Anchorage Daily News

From January to April, 19-year-old Tashaun Bradley slept on a twin mattress on the floor of an abandoned trailer off Lake Otis Parkway.

His toes nearly froze at night because of the way heat rises, he said.

Bradley had no heat, no electricity, no sink and no water.

The roof of the trailer eventually caved in, he said.

"I had to live there because there wasn't no other alternatives," said Bradley, who was in and out of McLaughlin Youth Center since the age of 13.

"I basically went on a solo mission."

Bradley is part of a growing group of invisible homeless people in Anchorage.

They are young adults between 18 and 24 who have aged out of the foster care system, come out of the juvenile justice system, landed here from a rural village, or left home to be on their own -- all without the resources for stable housing.

According to a 2004 report from the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, up to 2 million young adults are homeless at some point each year. This is about 13 percent of the nation's adult homeless population.

The numbers in Alaska are worse, say youth advocates and leaders with the Office of Children's Services.

In Anchorage, where the weather makes living on the streets impossible most of the year, young adults often end up in cars and abandoned trailers -- or on the couches of friends and family.

About 35 youths in Anchorage age out of foster care each year. Another 35 leave custody after turning 16, said Jefty Prather, independent living coordinator for the state OCS.

Nearly 38 percent of foster care alumni in Alaska said they were homeless at some point after leaving their foster homes, according to a 2005 study from the UAA School of Social Work -- much higher than the 12 to 25 percent for foster care alumni in other states.

NEVER HOME

Nineteen-year-old Alex Fox is one of Bradley's friends. Fox was in and out of different foster care families from the time he was a toddler until age 18.

Like many former foster children, Fox got used to change. That's why he wasn't too worried when, at age 18, he left his last foster home with no definite plans.

"I was just with the people I was with and it was all good," Fox said. "I don't really make plans because it's not stable."

He could've gotten an extension and stayed in the system for another year but wanted to move out on his own.

"We left his bed open for a long time," said Verna Gibson, his last foster mother.

Fox and other aged-out foster kids do not enjoy instability, but "couch surfing" is not much different from "house surfing" from foster family to foster family.

These days he moves back and forth between friends' homes and his 20-year-old sister's apartment.

"It just feels sometimes like I'm just floating around," he said.

For three weeks in September, Fox, who is 6-foot-1, slept in his Geo Storm, a compact car, outside his sister's place. "I didn't want to intrude in anybody's space," he said.

Now he sleeps on the living room floor of the two-bedroom apartment and Bradley takes the couch.

"I just sleep with my sweater on," Fox said.

His sister and her boyfriend stay in one bedroom, her two children in the other.

"It's weird because I don't have a house to live in," Fox said. "It doesn't feel good."

Foster children often don't make the permanent social connections that can help them transition to independent adulthood, says Amanda Metivier, founder of Facing Foster Care in Alaska, an advocacy group of foster care alumni. Foster kids are much more likely to end up at Covenant House or basically homeless, like Fox.

"I know some now that couch surf ... just surf around," said Metivier, 23. "It's like a rotating thing. Back and forth, back and forth."

Like Fox, about three-fourths of residents in two 18-month transitional housing programs at Covenant House aged out of foster care, said Alison Kear, director of development.

At the Covenant House Crisis Center, a short-term living alternative for 13- to 21-year-olds, nearly half have either aged out or dropped out of foster care.

SLEEPING AT JOE'S

Until 2005, the state of Alaska put little emphasis on what happened to aged-out foster children.

"If we got youth to 18, that was an enormous accomplishment and that in and of itself was a good thing," said Prather, the OCS independent living coordinator.

The agency changed its philosophy after seeing a study that showed former foster care children did worse in educational attainment, mental health and employment than kids who never spent time in the system.

Today, there are four independent living specialists working in the state to help youth make a smoother transition. Melody Dix, who is responsible for the Anchorage region, helps each foster care teen develop an "exit plan" -- a set of educational, employment and housing goals, personal strengths, analysis of present finances, health care and an outside support system.

Dix has a caseload of between 120 and 135 in-custody foster children 14 to 20 years old, plus about 80 out-of-custody children.

Almost every 18-, 19-, and 20-year-old in the region now has an exit plan, she said, and she's working on the 17-year-olds.

The single largest obstacle for young adults in Anchorage is finding their own housing, agency leaders say.

Fox, the aged-out foster kid, works for minimum wage, $7.15 an hour, with Anchorage Inventory Service, earning between $600 and $700 a month. He can't afford the going rate for the average one-bedroom apartment -- $750 to $800 a month. He usually gives his sister between $250 and $300 to stay in her living room for a few weeks, he said.

"If you're a single person and you're working 40 hours a week at minimum wage you're probably not going to be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Anchorage without some kind of assistance," said Jason Kahn, housing coordinator at Covenant House.

Covenant House created Kahn's position nearly seven months ago to help young adults coming through their doors without rent money or with poor rental histories. Or kids who just don't know how to find, rent and run their own place, said Carletta Mack, director of programs.

Once foster care children turn 16.5 they can apply for federal Independent Living funds, Dix said. The money is based on need and not guaranteed. Youth can receive up to $3,000 total until age 21 for college, training programs, interview clothes, emergency food and sometimes apartment rent.

Only 30 percent of that can be used for housing.

A half-million dollars is available each year for the 750 qualifying youth across the state.

Even when funds are available, landlords aren't always willing to rent to young adults because of their age and inexperience with living on their own, said Gibson, program director for L.I.F.E. (Living Independently ForEver), a program in the making that hopes to provide subsidized housing and mentoring for 18- to 24-year-olds.

Prather said the housing problem for young people in Alaska is tough because the housing market is tight.

"When youth that are just out of custody are competing with people who have had a job for awhile and have a credit history, they're just going to get tagged," he said. "There's not a lot of spare housing out there and the transition programs are very limited."

"These kids are the unseen homeless people," Gibson said. "They don't say, 'I'm a homeless person.' They just say, 'I'm sleeping at Joe's house.' "

WELCOME TO THE CITY

A decade ago, 80 percent of the youth staying at Covenant House were Caucasian. Today, only 33 percent are white. Forty percent are Alaska Native, a reflection of the burgeoning migration from rural villages to Alaska's cities.

Since 2006 this number has more than doubled, with 2,700 people leaving rural areas of the state, compared with 1,200 annually in the previous past few years, according to a 2008 study by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Many of these are young women in their 20s. Forty-one villages in the state had one or no females between the ages of 20 and 29, the study reported.

Kear said that sometimes, youth come in from the village for a day for a doctor's appointment or some other type of service, and end up staying.

"I think it's the influx of the kids who come here because there's a limited economic base in their community," she said. "And they come here and it all looks very attainable, but it's so far from an easy grasp."

"I was one of them," Cynthia Peet said.

Peet came to Anchorage two summers ago when she was 24 from Stebbins -- a village southwest of Nome with a population of about 550 -- to try something new and land a job in the city.

"Finding a job was pretty tough," Peet said. She said it took her several months to find housing and she had to stay with her boyfriend's family. Eventually, she got a job as a "floater" -- an administrative clerk for a week or two each month.

"I was rooming with somebody when I first moved here and that still wasn't covering living expenses," she said.

She survived in Anchorage for a year and then returned to her parents in Stebbins. "I went home because I couldn't afford rent anymore and the hours of work wasn't doing too much," Peet said.

She came back to Anchorage in December, surfed aunts' and cousins' homes for three months, and now rooms with a co-worker from her job at AmeriCorps.

"It's livable for me for now," she said.

Find Monique Newton online at adn.com/contact/mnewton or call 907-257-4469.

Homeless numbers

• 750,000 to 2 million young adults (aged 18 to 24) are homeless in America at some point each year

• 38 percent of foster care alumni in Alaska said they were homeless at some point after leaving their foster homes

• When Covenant House opened 20 years ago, 15 was the average age for residents. Today, it's 18.

Sources: National HealthCare for the Homeless Council, UAA School of Social Work, Covenant House of Alaska

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