Pretty awful when it rains. What would do when it rained?
Youth hostel? Metro? Do churches offer housing or did you not qualify for young adult/HUD housing?
I was homeless under 18.
A couple things in my experience. Sleeping under a bridge is tough because rough characters hang around there. When one of the kids you know on the street gets knifed hanging around that area and goes to the hospital, you scratch that location. Me and my little street gang did other things.
In the city with some parks, you traipse through the underbrush to where there's some trees and it gets thick. Gotta be careful because the cops if they can see you will chase you out. So you gotta crawl up in there. Then you can try to put up a tarp (we didn't have) so we used emergency disaster blankets we learned we could get from the local hospital. They get soaked, but you can try to angle them to keep as much water off as you can. You wring them out in the AM and can put them in a plastic bag until they're needed later.
We were lucky that one of our crew that I got to be good friends with (this guy later became my stalker) had a car and we could sleep in that (3 or 4 to a sedan is miserableO, but you can't do that every night or again, the cops are an issue. It wasn't insured etc, but it was easy enough to afford enough gas to just move it enough blocks to keep it out of trouble.
Otherwise, there was a shelter, but they had a rule, 3 nights in, 3 nights out (to try to help the most number of kids, it was really more for recent runaways in crisis). Once you start learning tricks from the chronically homeless, this option stops making as much sense, because part of surviving on the streets are the larger networks you form. Those sorts of shelters are usually for the kids that haven't figured out "how" to be homeless yet. Although there are kids that know how that you meet from staying there. Anyway, once you form a little crew it gets harder to get all of you in the shelter and you don't to leave them behind. Oh yeah, I forgot, if you're under 18 your parents have to consent to you staying there. IIRC, my parents did at first and then they didn't.
This is starting to touch on some of the legalities around whether or not your parents classify you as a "runaway" versus refuse to let you come home. 1) is their word and they're off the hook, 2) a bit harder for a teen to prove. Also, in a lot of cases, you really don't want/can't go home.
You also do some couch surfing. I did in the beginning. Let's just say I had enough... bad experiences with that to cross that off. When you're a young pretty girl, you're most likely to find guys that will let you crash on the couch. It's usually fine for a few nights, but then.... expectations. Contributing food stamps and housecleaning, while offering to try to get a job, only gets you so far.
My experiences are why I take a dim view of prostitution. A lot of what I saw was girls under 18 doing it for money or a place to stay. You could say legal prostitution has nothing to do with this sort of thing but... you think most professional prostitutes start over age 18? Yeah right. Maybe college escorts, but the bulk of the industry the average age of entry is under 18, 14 was the last I saw. Legalize it and you have a nice version of "school to prison" pipeline but it's "child street prostitution to adult brothel prositution." The illegal nature of it I saw help to dissuade a lot of this in my underage gfs and most of the older guys. Most, not all.
One of my friends stayed with a guy in our network we thought was a nice guy (I almost stayed with him) but he brutally raped her and she ended up in the hospital. This was not just "from the street word of mouth gossip," as the police came and took statements from us about this guy and wanted to know how he was connected to another guy that was in our network, who was stabbed to death. The rape put him higher on the list of suspects. Scary stuff. Too bad, the guy that he was suspected of killing was one of my "protectors" and a genuinely nice guy.
Anyway, safer to find a nice little gang, stay in groups outside or in the car.
There was a church mission but only for over 18. I imagine this is for various legal reasons.
Other programs? I dunno. There was a homeless kid resource center you could go and get free bus tokens, and they could act as a mailing address and phone number for your employment apps. Luckily over 16 you can get hired by anyone and not need your parents to sign off. It was harder for my friends that were 15. This place couldn't do much for those under 15. This place had computers, showers, washing machines, donated clothes for job interviews, and they would put out 2 daily snacks.
Granted, remember, I was homeless in a city that was famed for its homeless friendly ways, its services. I talked to grizzled old men who were like the professional homeless who would travel halfway around the country to come be homeless here. It was like the Mecca of homelessness, as they would put it.
TLDR:
there's extra layers of complexity to being homeless under age 18
