The rain fell hard that day. The tent he'd pitched in Howarth Park had leaked and Gerri Jackson's bed of piled blankets was wet. His Santa Rosa Junior College math textbook was damp.
And he'd just gotten word from a campmate that someone was going to kick them out in 10 days.
"Where'm I gonna go, go, go, bro -#8212; I don't know, I never know," he said.
The 22-year-old's singsong voice was just another sound in the night on a muddy hillside tangled with brush and trees, where Gerri was living with the skunks and deer.
It was better than the pavement outside Chop's Teen Center, where he'd been sleeping days before.
"Concrete sucks the life out of you," said Gerri, a Chicago native homeless on the streets of Santa Rosa since early 2011.
Adrift and often unknown amid the plenty of Sonoma County, homeless young people reel from abandonment or rejection, flee abuse or broken homes, exit the foster care system unmoored at 18.
They wander, their conditions anonymous, through shopping malls, parks and city centers, ride buses, scrounge free food, cigarettes and, often, drugs. They search for the next safe place to sleep.
Gerri is one of more than a thousand young people under age 24 who are the fastest growing segment of the county's estimated 4,280 homeless residents. This year's count revealed 277 teens between the ages 12 and 17 who have nowhere to live -#8212; a 200 percent increase in four years.
"They are terrifying statistics," said Georgia Berland, executive officer of the Sonoma County Task Force on the Homeless.
"What does it mean to their stability, to their ability to engage in society, to be productive?" she said. "If kids are going to be growing up feeling that their community doesn't even care enough for them to have a roof over their head, that means they're not going to feel connected to their community. That doesn't bode well for us."
More housing, education, job training and employment options, and counseling services are crucial to reversing the situation, Berland said.
"We have to find some way to reconnect with these kids and find a way to help them feel valuable and cared for," she said. "That is the most important thing we can do."
Tangled lives
The young people who come to live on Sonoma's streets have had tangled lives and tell their stories mostly in tangents.
Gerri was in Chicago's foster care system from age 5 or 6 until 18. He joined the Paragon Marketing Group, which recruits young people as salespeople, as a way to start a new life, and sold subscriptions across the country. He can still recite the sales pitch.
"I learned so much in that job," he said.
But after he arrived in Santa Rosa, the Paragon van left town without him, taking with it his identification. He spent 100 days in jail for taking someone's car to sleep in. Although he's avoided other serious legal trouble, it's been the streets for him ever since.
"You learn so much out here. All my senses are so good," he said.
But just an hour later, in Juilliard Park, Gerri, who can at times seem dreamy, said, "The longer you're in this, the harder it gets."
Then he smoked a joint and played Hacky Sack with some friends.
No shelter
Life on the streets possesses its own vague rhythms and dead ends.
At the end of a day spent wandering, homeless young people have literally nowhere to go. There are just six emergency shelter beds in the county for homeless teens and seven temporary beds for former foster care youth.
Adult shelters refuse those under age 18 and younger people on the streets tend to avoid shelters in general, preferring to hang out together and find other places to stay.
"Imagine being 18 and homeless and walking into a shelter full of 40- and 50- year olds. It would be frightening," said Cat Cvengros, development director for Social Advocates for Youth, or SAY.
"They stick together in packs," Cvengros said. "It's largely for safety, they just feel, -#8216;If I'm with someone I know, someone my own age, I know I'm going to be safer.'"
She is soliciting support from business leaders and the broader community for a controversial transitional housing facility for homeless youth, proposed at the former Warrack Hospital in Santa Rosa. It would serve up to 63 former foster and homeless youth aged 18 to 24, but it faces stiff opposition from residents who fear the young people would bring trouble to their neighborhood.
Kicked out
She has bipolar disorder and was kicked out of her home in Reno, Nev., when she was 16, said Charlotte Warren, a Santa Rosa native who is now 21. She has been homeless for six years.
Six months ago, when she quit shooting and snorting meth, Charlotte bought a skateboard to get around and is getting pretty good at it. In the late summer, she got a job in Staples' ink and toner department and skated every day to work from the Sam Jones Hall shelter about 3 miles away in southwest Santa Rosa.
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