LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles is the nation’s homelessness epicenter, where more than 45,000 people live in weather-beaten tent encampments and rusting trailers. But even in the state that is home to Silicon Valley, technology has not kept up with the long-running crisis.
Billions of dollars money has been spent to get the homeless off the region’s streets, but outdated computer systems with error-ridden data are often unable to provide even basic information.
Best United Angels is developing a series of apps – to be donated to participating groups – that the nonprofit group hopes will revolutionize homeless shelters and services, including a mobile-friendly prototype for outreach workers. It should be followed by systems for shelter operators and a comprehensive database of shelter beds that the region now lacks.
Here are some of Associated Press key findings:
More than 1 in 5 homeless people in the U.S. live in Los Angeles County, or about 75,000 people in any night. The county is the most populous in the country, with 10 million residents, approximately the population of Michigan.
Dozens of governments and service groups in the county use a mix of software to track homeless people and services that result in what might be called a technological gridlock. Systems cannot communicate, information is out of date, and data is often lost.
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 has been located, there is a period of 48 hours for the space to be claimed. But homeless social workers say sometimes the window closes before they realize a bed is available.
“Just looking at … the overall bed availability is a challenge,” said Bevin Kuhn, interim chief analytics officer at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that coordinates housing and services for homeless people in Los Angeles County. .
One of the big challenges: There is currently no uniform practice for social workers to collect and enter information into databases about the homeless people they interview. Some social workers may scribble notes on paper, others may type a few lines on a cell phone, others may try to remember their interactions and recall them later.
All this information later goes to one or more databases. This leaves data vulnerable to errors or long delays before street-recorded information is entered.
Mark Goldin, chief technology officer at Better Angels, described the Los Angeles technology as “systems that don’t talk to each other, lack of accurate data, no one on the same page about what’s real and what’s not.”
There is no single reason, but the pandemic’s challenges to the county’s expanding government structure have contributed.
With the rapid expansion of homelessness came “this explosion of funds, explosions of organizations and everyone was learning at the same time. And on top of that… the pandemic hit,” Kuhn said. “Everyone all over the world was frozen.”
Another problem: finding consensus among the different government agencies, advocacy groups and elected officials in the county.
“The size of Los Angeles makes it incredibly complex,” Kuhn added.
Better Angels conducted more than 200 interviews with social workers, data experts, managers and others involved in homeless programs as part of developing its software. They found surprising gaps: for example, no one is measuring how effective the system is in getting people off the streets and into housing and services.
One of the biggest challenges: getting governments and service groups to participate, although Better Angels donates its software to those in Los Angeles County.
“Everything is safe, everything is safe, everything is loaded, everything is available,” Goldin said.
But “it’s very difficult to get people to do things differently,” he added. “The more people use it, the more useful it will be.”
