Los Angeles CityBeat

By JOE PIASECKI

July 6, 2006

Former foster child Brian Chytka, (third from left) and his homeless posse

The 22-year-old is surrounded by those he calls family. There is a street-smart skater, a young punk-rocker in jeans who laughs like all of it is somehow funny, and a girl with military-short hair and a lip ring who looks healthy but knows she will die a heroin addict. She won’t eat the food I offer because she feels sick from going a day without a fix. Heroin is also Chytka’s drug of choice. It was his dad’s, too.

Like thousands of former Los Angeles County foster youths who have left state care homeless, penniless, and largely unprepared to fend for themselves, Chytka lives wild on the streets. As anonymous survivors of the state’s overtaxed and impersonal foster care bureaucracy, they are among L.A.’s throwaway kids.

Every day in Hollywood, newly homeless youths land at My Friend’s Place, one of only a few charities offering drug and psychological counseling, showers, food, and haircuts to people under 25. It was near here that I found Chytka – one of the few young people willing to tell their stories – with his friends carrying their food around in a plastic bag one recent afternoon.

Half of the kids who go to My Friend’s Place have been in foster care – more than 700, according to David Brinkman, the center’s executive director. All too often, he says, “Foster parents drop their kids off at our door into homelessness.”

According to the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, nearly one-third of foster youth – and there are more than 25,000 of them in the county right now, according to the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) – become homeless within two years of leaving the system. Another group, the Covenant House of California, estimates that as many as half of local foster youth become homeless within six months of leaving the system. The trend is the same nationwide, according to foster youth advocates Casey Family Programs. If nothing changes, 75,000 former foster kids will become homeless over the next 15 years, as Casey President William Bell warned members of the state Assembly last month.

Typically unequipped for relationships or caring for themselves, these kids often form “street families” to survive. In Chytka’s case, he has nothing else. A child of drug addicted parents, the state removed him and his younger brother from their home. After his father cleaned up, he again won custody of the boys, but was soon on the dope again, once shooting up right before a hearing with a family court judge.

“That was January 11, 1998,” says Chytka. “I wouldn’t let my dad apologize and say he loved me or anything, right? I got on that phone and I ripped him a new asshole, and my closing words were, ‘I hate your guts, you old man, and I hope you fucking kill yourself, man.’ And my fucking dad killed himself the next fucking day,” he says, a noticeable catch in his voice.

JJ, another former foster youth who just turned 21, spent the past three years sleeping under freeway bridges, in abandoned homes, and in Pasadena’s Central Park. She became homeless at 18 when, after years of being moved from group home to group home, she successfully fought to be emancipated from the system. She doesn’t want to use her full name. Chytka demands that his name be used.

Twenty-year-old Jonathan isn’t homeless, but his eligibility for free county-sponsored housing in Burbank runs out in a month, and so far he’s got nowhere to go. In and out of 15 different foster homes since he was five, including one in which his foster parent didn’t speak English, Jonathan says no one noticed he couldn’t read until high school.

According to Casey Family Programs, 46 percent of American foster children leave the system without a high school diploma.

“The state has a long way to go before it can be declared a good parent to kids in our foster care system,” says Assemblymember Karen Bass, a Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the Assembly’s Select Committee on Foster Care. By pushing a package of legislation that would extend housing, health care and other benefits to foster youth until they are as old as 24, the committee hopes to go a long way very quickly.

800 down – 9,200 to go

L.A. County’s foster care program is not only the largest in the United States, it’s larger than the programs in many entire states. And yet there are just 800 beds available for kids leaving foster care, with all but 244 of those operated by local nonprofits, says DCFS Emancipation Services Director Rhelda Shabazz. Those beds don’t even cover a 10th of the kids who need a place to go.

“We probably need about 10,000 beds,” says Shabazz. “That would guarantee every youth who wanted it could have one.”

The problem is not enough money. Of the $18 million in federal funds her department received this year, only 30 percent – roughly $5.4 million – can be spent on temporary “transitional” housing and rental assistance for kids growing up and leaving the system. The rest goes toward education grants and programs that teach kids to drive, cook for themselves, or understand credit and banking practices. County social services workers called “independent living coordinators” work with foster youth several years before emancipation, and services remain available to kids until they turn 21, even when they leave the system voluntarily and come back later for help, says Shabazz.

This year, says state Department of Social Services spokesman Michael Westin, $8.1 million in state funding is available to counties that will provide matching funds to expand transitional housing programs. Like most other counties, L.A. has not put up those matching funds. Removing that requirement is just one of several goals of the Assembly Select Committee on Foster Care. A package of legislation currently wending its way through the legislature specifically targets keeping foster youth off the streets. The bills have found support from both parties and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The new laws would make independent living services programs mandatory for all foster youth and give them the option to stay in the system until they turn 21. Other services, like transitional housing and education grants, would remain an option to emancipated foster youth for an additional three years, until they turn 24. To better supervise services delivery, the bills would establish a state Child Welfare Council and undersecretary of Foster Care.

“It’s important we try to resolve these problems upfront while we still have control over these kids. Otherwise they wind up in our system being incarcerated or homeless,” says Pasadena Democratic Assemblywoman Carol Liu, who several years ago authored the Foster Care Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all foster youth the right to obtain services, file complaints, and have access to attorneys and the courts.

According to the Children’s Law Center, 20 percent of ex-foster youth in the United States will serve time behind bars within two years of leaving care. “It’s a system that does need looking at, because if we don’t put the money upfront, you’re going to pay for it someplace down the line. We don’t want to waste more lives with something we certainly can fix,” she says.

‘And you can quote me’

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a push to create more transitional housing and other services for youth is underway as part of the Bring L.A. Home campaign, a $100 million county plan to end homelessness designed by a blue-ribbon panel of community leaders. Released in April, the plan calls for specific services and new housing for homeless youth, and has convened a task force to deliver that plan in July.

“We need a comprehensive, countywide approach for service planning and delivery for youth,” reads the report, which cites a study from the late-1990s that found more than 60 percent of Hollywood street youth had a history of foster care.

Housing these kids, says Brinkman, should be a starting point for services. “When you have a youth you’ve been working with for eight hours … and put them on the streets at night full of pedophiles and gangbangers and pimps looking to take advantage of this population, the next time you see them they’re back in crisis again,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Mental Health Services Act (2004’s Proposition 63) has allowed county officials to allocate some $14 million to foster care and transitional housing programs. Patricia Curry, who runs a Pasadena insurance business and has served on the Los Angeles County Commission for Children and Families for more than a decade, says that money will soon allow service workers to treat and house more street youth with mental health needs.

Even without health problems, however, kids on the street face major hurdles. Biggest among those, says Jonathan, the 20-year-old whose time in transitional housing is about to run out, is chronic instability.

“Right after my high school graduation was pretty much the day I got kicked out of my foster home. The guy I was living with didn’t want me there since they were going to stop paying him. Luckily the social worker was able to find me a place after a couple of days,” he says.

Many foster youth do not benefit from federally funded life-skills independent living programs, according to Human Rights Watch’s Los Angeles office, which recently conducted a study of homeless foster children in San Francisco and Hollywood.

“What they’re telling me is that they aren’t getting the preparation and support they need to enter into adulthood, regardless of what part of the state they’re from or when they left the system,” says Elizabeth Calvin, children’s advocate for Human Rights Watch, who presented a preliminary report to the Assembly Select Committee on Foster Care on May 8.

In her report, Calvin details complaints by several youth saying foster care officials had a vested interest in keeping them dependent. One said he wasn’t allowed to ride the bus or get a job. Others told Calvin they had no idea medical coverage, school tuition assistance, and transitional housing were even available.

“They’re really describing experiences of not having been given basic tools on how to be an adult, very basic things like how to cook, budget money, rent an apartment, protect themselves from people trying to take advantage of them,” says Calvin. “From the perspective of Human Rights Watch, this is a failure of the state because these children are dependent on the state for more than just food and shelter; they’re dependent for their development.”

The state is doing much to make sure kids don’t fall through the cracks, argues Shabazz, but the hard part is getting the kids on board. “Unfortunately, it seems there are youth that have not received services, but I believe that’s the exception, not the rule. Again, it’s voluntary. Youth are offered services and many of them choose to take them,” she says. “We’re doing a lot of outreach.”

County officials are currently sponsoring a survey of foster youth and are holding discussion-based forums to see what kids really think about the services available to them. In order to encourage more foster youth to participate, they’re offering a $50 gift card to those who fill one out.

And some foster youth do excel in these programs. More than 100 gathered downtown last month at the Walt Disney Concert Hall to celebrate not only their high school graduation but also their scholarships for college.

“Sometimes people have the wrong impression about who foster kids are and what it means to be in the foster care system,” says Polly Williams, president of United Friends of the Children. “People think the kids have done something, but they’re there by circumstance and can achieve as much as any other kid.”

United Friends, founded in 1979 by Nancy Riordan (wife of former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan), finds scholarships for foster youth in its program, offers an array of life-skills training, and operates its own transitional housing program.

Fewer than one in five foster youth will go to college, and many of those won’t graduate, says Williams. All of this, however, seems terribly unimportant to a group of a half-dozen African-American current and former foster youth recently gathered at My Friend’s Place. Among them are sisters Danielle, 17, and Chan’tell, 15, who say they resent being placed in foster care and just want to be left alone.

“Right now I’m kind of AWOL,” said Danielle, originally from Baldwin Hills. “I ran away because they made me mad. They took me to some old lady’s house. I didn’t know her.”

“The biggest challenge is establishing rapport as adults,” says Brinkman of working with street youth at My Friend’s Place. “Constantly they have been failed by the adults in their lives, and they are very wary of adults, period.”

As if to illustrate that point, Danielle asks me to send a message to the Department of Children and Family Services: “Let the foster care system know that they can kiss my black ass – and you can quote me on that.

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