The state’s official tally says 677 young people lack housing. Advocates say that number misses thousands living on couches, moving between shelters and trying to stay hidden.
This story contains mentions of self-harm, suicide, substance abuse, child abuse, and physical and sexual violence.
Michelle Magnon was 15 years old when she left her abusive home and started to live on the streets.
She was without an address of her own for several years, spending her nights outside and on friends’ couches with hardly a single adult to look after her. Back then in the 1980s, she said, there wasn’t really anywhere for teenagers in her situation to go.
But “there were one or two people and brief instances that did make me feel like, ‘I can get out of this, I can turn my life around and be OK,’” Magnon told LOOKOUT. “And then I realized, hey, not only can I do that, but I want to help others who are in the same position.”
Today, Magnon is the youth services program manager at Old Pueblo Community Services, an organization in Tucson that offers housing and related services to thousands of people every year. She helps oversee its Bread and Roses shelter, a transitional housing facility for young adults ages 18 to 24 who are LGBTQ or LGBTQ supportive.
Other businesses and nonprofits have filled similar gaps in homeless youth outreach, services and housing. But the issue is far from solved: According to Point-In-Time — or PIT — data from January 2026, 677 Arizona youth younger than 25 have nowhere to call home. It’s a figure that nearly every advocate and public health expert interviewed said dramatically understates the issue. Other recent surveys have put the number in the tens of thousands.
LOOKOUT spoke with nearly two dozen community advocates, experts and homeless young people about the underlying issues causing youth homelessness across the state and what needs to be done to help young people while addressing the roots of the problem. We found that systemic disadvantages such as poverty, abuse and discrimination can increase the risk of youth homelessness, pointing to the need for solutions that both address its causes and mitigate their consequences.
Counting and understanding the scope of youth homelessness in Arizona is difficult. Many young people rely on family and friends for a place to sleep until they are kicked out, and may later find shelter in group homes or transitional living facilities.
Various figures highlight significant differences in how youth homelessness is measured. A 2025 Arizona Department of Education report, for example, found nearly 26,840 unhoused students enrolled in grades K-12 that year. That makes the gap between their figures and the PIT count’s quite large despite the state report excluding older teenagers and young adults.
Kim Beaudoin, the communications person for Phoenix-based homeless services hub Keys for Change, said the PIT number is guaranteed to always be an undercount because the survey data is collected by volunteers who often don’t know the areas they are surveying. The survey also can’t account for people who seek shelter during inclement weather, such as extreme heat or heavy rain.
For LGBTQ+ youth, the problem is even more pronounced. PIT data does not count sexual orientation or gender identity when collecting street-level data. But one survey found that LGBTQ+ youth in the state face homelessness at double the rate of their peers. And in 2019, the University of Arizona Southwest Institute for Research on Women found that 40% of the homeless youth it served identified as LGBTQ+.
Despite these gaps in data, multiple reports point to the same trend: Arizona leads the nation in the official increase in its youth homeless population since 2020.
In addition, a 2022 HUD report reported that Arizona had the fourth-largest unsheltered unaccompanied youth population in the country. Derrick Jamerson, a community engagement coordinator for Goodwill, said young homeless people in the state very quickly become unsheltered, even if they initially have housing.
“Say me and my pop start getting into it, and now it’s getting physical,” he said. “When I run away, I’m going to go stay with my boy because he said I can stay there. In two or three days, the mom is like, ‘Hey, why is he here so much?’”
In this way, Jamerson said that most young people eventually get kicked out of the places they flee to and end up sleeping in parks or seeking shelter elsewhere.
Without stable housing, youth become vulnerable to trafficking. Phoenix is designated by the U.S. Department of Justice as one of the nation’s top human trafficking jurisdictions, and roughly 40% of homeless young adults report experiencing sex or labor trafficking across Arizona.
Public health and housing advocates also say young people with mental health challenges can experience worsening symptoms when they become homeless and lose access to medication and care. Of the youth LOOKOUT spoke with, more than half said they had experienced mental health challenges such as depression, post-traumatic stress, or bipolar disorder. Two young people interviewed said they attempted suicide.
Isabel Maxwell-Kinslow, 20, takes classes at Goodwill’s youth center and said she was abused and raped by multiple people since she was a small child. She eventually left home after she got a restraining order from her mother, who attempted to stab her with a knife.
Due to her bipolar disorder, Maxwell-Kinslow said she threatened people during manic episodes, committed arson and attempted suicide while homeless. These incidents led to her being kicked out of several shelters before she eventually secured an apartment.
“I’m worried about it in the future because, what if I don’t get a job, or what if I go back to homelessness, and I don’t have the resources, and they just disappear?” Maxwell-Kinslow said. “I need someone to check up on me.”
The pain and illnesses homeless youth struggle with are physical in nature as well. Those who spoke to LOOKOUT mentioned gallstones, knee pain and untreated athlete’s foot, which can lead to bacterial infections in extreme cases, as problems caused or exacerbated by their homelessness.
“We didn’t have toothbrushes, we didn’t have toothpaste … I hadn’t been to a dentist in years, hadn’t been to a real doctor,” said Lillian Williams, 18, from Kingman, Arizona, who has dealt with homelessness since she was 10. “Whenever I was sick, I would just be sick, and that was all that we could do.”
Caseworkers and community coordinators who work with unhoused youth said a roadblock to solving the problem comes from anti-homeless sentiment, and public misconceptions that young people choose to be homeless or are juvenile delinquents. Instead, they say, many homeless youth face disadvantages from birth or early childhood.
“It’s actually very common, parents being incarcerated or suffering on the streets from substance abuse disorder themselves,” said Magnon with Old Pueblo Community Services. “A lot of these kids come in and they tell us these stories. It’s so sad because it almost seems like they didn’t have a fighting chance when they started.”
Youth advocates most frequently mentioned physical, emotional and sexual abuse in the house; parents’ substance abuse; and the incarceration or deportation of family members as among the strongest predictors of youth homelessness into young adulthood, particularly when they lead to involvement with child protective services and the foster care system. Out of the nine homeless youth LOOKOUT spoke with for this story, eight people said problems with their family directly contributed to their homelessness.
A large proportion of homeless youth end up without shelter after being explicitly kicked out by their families. This is especially the case for LGBTQ+ youth and teenaged parents. Experts noted how teens they work with are rejected and forced out of their homes after coming out.
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Email a TipAccording to Erin Runion, the program coordinator for a Mohave County shelter run by Arizona Youth Partnership, an increasing number of young people in her county are being kicked out of their homes the minute they become legal adults.
“A lot of these kids, when they turn 18, the parents — even if they’re still in high school — are just like, ‘You’re 18, so get out.’ And they don’t have anywhere to go,” Runion said. “Their families were not good to them, and they don’t know what to do.”
Research shows that youth who age out of the foster care system or are reunited with their families afterward have an increased risk of homelessness compared with peers who have had no interaction with the system. A national study by policy research organization Chapin Hall found that 25% to 33% of youth and young adults experiencing homelessness in 2019 had a history in foster care, and surveys going back decades have shown that up to 40% of foster youth nationwide said they were abused in care.
“Ghost,” a 19-year-old from New Pasqua Reservation who wished not to disclose his full name due to gang affiliation, said the house manager of a Phoenix group home he was placed in as a child, along with the house manager’s wife, would verbally berate youth by calling them “fat” and “useless.” He also said staff at that group home bullied a 5-year-old for being autistic.
Homeless youth can also experience housing instability and poverty alongside their families from a young age. According to the Phoenix Children’s Foundation, unaccompanied youths and families with children were approximately 35% of Arizona’s homeless population in 2022.
“It’s always been a problem for my mom, financially. It was just her, so she was a single mother,” said Ti Jordan Lewis Schaffer, T.J. for short, who said he first experienced homelessness at 8 years old after being kicked out of a family member’s house. “We would sleep on the streets for a week, and then my mom would take us to a hotel, and just go back and forth.”
Advocates say Arizona’s dramatic rise in housing costs since 2020 — making it one of the nation’s least affordable states — as well as federal funding cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid are only worsening families’ economic situations.
“Because of income inequalities and these sorts of systems, people are already so close to the edge and (now) getting pushed over,” said Bethany Neumann, a communications director for the Pima County and Tohono O’odham Nation homeless high school graduation program Youth On Their Own. “One of our students was trying to sign up for SNAP … and they, at the beginning, offered 10 bucks a month. He was like, ‘Hell no! What’s the point?’”
Born on the New Pascua Reservation and raised by his grandparents, Ghost’s grandfather gave him up to CPS after his grandmother died a week before his 11th birthday. Instead of going to the agreed-upon pickup location where AZDCS officials were meant to meet him, Ghost went on the run.
He survived his first week of homelessness by stealing food, asking local restaurant workers for water and sleeping in parks. He said that even the people who helped him often treated him like he was a “waste of sperm” before his older brother’s friend, a member of the Bloods gang, took Ghost under his wing and eventually into his home.
“I had a lot of hatred, a lot of anger in my body. But I found a way to put it out, which was music,” Ghost said. “My OG (Original Gangster) put me into his studio and just let me go off.”
Ghost said that becoming a part of the Bloods helped him eat, earn money, put clothes on his back and access weapons to stay safe on the streets. He is still gang-affiliated today and said he can never leave, though he wants to “separate” himself for his future wife and kids.
Eventually, Ghost’s OG alerted the AZDCS of his situation. After being taken in, he was moved around group homes between Tucson and Phoenix. When he aged out of foster care at 18, he lived on the streets again until his coach from Extended Foster Care, a program that offers foster youth further care until they are around 22, got him into a shelter.
“I choose to forget everything that happened,” he said. “The way I look at it, the past is in the past. That’s in the rearview. We’re moving on, we got a whole mission ... I’d rather live in the ‘burberry’ (suburbs) to show my kids that sometimes you can make it by having it.”
Eevee Van-Vuur’s mother lost custody of her and her brother when they were both 2. She heard rumors growing up that it was because her mom was charged with sexually assaulting their brother.
The two drifted through the foster care system for a few years, where they were matched with several families she felt had only taken them in for the check. At around 4 years old, they were taken in by their great-aunt, with whom Van-Vuur developed a difficult and occasionally physical relationship.
“When we moved to Texas, I enrolled my brother and me in school. I signed us up for the free and reduced-price lunch program. I figured out our bus route,” she said. Her great aunt always said she wanted kids, according to Van-Vuur, but that she felt her aunt never wanted to be a parent.
Van-Vuur ended up running away to Arizona and attended the University of Arizona, but she had to drop out after a semester due to costs. She couch-hopped between friends for several months and ended up on the streets for a month as well.
“I didn’t have the energy to be scared ... I applied for food stamps so I could eat and was mostly just nocturnal, in a way,” she said.
Eventually, Van-Vuur attended a summer camp hosted by EON Lounge — a Tucson community drop-in space for LGBTQ+ youth and allies who are 12 to 24 years old — where staff members connected her to the youth center where she currently stays. She said she has several physical and mental diagnoses which can cause her to have mood swings, but that she is now working and involved in several local activities, including sword fighting.
“Being homeless isn’t ideal, but it’s still an upgrade” to living with her family, she said.
Isabel Maxwell-Kinslow said she was adopted at a young age because her biological parents were addicted to weed, crack cocaine and other drugs. She said she was abused by her adoptive family members and that she was raped “as a kid, a teenager, a baby and as an adult,” but that she had a motherly figure in an older acquaintance who taught her how to cook.
Maxwell-Kinslow left home at 18 after getting a restraining order against her adoptive mother, who she said told her to kill herself and attempted to stab her with a knife. She said if she had stayed with her family longer, she would have ended her life.
“I really don’t understand why she was treating us like that,” Maxwell said of her adoptive mother. “She said, ‘Your (biological) mother raised you this way, you should just go back with your mom’ ... I don’t know about Zodiac signs, but she was an Aries. I looked it up, sometimes they’re mean.”
After leaving, she lived without a home for several years. Maxwell said she oscillated between going to homeless shelters, her sister’s house and sleeping in hotels and parks, the latter of which scared her due to fights sometimes taking place.
She was often kicked out of shelters and agencies due to suicide attempts, mental episodes where she would kick and scream, and once because she stayed out too late watching Five Nights at Freddy’s when it came to theaters: “It was sad, because I really liked their Bingo nights,” she said.
Maxwell has managed to secure housing for a year but is scared of becoming homeless again. She wants to go to college and train in the culinary arts; she thinks she should “get a business loan and open a shelter ... there’s not a lot, and they’re usually full.”
When Lillian Williams was 7 years old, her biological father was arrested for molesting her sister. Afterward, her mother divorced her father and engaged a man she met on Facebook.
The family moved to Arizona for him, but he ended up having problems with substance abuse and mental health. Williams and her mom escaped and fled to Kingman, where they would be homeless for the next two years.
“A lot of those times that everything was going on, my mom was just out of it, and she didn’t really want to be home,” Williams said. “So I learned how to be independent, and it helped me in a way, but also gave me trauma.”
She remembered being embarrassed as a child, having to “tell her friends they can’t come over to her house because she’s homeless and living in a shelter.” Though her mother remarried and they both moved in with her new husband, Williams was sent to a group home after being caught with a vape at school.
“They told me while I was in there that the day I turned 18 at midnight, I was kicked out of my house,” she said. “It was one of those things where if I hadn’t been able to move into transitional living, I don’t know what I’d have done.”
Williams struggled a lot with mental health in her teens and attempted suicide due to her circumstances. She was also nearly killed when she developed a gallstone that slipped into her bile duct and she lacked the health care to fix it immediately.
But now, Williams is happy. She said she has a “village” of amazing friends who support her and that she is engaged to be married in May of next year.
Ti Jordan “T.J.” Lewis Schaffer first became homeless when he was 8 years old and living with his mother and younger sister in Las Vegas, Nevada. They circled through family members’ places before his mother met a woman whom she married, and they came to live in Arizona as a family with her and her children.
He said that his mother’s spirituality made her a self-hating lesbian who would beat him for being gay and cause problems with the women she was with, her new wife being no exception. After they divorced and his step-mom got a restraining order against his mother, Schaffer said his step-mom initially let him and his sister stay in the house. But she eventually made them leave as well.
“At that point, I didn’t care about me. Like, kick me out! I’m 18. Shoot, I’ll figure it out. But don’t kick my sister out,” he said. “I went off because, you’re a grown woman kicking kids out that you said you love, and we’ve been in a whole homeless situation together not once, but twice. Then you want us to do that shit alone?”
Schaffer’s mother moved back to California, his sister went to stay with a friend and his neighbor convinced him to live with her. But he left after four months because he said she was controlling, and that her family was homophobic toward him and his boyfriend. He slept outside a library for a few weeks until he was connected to a youth shelter in Phoenix and accepted into Job Corps’ residential employment program, where Schaffer has recently begun training.
“You can’t really rely on people for anything ... there are people who take advantage of (homeless youth) because they know they’re going through something and that they’re also not
Organizations serving homeless youth said they have seen increased demand for their services in recent years, particularly in the wake of federal funding cuts. Many said they have lost or are at risk of losing funding, while others have strained their resources to keep up.
“It’s not just one system, but many that have to be changed in order for us to see a difference,” said Natasha McCloud, director of program services at Sister Jose’s Women’s Center. “But I don’t think that is going to happen because it’s still treated, sometimes, as a crime to be homeless.”
Over the past year, the center says it has gone from seeing 55 women a day to 83.
Advocates and homeless youth told LOOKOUT that the multistep approach needed to effectively tackle homelessness starts with the government restoring funding to youth-focused programs and organizations serving homeless and low-income people.
Other, more systemic solutions they said would help the problem include lowering housing costs, making medical and mental health care affordable, addressing discrimination against marginalized groups and fixing the job market for young people.
Keri Kramer, who manages Phoenix’s POND Housing Program for LGBTQ+ and allied youths 18 to 24, said the current employment landscape makes finding a job extra challenging for homeless youth.
“A lot of our youth are on their second chance — they’ve made a mistake sometime down the road in their younger years, and jobs are not hiring them because of past records,” she said. “We are human, we make mistakes, and you shouldn’t have to go through nine interviews to work at the baseball field downtown.”
Sreejita Patra (she/her)
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