Key Takeaways from AP Story on Inefficient Technology That Slows Efforts to Get Homeless People Off the Street

MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press

37 minutes ago

FILE – A man walks past a homeless encampment in downtown Los Angeles, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles is the nation’s epicenter of homelessness, with more than 45,000 people living in weather-battered tent cities and rusting RVs. But even in the state that’s home to Silicon Valley, technology hasn’t kept up with the long-running crisis.

Billions of dollars have been spent to get the region’s homeless off the streets, but outdated computer systems with error-ridden data are often unable to provide even the most basic information.

Better Angels United is developing a suite of apps — donated to participating groups — that the nonprofit hopes will revolutionize homeless shelters and services, including a mobile-friendly prototype for outreach workers. That would be followed by systems for shelter operators and a comprehensive database of shelter beds that the region currently lacks.

Here are some of the key findings from The Associated Press:

What’s going on? No one really knows

More than 1 in 5 homeless people in the U.S. live in Los Angeles County, or about 75,000 people on any given night. The county is the most populous in the country, with 10 million residents, about the population of Michigan.

Dozens of governments and service groups within the county use a hodgepodge of software to track homeless people and services, resulting in what you might call a tech traffic jam. Systems can’t communicate, information is out of date, data is often lost.

A homeless person is looking for shelter, but is there a bed available?

Again, it’s possible that no one really knows. There is no system that provides a comprehensive list of available shelter beds in Los Angeles County. Once a shelter bed is found, there is a 48-hour window in which the spot can be claimed. But homeless counselors say that window sometimes closes before they know a bed is available.

“Just seeing … that there are enough beds available in general, that is a challenge,” said Bevin Kuhn, acting deputy chief of the Analytics Division of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that coordinates housing and services for the homeless in Los Angeles County.

Bad data in, bad data out

One of the big challenges: There is currently no uniform practice for caseworkers to collect and enter information into databases about the homeless people they interview. Some caseworkers scribble notes on paper, others type a few lines into a cell phone, and still others try to remember their interactions and recall them later.

All that information later goes to one or more databases. That makes data vulnerable to errors, or long delays before information recorded on the street is entered.

Mark Goldin, Chief Technology Officer at Better Angels, described LA’s technology as “systems not talking to each other, lack of accurate data, no one on the same page about what’s real and what’s not.”

How could Silicon Valley’s tech sector be left behind?

There is no specific reason, but the challenges the pandemic brought to the region’s extensive government structure have contributed.

With the rapidly growing homeless population came “this explosion of funding, explosion of organizations, and everyone was learning at the same time. And then on top of that … the pandemic hit,” Kuhn said. “Everyone around the world was frozen.”

Another problem: finding consensus among the various government agencies, interest groups and elected officials in the region.

“The size of Los Angeles makes it incredibly complex,” Kuhn added.

Looking for a solution, building the app

Better Angels conducted more than 200 interviews with caseworkers, data experts, managers, and others involved in homeless programs as part of the development of its software. They found glaring gaps: For example, no one measures how effective the system is at getting people off the streets and into housing and services.

One of the biggest challenges: getting governments and aid organizations to participate, even though Better Angels donates its software to people in the Los Angeles area.

“Everything is safe, everything is secured, everything is uploaded, everything is available,” Goldin said.

But “it’s very hard to get people to do things differently,” he added. “The more people use it, the more useful it will be.”