The young homeless on our streets aren’t there because their parents were addicts. They’re there because rents doubled while their wages flatlined, and because fentanyl showed up. Christopher Calton writes in Why Are the Homeless So Young? for National Review that the falling age of America’s homeless is not a housing story but an addiction story — parental heroin and crack use producing foster-care kids who age out onto the street — and that homelessness policy has wrongly traded recovery services for housing. He wants recovery beds restored at the expense of housing policy. He’s pointing at something real. He’s pointing at the wrong generation.
Calton’s evidence is mostly the crack era. The rate at which Black children entered foster care doubled in the 1980s. Child-neglect petitions in New York City grew nearly fivefold. Parental drug use drove three-quarters of those cases. Fine — that is a real cohort, and it deserves a real answer. But that cohort is now in its forties and fifties. The 47 percent of homeless Americans under 35 in 2026 were born after 1990. The crack babies grew up. Many of them have homes. The intergenerational mechanism Calton describes takes twenty or thirty years to surface in a shelter count. The under-35 spike we’re seeing right now is too fast for that machinery.
What’s fast is fentanyl. In 2014, fentanyl killed roughly 6,000 Americans. By 2023, it killed more than 75,000. The under-35 share of the homeless population moved on roughly the same curve. Fentanyl hits young users directly — not their parents. A twenty-two-year-old who tries it can be on the street within a year. There is no twenty-year lag. There is no foster-care pipeline. There is a drug that destroys people in months, and a housing market that won’t take them back.
Now the other half of it, the part Calton dismisses in a sentence — he says housing costs “cannot explain the age shift.” That’s the wrong way around. Housing costs are the cleanest explanation for the age shift we have. In 1990, a minimum-wage worker could afford a studio apartment in most American cities. In 2026, in most of them, they cannot. Young people have the thinnest credit, the smallest savings, the weakest tenant protections. They are the first to be evicted when rents spike and the last to be rehoused. The age of the homeless tracks the ratio of youth wages to entry-level rent, and it has tracked it for decades.
You can see it in the cross-city pattern Calton himself waves at. The cities with the most youth homelessness are the cities with the worst rent-to-wage ratios: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York. The cities with cheap housing do not have youth homelessness epidemics at the same scale — even where opioid addiction is rampant. West Virginia has one of the worst opioid crises in the country and a youth homelessness rate a fraction of San Francisco’s. The addiction is the same. The housing is different. The homelessness tracks the housing, not the addiction.
And behind all of this sits an older, quieter number Calton never touches. The 1958 figure he cites — that most homeless people in Chicago were at least 50 years old — does not describe the same population we count today. In 1958, a homeless man in his thirties slept in a flophouse downtown, where the missions counted him. A young person who lost a job moved in with a mother and father who owned a house with a paid-off mortgage, slept on the foldout couch, and got back on his feet. Nobody counted him, because he wasn’t homeless. The counted homeless were old because the un-counted homeless had somewhere to go. The counted homeless are young today because the foldout couch no longer exists for millions of people. Mom and dad are still renting, still carrying their own mortgage, still working two jobs, or living in an apartment too small for one more adult. When the family home is gone — never bought, lost in 2008, or mortgaged to the hilt by people still working at 70 — there is nowhere to fold back into. When the rent goes up 50 percent in five years, the people with the least savings go homeless first, and the least-saved are the young.
Calton is right about one thing, and I’ll grant it plainly: recovery services have been gutted. Treatment beds are scarce. Many who ask for help are turned away. That’s a real failure and it kills people. But he is mistaking a contributing factor for a root cause, and the policy he proposes addresses the wrong bottleneck. The 18-year-old who ages out of a group home in Los Angeles does not need a recovery bed. He needs an apartment he can afford on a starter wage. Until that exists, he’ll be on the street regardless of how many treatment slots we open — and the same young people will keep showing up in the shelter counts year after year.
So what to build? Housing young people can actually rent — small units, shared housing, supply where demand is highest, tenant protections that keep people in place, rent stabilization for the most vulnerable, family-level economic support so the foldout couch remains a real option, and a foster-care system that does not discharge 18-year-olds to the street with a trash bag. And, alongside it, treatment on demand for the fentanyl generation — not as a price of admission to a bed, but as a service that meets people where they are. The two aren’t in competition. They’re both missing. Calton wants to choose recovery over housing. The choice is a false one. We need both, at a scale that matches the problem — and we need to stop telling 22-year-olds the reason they’re sleeping under a bridge is a choice their parents made before they were born.