Casey Johnson, left, and David Laub, right.
Casey Johnson lives in Pittsburgh’s North Shore, a couple of blocks from one of the most colorful buildings in the nation, Randyland, a utopian-esque public art installation with walls, chairs, and trinkets in every possible shade and hue.
When apartment shopping in the Steel City, Johnson, who is pansexual, gender non-binary and uses non-gendered pronouns, searched to find a neighborhood that was the “most accepting.” North Shore, they said, fits the bill.
But if Johnson were ever to move back home to West Virginia, where they grew up, they know that acceptance isn’t certain and often a matter of where someone chooses to live.
The Intelligencer on youth homelessness:
Try to remember what it was like to go to bed at night after having finished your homework, or to wake up in the morning and join the family rush to get ready and get out the door to school. Think about having friends over. Think about knowing you had the same safe place to come home to each day after school; and that the routine would most likely be the same the next day, and the day after that …
Too many West Virginia kids do not have that experience. In fact, according to a WV KIDS COUNT issue brief released this week, there were 10,417 youth classified as homeless during the 2019-20 school year.