  Approximately 4.2 million youth and young adults experience homelessness each
year in the United States and lack of basic necessities puts this population at
high-risk of being trafficked or exploited. Although all runaway and homeless
youth (RHY) are at risk of being victims of human trafficking, certain racial,
ethnic, and gender groups are disproportionately affected. Motivated by these
facts, our goal is to improve equitable access to housing resources for at-risk
RHY in New York City (NYC) by expanding the current housing capacity, while
utilizing priority thresholds that guide decisions regarding which youth should
start receiving service based on the number of beds idle in the system. Our
approach involves an $M/M/N/\{K_j\}+M$ queuing model with many statistically
identical servers (beds) and RHY from different demographic groups with limited
patience arriving to the a large crisis and emergency shelter in NYC. The
queuing model allows us to: (i) investigate the populations and demographics
that are facing access barriers, (ii) project the minimum number of beds
required to provide a certain global service quality level to all youth,
regardless of demographic characteristics, and (iii) use priority thresholds
while matching RHY with beds to promote equity. The recommendations regarding
the capacity expansion and priority thresholds improves equitable access to
this crisis and emergency shelter by decreasing the average number of RHY
abandoning the system by 92%, with a particular reduction in the abandonment of
RHY who are at high-risk of experiencing trafficking.
