Cities are looking at data differently to fight homelessness

Homelessness was among the key concerns raised by US chief information and innovation officers in a poll ahead of last week’s Cities Today Institute City Leadership Forum in Las Vegas.

Some are beginning to use new approaches and data as part of a multi-pronged approach to tackling the issue.

Among a range of factors, housing instability and financial problems can be indicators of homelessness risk, as well as causing stress. South Bend, Indiana is using data analytics to get ahead of housing vulnerability.

Working with the Lucy Institute at Notre Dame University, the city is bringing together data on code enforcement, utility bill delinquency, and evictions and foreclosures to build a model that can derive insights on housing vulnerability in real-time and potentially predict which households are most vulnerable.

Denise Riedl, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of South Bend, told Cities Today that the goal is to provide support for people sooner.

“Instead of catching them after they get evicted, or after the house was foreclosed on, or after they experienced some level of housing instability, we can actually move earlier,” she said.

Some data, such as eviction data from courts, can be more challenging to access.

In addition to paying for eviction data and advocating to make sure that the data is stored and collected in the right way, data requests are also “really tricky”, Riedl said, noting that precision is needed in order to get the expected information and this can take some trial and error.

However, she says the cost of the data is not prohibitive and the extra effort is necessary: “We need eviction data.”

Further, some evictions are unofficial and don’t go through the courts. Here, 311 teams can make a note of suspected informal evictions to build a clearer picture, Riedl said.

Intervention points

A related project focuses specifically on water delinquency – that is, people falling behind on their bills.

“We’re trying to identify the period of time in the water delinquency cycle where intervention is most helpful,” said Riedl.

Late bill payment has traditionally been viewed through a revenue lens by the city, but Riedl said: “It’s actually data that tells me when people are first starting to potentially experience financial hardship. And so it’s a really powerful dataset and we haven’t really used it in that way before.”

And this means encouraging departments such as public works and water to look at the shut-off process differently too – more “as a service intervention point.”

This perspective can then trigger collaboration between partners and wraparound services at vulnerable points in people’s lives.

Riedl hopes to have a prototype of the housing vulnerability response and prediction model up and running by the end of the year.

Data governance is key, she stressed.

“It’s really important for every city to have standardised policies about what data you share, how you share it and with who, and to make sure all of your data is secure. It’s important that you’re also communicating those expectations not only to the public, but to partners that you might be sharing data with too.”

A horizontal view

Salt Lake City in Utah is also trying to look at data in new ways to address homelessness.

Aaron Bentley, Salt Lake City’s Chief Information Officer, told Cities Today: “What we found as we tried to help those suffering from homelessness is that it runs horizontally across the city, but our datasets are vertical.”

Public safety data and data about homeless camp clean-ups typically sit in different systems, for instance.

“Data was spread across multiple data sources so it was really hard to accurately tell the story,” Bentley said.

This includes knowing where homeless camps are, understanding capacity in shelters and tracking finances related to homelessness response. This big picture view is also important when it comes to cities requesting more help at the state level, for example, Bentley said.

Salt Lake City’s Chief Data Officer created a way to easily bring data silos together to give the mayor and city council a clearer view of homelessness needs.

“It allowed us to just look at it differently and to be more strategic in our approach to help homeless people and bring services to them,” Bentley said.

Salt Lake City doesn’t have all the data that could help with addressing homelessness, Bentley says and he believes understanding people better is key.

“A lot of it comes down to qualitative but also quantitative data of the individual,” he said. “When you walk any street, you’ll see someone struggling, but what’s their story and how can you help them? And I think everyone’s working on that.”

In Salt Lake City, for example, the goals of a new park ranger programme include promoting voluntary compliance with park rules and engaging with the homeless community to connect them to resources.

Bentley believes more data-sharing between partners is key to a coordinated approach.

In 2021, Salt Lake City’s mayor appointed a Director of Homelessness Policy and Outreach. Bentley highlighted how the city is also working on policies and procedures to boost affordable housing and partnering to develop a tiny home village. Action to support mental health issues is also a focus and initiatives such as ‘kayak court’ have brought legal services to people in camps near the Jordan River.

“It’s a very complex problem,” he said. “It’s not a ‘one and done’ situation.”