Jackie Mejia is waiting for a phone call. She often tries to distract herself with homemaking as her children sleep.
But Mejia is settled into a Motel 6 in Hacienda Heights. She doesn’t know if she will be at a friend’s house tomorrow night or in this room, so she basks quietly in the faint pulse of the heater. It's small luxury given that just months ago she was spending nights curling up in a cold pickup truck shielding her 9-year-old son and her newborn daughter from the brisk night air. The phone call that may come any day will decide if Mejia will get Section 8 housing and for the first time in her life, allow her to settle into permanent housing.
Across the city, in South Los Angeles, Eddie Chavez is cleaning dishes that have piled up from his housemates skipping kitchen duties. He's fine with doing them most of the time because he also knows what it's like to not have a kitchen at all to come home to. But it also intensifies his dream of owning his own place. But he's currently biding his time because work setting up convention centers is slow and he's currently out of work.
All young adults like Mejia and Chavez face setbacks to jobs and housing. But for these two, their transition to adulthood has been defined by their transition out of foster care.
Los Angeles County has the largest foster care system in the country.
The department was intended to be temporary relief, but Chavez and Mejia were part of a small subset of foster youth who stay in the foster care system until the maximum age. These people are truly raised by the system.
There is no typical path out of the system— some young adults interviewed for this story had been incarcerated, others were applying for mortgages, and some were still trying to finish their college degrees. However, policy confusion, lack of training of DCFS employees, communication between DCFS and other bodies and funding for services from the Department of Social Services have left many of them like Mejia without tools that could prepare them for adulthood.
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Over the last two decades, the most dramatic policy changes in the foster care system have focused on 16-to 24-year-olds. Tiffany Boyd is the first former foster youth to hold a position on the Commission on Children and Families and whenever she explains why this population matters, she begins by pointing out how today, the narrative of millennials leaning on their parents late in life has really changed the way that society thinks about child support.
“Society’s new norm is that kids are coming back [to live with parents] until 28 and damn near 30 nowadays,” she said. “That age has been pushed back for at least the last seven years.”
Before 2011, a person’s 18th birthday used to be the day that all services from the county would stop. The process is called “emancipating”: No more social worker, no more lawyer, and most importantly, foster homes no longer had to keep their kids. And there wasn’t much waiting for them after that.
One of Boyd’s colleagues on the commission, Trisha Curry, began her career in children’s services about 26 years ago. She remembers what it was like well before Boyd was in the system.
“The kids left with a Hefty bag. Everything they owned in the world was in that Hefty bag. They would go to court and the judge would say you’re no longer a foster child. And some people would celebrate, except for the fact that what that meant was that they had their hefty bag of stuff and they were going to be homeless,” said Curry.
But this is happening less and less. Curry was one of many advocates who helped push for the first federal law that provided grant money to help older foster youth in 2001.
Age 18 was still the cutoff but housing became available for youth who emancipated and didn’t have other arrangements. Department of Children and Family Services of Los Angeles County had a division called Youth Development Services (YDS) before the law was passed, but their housing program received a boost in funding after 2001.
Mejia and Chavez both took advantage of the housing. Chavez currently lives in a housing facility that specifically serves former foster youth. It is a large Victorian-style home with a balcony upstairs and a garden in the back. Much like a fraternity house, the bedrooms are up the wide dark wood staircase and the first floor is common areas. Given that for most the residents this is the first place they’ve ever called their own the place is clean say except for some stray belongings—a TV placed on a swivel chair in a living room, some abandoned boxes in the next room.
“It has its ups and downs. Some people know how to take care of their responsibilities more than others,” he said. “I’m real picky about how my kitchen is.”
Chavez only pays about $420 a month, so the place feels like low-income housing. He also pays the big brother role in the house, teaching the 18-year-olds who are newly emancipated how to cook and points them to the resources he used when he first got out of care.
Programs for youth have only been expanding. Just months after Chavez and Mejia emancipated, the foster care system went through its biggest change in history. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that is commonly referred to as AB12 that went into effect January of 2012. It established that youth could stay in care until the age of 21 in California.
“AB12 was very different. All the other efforts were good efforts but they weren’t giant leaps forward. AB12 was. One of the main reasons it was because it acknowledges the kids are still eligible for funds and money for different things like housing,” Curry said.
The bill that established housing in 2001 was only 39 pages. AB12 is over 146 pages.
AB12 singlehandedly created more government programs for older foster youth than ever in history. While it is unclear how many foster youth become homeless after emancipation, studies out of the Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, one of the few institutions that has been monitoring older foster youth since 2011, says that youth that take advantage of AB12 are less likely to become homeless than their peers who aren’t in the program.
Mejia loved her transitional housing on Martin Luther King Boulevard and Coliseum Street in Los Angeles. She had a job and her son had grown out of the demanding newborn phase. But then when her transitional housing ended, things took a turn.
“I moved in with my sister after my two years were done there, because when we were done there I didn’t know we could go into another one. I found out that you could [afterward,] so I went to another one named United Friends of the Children. And I was there for almost two years and then I moved out from there and I got my own spot in south central LA,” she said.
It seemed like it was just a bit of moving. Then Mejia got pregnant with her second child.
“I wasn’t working so I couldn’t stay where I was at. I had no income coming in so I had to move in with my sister. But my sister lives in a low income [housing facility] in La Brea so I stayed with her for about six months,” she said.
Mejia wasn’t aware that she could have not only petitioned to stay in housing under AB12, but also gotten it for free. Things started piling up. To get back to work, she needed child care, but she said there was a yearlong waiting list to get in a program covered by government assistance.
“I was like I can’t even work, like this was the whole point of me staying with my sister, she got the approval for me to stay with her for six months so I can get everything together and find a spot and do everything,” she said.
She’s been homeless since September. Had she known about AB12, she said she would have made different decisions. “I would have wanted to know about it. I would have at least wanted to have that option,” Mejia said. “I could have probably went to school.”
Chavez was aware of AB12, and decided that when he emancipated, he wanted to be in a transitional housing that had more support. He had been getting good grades in high school because care was very structured. He wanted to keep working towards his dream of becoming a social worker. But when he got to his facility in Compton, the services that he was looking for weren’t being provided.
“They didn’t really work with you a lot. The staff didn’t really work with you they didn’t really guide you or help you in everyday things we need to figure out in life. How do you do our taxes? How do I apply for jobs and do resumes? How do we budget our bills? They didn’t teach us any of that after we were emancipated,” he said.
Other youth around Chavez ended up convincing him to do and sell drugs. The blur of parties, couch surfing and hustling ended abruptly when he went to jail for strong-arm robbery.
“We’re held down under rules and all this structure for so long and when we finally get out, we don’t know what to do with it. And sometimes that freedom is a little too much for us,” he said. “I was a mess. I was just hurt. I had a lot of hurt and anger and pain inside of me that I didn’t know that I had there. I guess you could say that I had an empty space inside my heart that I was just trying to fill.”
That same study out of Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago shows that staying in extended foster care didn’t increase in employment, health, earnings or rates of pregnancy.
In Boyd’s cast, what got her on a track towards being employed and managing her finances was not just receiving a check, but having her sister show her how to deposit it and start a bank account. “Now it empowered me to be in the driver’s seat not in the car by myself. I think often times, a lot of our young people who are currently in AB12 are in the car by themselves. The intention of AB12 was not to let people drive alone,” said Boyd.
While thousands of youth are enrolled in the housing programs under Youth Development Services, the department has had issues implementing some of those programs. In 2003, the County of Los Angeles released a report of the transitional housing program it showed that miscommunications and disagreements within the department prevented transition age youth from receiving the full benefits of the programs in the early 2000s.
The Office of the Ombudsman was tracking complaints during these years. Between 2000 and 2007, they found that complaints persisted.
When AB12 came around, YDS was again responsible for implementing the program. Harvey Kawasaki was in charge of the Los Angeles division of YDS and noticed that again, the department’s implementation was held back by confusion within the department.
DCFS sends out officially policy letters to all the counties in California that allow for administrators like Kawasaki to begin budgeting and training on policy. But DCFS didn’t issue all-county letters until the very end of 2011, and continued to issue them into 2013.
“In hindsight was that probably if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t have gone for a program person I would have gone for someone from line [operations],” said Kawasaki. “I think I did a pretty good job considering that I was also at that time dealing with a reorganization of the youth development services, it was a very challenging two years for me but I’m a challenge-oriented person. I think if I only had to deal with the AB12 population, and I could have given 100% of my time to AB12, I could have done a better job.”
While staffing seemed to be lacking, it still eclipsed the funding for services. Kawasaki said the Department of Social Services did not allocate any funding for the actual services, just for personnel.
A lot of youth try to fight for these services in court. Jenny Marino runs the law firm out of the Children’s Law Center that specializes in representing older foster youth. Six years after the program was implemented she still sees that members of the department still have trouble understanding AB12 and translating it into services if they do know what youth are entitled to.
“They aren’t understanding all the laws and so that’s for sure one big thing because we want to make sure every worker understands what clients are entitled to,” Marino said. “There is supposed to be an AB12 worker on every case for all the 2,500 cases in LA County unfortunately we’re not there yet. There are workers who don’t have experience in AB12 basically handling these cases in court.”
She said often her firm is fighting to get out of state living placements approved because social workers do not know they can approve them or think that they are only allowed in some states, getting ILP funding that is available to clients and proving eligibility for re-entry for clients who had established guardianships that failed.
Chapin Hall found that only 76 percent of youth were ever asked to attend court proceedings about extended foster care, and only 58 percent actually attended court proceedings about extended foster care.
Robbie Odom, the current director of YDS was contacted multiple times for this piece but did not respond to requests for an interview.
For Boyd, the inefficiency is troubling.
“If I’m sitting waiting for a train for two hours, after two hours, I’m walking,” she said. “I’m probably not going to wait two hours. I’ll give it 45 minutes. I’m gonna walk. I’m not going to sit and wait there for a bus that is not coming.
“Our foster youth never have that moment that the bus is not coming, because every time we turn around, there is someone else in our face telling us that they care about us and they’re going to do something [for] us. ‘The bus is coming; don’t worry.’
“At this point my main problem is with the people that are telling us that the bus is coming.”
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After Chavez got out of jail, he did have that moment that the bus is not coming. He was watching kids younger than him drive around in nice cars and start to have their lives take shape.
“I was just thinking; will I ever have my own house? Will I have my own car? Will I even make it to see that? At the rate I’m going, I’m gonna end up in prison, end up dead or I’m going to lose my mind on drugs,” he said.
Chavez then checked himself into a rehab center. He started looking more closely at his relationship with God, and remembered the motivated kid he was in high school. Chavez has been working up from odd jobs to finally being a part of a union.
But the setbacks are not over. He plans on moving to Las Vegas and finally buy a house. Other foster youth have noted that applying for housing is difficult without anyone guiding you through, and Chavez will have to learn as he goes, as he always has.
All the professionals consulted for this piece with were aware of the flaws of AB12’s implementation and were eager for improvements.
“The point is this,” said Curry, “we started with nothing and a black hefty bag, and we now have not a perfect world by any stretch of the imagination. Do we still have kids homeless, yes, do we still have problems, yes we do. But we also have made some advances.”
Harvey Kawasaki is working on proposing a new plan to the County in May to change a lot of this. The plan is specifically made to increase communication on services aimed at older youth and ensure they are more aware of what they are entitled to.
For Mejia, the real relief will come when she finally gets that phone call.
“That is one thing I can say about being about being in the foster care system. I feel like after you emancipate, if you’re a foster youth, and you really don’t have any family they should make it a very high priority for foster youth and especially single mothers to be able to get into a section eight or low income straight out of emancipation. Because you never know there is transitional housing but that’s not permanent. And even though it could help you become permanent, you never know what happens,” she said.
But all the events in her life have reminded her that she must keep move forward because there will always be a new day, no matter how hard the last one was.
“I know now I can get through whatever. I know whatever happens I can get through it and everything is going to be good.” she said. “I have goals. I have a plan with my life. I’m not just a foster kid.”