Community leaders gather to tackle growing issue of youth homelessness
Community and government leaders gathered in downtown Las Vegas Thursday to address a persistent and growing problem in Nevada: youth homelessness.
Over 50 different organizations in Nevada and Clark County gathered at the Smith Center for Performing Arts for the annual Southern Nevada Youth Homelessness Summit. The summit brings together a multitude of groups because youth homelessness is a result of a multitude of issues from domestic abuse, housing affordability and mental health issues, said Arash Ghafoori, the CEO of Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth.
“It’s really an opportunity to bring together all the necessary players and bring in even more of those players because not one sector of government, not one non-profit, not one business can address this issue,” Ghafoori said.
One youth who has experienced homelessness spoke at the summit. Tayari is 20 years old and currently is housed through NPHY’s independent living program. She said she has experienced homelessness sporadically for the last six years and wants more people to understand the mindset of homeless youth.
“I was stuck in survival mode,” said Tayari, who asked to be identified only by her first name out of privacy concerns. “And it’s hard to even get to the base level, like, somewhere to eat, or a warm shower or even a bathroom throughout the day. So when I was homeless, I had literally all of those issues.”
Growing problem
It’s estimated that over 5,600 people experienced homelessness in Southern Nevada with 516 individuals being in families with children and 314 being unaccompanied youths or young adults, according to the 2022 Point-In-Time survey, which measured homelessness on one night in February. The survey was conducted by Help Hope Home, which partners with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for this data.
Ghafoori said these results usually provide an undercount of actual homeless numbers, especially for youths, who can avoid being counted by couchsurfing or temporarily staying at other people’s homes.
“Young people are resourceful enough to not necessarily end up within some of those facilities,” he said. “And more so than that young people have an incredible distrust for a lot of adults and institutional figures and that’s simply because many systems have failed them before.”
NPHY expects overall homelessness, both in the older and younger populations, to rise in the near future in Nevada. Ghafoori cites reduced pandemic-era government aid and high housing prices as main reasons for an expected increase.
“As different government resources dwindle down and as the more equipped in higher income parts of society get back to business as usual, the struggle is still very much there for our most vulnerable populations, especially young people,” he said.
Housing costs are coming down slightly from the red-hot pandemic market but still remain high.
The median price of a single family home in Southern Nevada was $440,000 in October, which was a 7.3 percent increase from October 2021, according to trade association Las Vegas Realtors. The average asking rent in Las Vegas during the third quarter of 2022 was $1,451 per month, up from $1,403 during the same period in 2021, according to the Nevada State Apartment Association.
Affordability in housing is top of mind for Tayari, who currently sells insurance policies, since the current housing prices feel out of reach for her.
Tayari said that before discovering NPHY she didn’t get involved with homeless resources, mostly because she was unaware of what resources existed, and she was mostly sleeping out of her car.
“I didn’t even know where to look,” she said. “Because everywhere I went I was just trying to just get a job to make a living and it just made it seem like I couldn’t even do that.”
Ghafoori said what’s needed to address homelessness is creating base-level support such as community and non-profit programs for homeless youth, while also fixing policy issues that keep the homeless from finding permanent housing.
“It’s a combination of boots on the ground and of making the systems actually work,” he said. “Homelessness quite frankly in America is a policy problem so it needs policy solutions as well.”
NHPY has focused on expanding access to government identification and medical access for homeless youth, and plans to focus on expanding access to higher education for the next Nevada legislative session, according to Ghafoori.
The summit has been happening annually since 2017 and has focused on youth homelessness in Southern Nevada. It is set to expand its scope in 2023 to also address the issue in Reno and rural areas of the state, Ghafoori said.
The summit was sponsored by the Review-Journal and Sands Cares, the community engagement program for Las Vegas Sands Corp.
The Review-Journal is owned by the Adelson family, including Dr. Miriam Adelson, majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands Corp., and Las Vegas Sands President and COO Patrick Dumont.
Contact Sean Hemmersmeier at shemmersmeier@reviewjournal.com. Follow @seanhemmers34 on Twitter.
