Youth aging out of care and custody in the child welfare system are referred to as being on the superhighway to homelessness.
If you're homeless at 16, the chances you will be homeless at 28 is close to 80%. As kids age out of care, if we don't have supportive housing to move them from the provisional housing they have had in the child welfare system to independence—if we don't have that hop, skip and a jump to a higher quality of life—those kids will end up as the chronically homeless we have to deal with in a generation.
Focusing on youth, and in particular gay, lesbian, two-spirit and queer youth, is fundamental to this. During COVID, one of the highest jumps and spikes in population has been kids in that community as they get kicked out of their homes because their sexuality or their gender presentation presents a challenge to their families.
The homeless encampments in Toronto in particular are seeing a much higher count of racialized youth and queer youth, so building intentional housing in that space is fundamentally important to ending homelessness.