Homeless youth gets second chance

Kraig Coburn sits on a LYNX bus bench with nowhere to go. He has no intention of taking the bus, just a breather. His messy, over-grown blond hair sways in the wind as he lets out a big sigh.

Coburn is 21 and homeless.

"The fact that I don't know where I am going to end up scares me the most," Coburn said while choking up and pausing to clear his throat. "It really hit me when I realized I was going to be homeless. I started to cry. I just don't know what is going to happen next."

Coburn said that he did not stay on top of his schoolwork in high school and fell behind.

"I just would have rather hung out with my friends and play video games and have fun. I just didn't take school as seriously as I now realized I should have," Coburn said.

During his senior year, his mother, Patricia Coburn, pulled him out of school to transfer him to a school closer to their home due to rising gas prices. This made it impossible for Coburn to continue his education at a public school, because he was too old and did not have enough credits to be accepted anywhere in the area.

A year later, in 2009, he earned his GED online and got a part-time job at a McDonald's inside of a Walmart. He never applied to college, could not afford to buy a car and only worked a few days out of the week.

When Patricia Coburn noticed that her son had no drive to do anything but play Call of Duty on the Xbox, she decided it was time for him to leave home and make his own path in life.

"I was brokenhearted about the whole thing; that he messed up enough to get thrown out of here to begin with," said Patricia Coburn, in an email, admitting she was in the midst of crying. "I did agree that Kraig needed some tough love, but it was tough on me too."

According to Patricia Coburn, just thinking about her son puts her in a nervous state.

Coburn is not the only teenager to become homeless because of economic pressures within the home. The Covenant House Florida, one of the largest private agencies helping runaway and homeless youth under 21 in Central Florida, has recently seen the numbers of homeless youth increase.

"The number of youth ages 18-24 that are becoming homeless are significantly increasing because of the current economy," Maria Shorkey, Covenant House Florida's director of community relations, said. "[As] a matter of a fact, the covenant house of Florida has a waiting list now. It ranges anywhere from 80 to 100."

Shorkey said the most prevalent reason why youth in Central Florida are becoming homeless is family crisis.

"With this economy, people are struggling financially, which creates conflict in the home, creating more problems within the family," Shorkey said. "Even kids who are going to college are increasingly becoming homeless because they do not have the family and financial support that they need."

Increasingly becoming a burden to his family, Coburn started the new year not by throwing confetti, but by packing his belongings into two plastic storage containers and leaving his mother's home.

"I've been staying with family members weeks at a time, but now I've run out of places to go," Coburn said, almost two months after moving out of his mother's house.

However, Coburn was not yet on the streets and he was not completely out of options. His next place to stay was the cheap Gator Motel in Kissimmee.

Coburn is one of many in "Generation Y" that is left without a place to call home. In a research done by Randall S. Hansen, founder of the award-winning Quintessential Careers, Generation Y believes work should come to them, not the other way around.

Hansen said this may be because their parents were willing to give them things too easily.

"I would say I'm a very laid-back person, but I do have things that I want to reach. I want to go to Valencia for two years and then get my nursing degree at UCF," Coburn said. "I do like to have fun most of the time though, whenever I can."

Coburn checked into the Gator Motel in Kissimmee. He paid $20 a night, draining up the few hundred dollars he had saved from flipping burgers. He lugged the two plastic containers of what had become his life into the small, white motel room. He sat on the pastel, wishy-washy pattern of the uncomfortable motel bed and watched TV while eating a Stouffer's frozen dinner.

He picked up his cell phone, which his mother pays for to be able to stay in contact with him, and called who he feels is his only friend, Mike Murphy, a computer science major at UCF.

"After hearing about what Kraig had been going through, I decided to let him stay at my house for a little," Murphy said. "I've known him since fifth grade. I just felt that it was the right thing to do."

But Murphy soon regretted his decision to help Coburn out. Murphy said he would come home from school and Kraig would be sitting on the couch, barely dressed in a white undershirt and khaki shorts from Walmart, chugging a Coke and playing Call of Duty.