An Invisible Problem
I didn’t set out to write a story about youth homelessness. It began one day as I was walking the dog. I do a lot of my writing work while I’m walking the dog; I stroll along talking to myself, but since it looks like I’m talking to the dog, no one thinks I’m off my gourd.
On this day the title, The Antique Picker’s Daughter, popped into my head. That’s interesting, I thought. A moment later, the first two lines of the novel followed:
“The first thing you need to know: they’re not antiques.”
“The second thing: I’m not his daughter.”
What’s going on here? I wondered, so I wrote the novel to find out.
What I found out was that Frankie, the novel’s 15-year-old narrator, was homeless and learning how to live on the streets.
I worked in libraries for years, so it was automatic for me to begin researching youth homelessness (also referred to as unhoused or underhoused youth).
What the numbers told me was grim. Depending on the population being studied, there are around 6,000 unhoused kids in Canada on any given night, 40% of them under the age of 16. Vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as girls and women, 2SLGTBQIA+ people, Black people, and people of colour are more likely to experience homelessness, as are those who have experienced abuse. Unhoused youth make up 16-20% of the homeless population in Canada, but they’re nearly invisible; in all the discussions about homelessness, there’s almost no mention of homeless kids.
That’s because the streets are dangerous, so kids who are homeless do their best to stay off them. Kids couch surf, they stay at their friends’ homes if their friends’ parents let them, they’ll hunker down in squats before they live on the streets. Walk downtown in urban centers and you’ll see lots of homeless adults on the streets: You won’t see many kids.
As a result, youth homelessness is an almost invisible problem. And if you can’t see a problem, it’s difficult to fix it.
Youth homelessness feeds other problems, too. Kids on the street are more easily coerced into human trafficking than housed kids are. People often equate human trafficking with sex trafficking, and it’s true that vulnerable girls and women are often forced into the sex trade; however, boys and men are trafficked, too, into the labour market: agriculture, construction, industry—brutal, dangerous lines of work. If we start to address youth homelessness, we can start to remedy other issues as well.
But I was working on a novel, and novels, as a rule, are not written as a list of statistics, since statistics are notorious for not being compelling characters or plot points. Novels work better when there’s a human character involved, a proxy for the reader.
I have never been homeless, but I have friends and relatives who have been homeless, so there were people I could talk to who could fill me in on the human aspect of what the numbers I turned up didn’t tell me.
What I learned is, living on the street is exhausting; it’s filled with humiliations, large and small. A lot of the time, life on the streets is tedious, but it’s a tedium filled with constant danger; there’s the threat of violence, assault, theft, exploitation, of falling into substance abuse, addiction, or prostitution.
Because homelessness and poverty go hand in hand, the homeless are subject to the indignities of poverty: denied choice, denied agency, denied respect. And, as anyone who has been out of money will tell you, it’s expensive to be poor; small servings of food cost more than buying in bulk, cheap goods wear out more quickly than good quality merchandise, which means the poor have to replace their things more frequently, which can end up being more costly in the end.
I learned that lots of people look at the homeless as a broad, homogeneous mass instead of seeing the individuals involved. It’s easier that way. It’s easier to talk about “the homeless” as if all homeless people are the same, as if their trajectories have been identical, as if their needs and wants are interchangeable. It makes it easier to see the homeless as “other,” different from us. In fact, the homeless are you and me who have fallen on tough times: each homeless person has a different story. When you talk to people who have fallen on hard times, you learn that a lot of us are only one disaster away from being where they have ended up—one bad injury away from unemployment, one missed bill payment away from losing the roof over our heads, one accident away from living on the streets.
I didn’t start out to write about youth homelessness, and there’s a lot more to the novel than Frankie’s experiences on the street, but youth homelessness is an integral part of the story and in exploring it I discovered that many of the systems needed to fix the problems that cause it are already in place, but they’re starved of money. Many of the policies to address it already exist, but they’re not high on governments’ action plans—a lot of homeless kids are too young to vote, so their needs carry less political weight. What’s required is the political and moral will to insist the systems get funded and the policies get implemented. A dollar spent today to help a kid find stable housing saves society seven dollars down the line. Think of it as spending money now to save money later.
What I also learned is that the cost in human pain caused by youth homelessness is too high, and the waste of human potential too steep. Canada is wealthy. In this country, no kid should be living on the streets.
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Melanie Dugan was born in San Francisco, and lived in Boston, Toronto, and London, England, before settling in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of six novels: The Antique Picker’s Daughter, Hard White, Sometime Daughter, Revising Romance, Dead Beautiful, and Bee Summers. Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards.
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