Youth homelessness has increased rapidly in Austin, according to nonprofit data

The number of young people experiencing homelessness in Travis County, which includes most of Austin, has risen substantially in the past four years, according to numbers from a nonprofit that tracks the issue.

Since 2020, the number of people under 25 years old without permanent housing and not under the care of a parent or legal guardian has nearly quadrupled, jumping from 247 people to 934, according to LifeWorks. This data excludes families with kids who may be experiencing homelessness.

“It’s alarming in the sense that it signifies the work that we have to do,” said David Gray, the city’s homeless strategy officer.

Gray and Liz Schoenfeld, the CEO of LifeWorks, both said one factor that may have contributed to this jump is better data. Gray said the city has been doing more outreach with people living on the streets and the difference in these numbers could reflect, in part, a better count of those experiencing homelessness.

LifeWorks pulled the data from the Homeless Management Information System, a portal shared by local organizations that work with homeless people. Organizations use this database to log personal information, track the needs of those living on the streets and share resources about housing.

The numbers pulled by LifeWorks come from a list of people in this database who are on a waitlist for housing. A spokesperson for ECHO, the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, confirmed the data from 2023 and 2024. He could not confirm earlier numbers because LifeWorks had recorded them in real time.

Schoenfeld said about two-thirds of young people experiencing homelessness in Austin have either been involved in the foster care or juvenile justice systems. She said moving from family to family, as some kids in the foster care system do, could be traumatizing. According to state data from 2023, children in foster care in Texas had an average of four placements.

“When you think about having that many transitions, changing schools, potentially, that many times, it’s not surprising that young people are really, really challenged to then make it on their own when they’re exiting the foster care system,” Schoenfeld said.

Research supports the relationship between foster care and homelessness. In 2020, a researcher at Fordham University found that nearly one-third of 2,000 people who had been in foster care in the country had experienced homelessness by the time they turned 21.

Schoenfeld also said some young people have become homeless after struggling to afford housing in Austin. Average rent prices in the area have increased by about 18 percent since 2020, although for the past year rents have been falling.

Overall, the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased in Austin and Travis County. Between 2020 and 2024, the number nearly doubled, jumping from 3,194 people living on the streets on any given day to 6,358. Schoenfeld said homeless youth aren’t often captured in this overall count.

“Generally speaking, youth homelessness is an invisible problem,” she said. “Youth are often really ashamed of the fact that they’re experiencing homelessness. They are better able to blend in … (T)hey will be trying to position themselves in places where they won’t necessarily be detected. Staying at all-night coffee shops, going to raves, things like that.”

Buoyed by federal funding provided during the pandemic, the city has recently made large financial investments in building housing for people who have been homeless.

From now through 2026, about 1,000 apartments of housing for people who have been homeless are set to open in Austin, including several conversions of hotels into apartment buildings. According to city numbers, that represents about a 600 percent increase in the number of homes for people who have struggled with homelessness.

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