How many foster children are homeless in Los Angeles County? Nobody knows

Iziko Calderón was in tenth grade when the seizures began.

Calderon, a foster youth who had been in abusive homes, assumed the episodes were a reaction to years of accumulated trauma. Occasionally, Calderon would collapse at school, writhing in nerve pain as if he were engulfed in fire.

“People at school were afraid of me,” said Calderón, now 22 and a community organizer.

Calderon, who uses the pronoun “they,” dropped out of Los Angeles high school that school year, around age 16, in part because teachers didn’t seem to know how to handle the debilitating episodes.

Two years later, shortly after turning 18, Calderon fled another strained living situation and returned to school — not to enroll, but to sleep on a park bench outside. For the next year, Calderon says, they were homeless, sleeping in their car and showering at Venice Beach — all while in the custody of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.

Every year, teens and young adults quietly transition from foster homes to the streets, though the county remains responsible for their care. After years of county officials promising safer, more reliable placement options for older foster children, a sprawling federal lawsuit is putting new pressure on the nation’s largest child welfare system to deliver.

In June, U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt allowed a class action lawsuit against Los Angeles County and the state to move forward, emphasizing that the government's responsibility toward foster children does not necessarily end when they turn 18.

In California, teens can choose to remain in foster care until age 21, meaning the government is responsible for keeping a roof over their heads as they navigate early adulthood. The four firms suing the state and county — Children's Rights; Public Counsel; Munger, Tolles & Olson; and Alliance for Children's Rights — argue that the lack of stable housing and mental health services for older foster youth has rendered the promise hollow.

“We still have too many children living on the streets, sleeping on their parents’ couches, in and out of homeless shelters,” said Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director for Children’s Rights, based in New York. “It’s incredibly dangerous.”

Last week, the attorneys filed an updated complaint with new details about one of their allegations: Neither the county, which runs the foster care system, nor the state, which oversees it, know how many foster youth are living on the streets.

“It’s very difficult to compare Los Angeles to other places, because they just don’t track whether kids end up homeless or not,” Welch said.

The attorneys say DCFS officials told them the county does not track homelessness rates among foster youth. Neither does the California Department of Social Services. The lawsuit quotes the Department of Social Services' chief deputy director telling lawmakers in April that the agency “does not track data in a way that would allow us to know how often [foster] “Young people experience homelessness or housing insecurity.”

There are about 2,500 young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 in foster care in Los Angeles County. DCFS did not respond to a question from The Times about how many of them were homeless, stressing that the agency does not comment on pending lawsuits.

“The county is committed to ensuring the well-being of young people as they enter adulthood and providing available services to assist them with that transition,” the agency said in a statement.

The state Department of Social Services said officials there do not comment on ongoing litigation.

The county's most recent homeless survey found 3,718 youth ages 18 to 24 living in temporary shelters or on the streets.

“I wouldn't be surprised if close to half were in our system,” said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, adding that she recently met with DCFS Director Brandon Nichols about the possibility of renting units for foster youth.

Iziko, a former foster child, poses in a park in Los Angeles.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Soft-spoken, with wobbly knees and worn-out Converse sneakers, Calderon could easily be the face of the lawsuit now in federal court.

Like many youth in foster care, Calderon remembers a childhood marked by violence. According to Calderon, DCFS removed them from their parents as infants after allegations of abuse at home. A series of difficult placements followed, including a period when Calderon was returned to his father, who they say once stabbed them with a fork when they wouldn’t eat. When they were teenagers, Calderon said, the father took them to his native Peru, scoffing that there was no child welfare agency that could save them.

At 15, Calderon returned to the United States alone. Seizures began soon after. After a very bad year in school after leaving PE, Calderon said they ended up in a psychiatric hospital and were back on the DCFS radar.

At the time, Calderon was living with an older sister near the school. But tensions mounted and the seizures made Calderon feel like a wrecking ball in her sister’s stable life. Calderon asked her caseworker to find a new place to live.

There are two main housing options available to older foster youth. The county provides them with a stipend they can use to find a place on the open market, or it provides them with free supervised housing, often with a suite of services aimed at helping them transition into adulthood: counseling, help finding employment, and budgeting tips.

Calderon said the social worker submitted two unsuccessful applications for supportive housing before Calderon left for the park bench.

“She was in a panic,” Calderon said. “I always… [ask] “She, is there something out there for me? It's the most heartbreaking part when you want help and your caseworker says, 'I don't know.'”

The wait for supportive housing, considered a sort of holy grail for older foster youth, can stretch for months. And foster children struggle to find a rental place with no rental history, no guarantor and a monthly stipend of just over $1,200.

Calderon, who received stipends while homeless, says she submitted two applications for studio apartments that were denied.

In the absence of sufficient foster housing, the county has at times rented hotel rooms for older foster youth, often with minimal oversight. An investigation published last year, jointly reported by The Times and the Investigative Journalism Program at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the county had placed hundreds of foster children in hotel rooms between January 2022 and May 2023, some of them young people in dire need of mental health care.

In February, the state ordered the county to “immediately cease” hotel placements, noting that such facilities are not licensed to house foster youth.

DCFS told The Times it is no longer using hotels as temporary housing.

Michael Nash, a former presiding judge of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, says he believes the county should focus on finding stable, welcoming places for foster children (ideally families) before they turn 18. After that, he says, “there will never be enough” housing to support them all.

“There are thousands of children who could age out of our system,” he says. “What does that mean for our homeless population? Nothing good.”