth had been placed in foster care at some point during their childhood compared to just over six percent of their housed peers. Foster care utilization within homeless families has an intergenerational component. Foster care utilization within homeless families has an intergenerational component. Premature exit from a foster care living arrangement is not an uncommon choice among the homeless youth population. The NASW survey also uncovered that 38 percent of these same youth seeking shelter had been in foster care at some time during the previous year to their experiencing homelessness.
Homelessness is an unfortunate outcome for some newly-discharged foster youth.
A 1997 study of Wisconsin discharged foster youth indicated that 12 percent reported at least one experience of street or shelter homelessness at least once since discharge from the program. These trends suggest that the connection between foster care and homelessness is pervasive. Regardless of the manner of the linkage, it is clear that the foster care program is ripe for reform. Policy Solutions Decades of state and national policy-making have established a comprehensive child welfare system that should be able to snip the connections between foster care and homelessness described above. For example, child welfare agencies are empowered to use a range of interventions to break the cycle of poverty and instability that will otherwise plague foster children in their adult years and perhaps contribute to their residential instability.