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“Homelessness is not inevitable. When young people receive the right support at the right time, housing crises can be prevented.”
Before Marsha P. Johnson became a symbol of Stonewall, she was already doing the work. She was on the piers and in the streets of the West Village. She took in young people—Black and brown queer kids, transgender teenagers, children cast out of their homes with nowhere to go—and made sure they had somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and someone who saw them as worth saving. That was the work. Stonewall was the breaking point. But the work came first: protecting homeless queer youth from living on the streets.
Together with Sylvia Rivera, Marsha co-founded STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—and turned an abandoned trailer, and later a condemned building on Second Street, into STAR House, one of the country’s first shelters created specifically for homeless LGBTQ+ youth. They funded it themselves, through their own labor, because the city would not. Sylvia was explicit about what they were fighting for: not just visibility, not just a parade, but housing for young people nobody else would support.
The young people Marsha and Sylvia sheltered were not a side project of Pride. They were central to Pride and to Stonewall’s origin story. Stonewall happened because young people and adults who were experiencing homelessness, criminalized and pushed to the margins, had nothing left to lose.
Today, 57 years later, New York still has not done enough.
LGBTQ+ young people are estimated to make up about 40 percent of youth experiencing homelessness in New York City, despite representing roughly 10 percent of the youth population. That overrepresentation is not random. It falls hardest on the communities Marsha and Sylvia fought for: Black and brown young people, transgender and gender-nonconforming young people, and young people cast out by families who refuse to accept who they are.
At The Door, we meet young people at this intersection every day. Last year, more than 9,000 young people came to The Door seeking support, connection, and opportunity. Some had aged out of foster care. Some had been forced from their homes after coming out. Others were applying to school, looking for work, or trying to build stability while staying in shelters, sleeping on friends’ couches—or not sleeping at all.
We also know that homelessness is not inevitable. When young people receive the right support at the right time, housing crises can be prevented.
There is a program that works. We have the evidence.
The Targeted Housing Assistance Program, or THAP, provides direct, flexible cash and tailored support to young people on the edge of homelessness. It is a direct investment in a young person’s housing stability when they need it, without waiting lists or a maze of eligibility paperwork.
The Door was proud to join Henry Street Settlement as New York City’s two THAP pilot sites. The results are substantial. At six months, 97 percent of The Door participants and 98 percent of Henry Street participants had not appeared in Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) data, according to the seven-state evaluation led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.*
The fiscal case is not complicated. Across the seven-state pilot, the average THAP household investment was about $3,700. New York City spends upward of $80,000 per person in the homelessness system, according to recent estimates.
As part of their final Fiscal Year 2027 budget negotiations, Council members sat in a hearing room earlier this week and listened to LGBTQ+ young people testify about the issues they must navigate in our city, most importantly safety and housing access. The question is what the Council will do next.
The Council is not being asked to choose compassion over budget discipline. It is being asked to spend smartly—and to trust young people with the resources they need before a housing crisis becomes homelessness.
The New York City Council is not in an enviable position: closing a budget under fiscal pressure while the federal government retreats from programs that catch New Yorkers when they fall. We understand that. That is why we are pointing to the evidence, the cost comparison, and the pilot data from New York City’s own sites. Funding THAP at $4.775 million in FY27 to help prevent 1,000 young people from experiencing homelessness is one of the clearest moral and fiscal cases on the table.
This June, when we march in Marsha’s name, we must support the young people who share her story.
We call on New York City to fund THAP at $4.775 million in FY27 to help prevent 1,000 young New Yorkers from experiencing homelessness and save the city over $69 million in savings from avoiding shelter related costs.
This year we can make LGBTQ+ Pride mean so much more—especially for our youth at risk of homelessness.
Show up. Make this Pride mean something that lasts past June.
Larry Cohen is executive director and co-founder of Point Source Youth, a national nonprofit working to prevent and end youth homelessness. Kelsey Louie is chief executive officer of The Door, New York’s leading youth development organization and THAP pilot site.
*These data represent Department of Youth & Community Development programs only and do not include Department of Homeless Services programs.