Chris and Randy are in their mid-30s now, but like more than a third of the 1,800 people living homeless in Capital Region, they were kids when they first ended up on the streets – Chris was 11, and Randy, 14. They fell out of the child welfare system, one of the major feeders of homelessness. A bylaw sweep a couple days before had left Randy with nothing but his backpack, and he wept as he talked about losing everything he owned yet again. He’s been on the housing registry for six years now. “I don’t like to say it, but I think they want to harm us,” says Randy. “We’re stuck out here.” Of the 600 people on local streets who were in the “care” of the child welfare system as kids, a third were homeless within a year of being discharged from the system at age 19.