Local Strategies to Address Homelessness: Communication and Collaboration
I came away from my work on Mayoral responses to homelessness in 2019 with recommended strategies that small to mid-sized Cities can use to address homelessness and what pieces of data and communications infrastructure are common in successful communities.
In this post, I will outline strategies for community leaders across the country who are looking to prioritize addressing homelessness. These strategies are in two sections: Communications and Collaboration. It is not easy to foster discussions concerning homeless services systems but I hope this can serve as a starting point for others’ research and a way to quickly get an overview of practices found in other communities.
Community Communications
There is a great need for more public information about the state of homelessness and related services. The scope of the situation is often misunderstood or misestimated. After learning the experiences of many cities, I believe Mayors are key in communicating with the public about the state of the problem and the available support systems.
Three recommendations for local leaders to address the gap of information about homelessness and homeless services are:
- Build a Public Dashboard
Shared measures are vital to approaching any problem in a collective manner, especially complex problems such as homelessness. There are many definitions, counts and statistics; it is difficult to know when the situation is getting better or worse. Communities should agree on a set of key indicators. They can then decide whether to make them public and update them regularly. Numbers from the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) are easily calculated but not often shared publicly. This is a great opportunity for communities leaders to field opinions from stakeholders about the content of the dashboard and to set and incentivize attainable public performance targets in collaboration with the Continuum of Care and the state.
Annual counts from HMIS are important to identify the scope of the problem. Many communities supply an annual prevalence and incidence counts in addition to their point prevalence count. They do this using HMIS and published using a dashboard. These numbers are often easily accessible but just are not currently made public.
Below, are outlines of five different dashboard models from across the United States:
Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the lead agency of the LA Continuum of Care, uses Tableau for their dashboards. They have an occupancy rate dashboard for its shelters showing change over time by funding source and by weather. They also have one based on point in time counts. Lastly, they have Coordinated Entry System dashboards that monitors the triage process assessment scores, assessment counts, and housing counts by youth, veterans, adult, family, etc.
Utah’s Department of Housing and Community Development has a statewide homelessness dashboard also run by Tableau. On the overview page they have HMIS counts, client entries by program, exit destinations, trends, and more. In addition to an overview, they have a specific page for emergency shelter performance, transitional housing performance, as well as one with HUD performance measures.
Coalition for the Homeless in Houston, Texas publishes annual dashboard reports twice a year (January-December and July-June). The data all comes from HMIS and is meant to reflect successes of permanent housing programs as well as coordinated access. These also were created in Tableau. They show count of coordinated access assessments by household type, monthly waitlist count by household type, median days on waitlist, coordinated access referral outcomes and denials, housing placements, and 12-month exits and returns.
All Chicago has a dashboard created by their HMIS team. They update the dashboard on a weekly basis to allow for real-time analysis. Their dashboard includes key system indicators, project involvement, housing needs and availability, comparison of housing & homelessness, movement to permanent housing, permanent housing outcomes, and veterans federal benchmarks.
The Housing Advisory Board of Charlotte-Mecklenburg created their dashboard in 2015. The dashboard has data from HMIS and PIT counts. The dashboard was funded by Mecklenburg County Community Support Services and was developed by the UNCC Urban Institute. There are six key success indicators: length of time homeless, exits to permanent housing, number of people homeless for the first time, income growth, returns to homelessness, and total number of people homeless. They include an “annual count” and a PIT count total. The annual count covers a full year but does not include unsheltered homelessness, and comes from their HMIS system. It has one of the most complete explanations of data of all the dashboards.
Initially, it was thought that the dashboard would be a static pdf, but Charlotte wanted to address more than just that. They wanted the dashboard to be a place to effect change. The leaders of this effort met with over 40 stakeholders: clients, media, service providers, etc. to inform the dashboard.
Charlotte made a proposal with three different levels of dashboard that was funded by a Local University and City Government. They want to connect the concept of housing instability with homelessness. The ONE NUMBER from the Built for Zero work. All the by name lists from HMIS.
HUD creates a “dashboard” annually for each Continuum of Care that uses the data they receive. This dashboard has a boundary map, grants awarded divided by type and renewal type, beds by target population, and a point in time count overview.
2. Clear Count Reporting
Clear count reporting to feed into the dashboard is important for ensuring a unified view of the service gaps for both providers and citizens. While the Point In Time (PIT) Count is published each year, it does not sufficiently capture the annual incidence or prevalence of the homeless population. Other communities use HMIS to capture a more complete picture of homelessness and utilize dashboards in order to make these counts and other statistics available to the public.
There are three kinds of counts : Point Prevalence (Point in Time Counts), Annual Incidence (# entering homeless per year), and Annual Prevalence (Cumulative total).
Cordray and Pion (1999) argue that we should move forward with Intelligent Segmentation in counting even without consensus on a particular definition of homelessness. Intelligent segmentation is the process of clearly reporting counts, so that users may understand who precisely has and has not been included (e.g. shelter residents, street residents, institutional residents, doubled up residents). Intelligent segmentation is a vehicle for reporting estimates of the components of a broad definition. But this requires a family of studies which is incredibly difficult.
The PIT Count is a HUD-mandated comparative measure of homelessness. Started in 2003, the PIT Count is a point prevalence measure that is intended to standardize across years and locations. It is also a dramatic undercount, some experts even say by half or more. Undertaken during the middle of winter and at night, it is thought that many homeless individuals are not visible because of safety concerns. “If you’re really going to understand what your system needs to do, you have to understand how many people it serves over a year. A PIT count can’t answer that for you.” -Elaine De Coligny, EveryOneHome
Critics often highlight the discrepancy between PIT counts and number of homeless children reported by school districts. As Alastair Boone writes for City Lab, “In 2015, the PIT count reported that the total number of Americans experiencing homelessness was 564,708. According to a report by the National Center for Educational Statistics, there were 1.3 million homeless children attending public schools across the country that same year.” This may partially be from DOE’s larger definition including doubling up and temporary housing. This issue of undercounting has deep repercussions, some of which cannot be mitigated. For example, California’s state homelessness grant amounts are calculated using PIT count data.
3. Unified Outreach Material
In many communities, outreach workers do not have a resource sheet that gives an overview of services available, which could include a map, hours of operation, and phone numbers. Residents do not have resource materials to give to panhandlers or individuals they see on the street. Additionally, faith communities often want to help with outreach and could be an effective distributor of resources if they were provided to them, possibly with a training. Community leaders can ask their local government to budget for the printing of this resource and work with their Continuum of Care and faith community to see if trainings for citizen and faith outreach would be feasible.
Community Collaboration
Cities across the US have made many strides over the past decade in growing collaboration among homeless services providers but there are opportunities for further growth. Two key opportunities for cities to boost collaboration are:
- Population-Specific Homeless Services Flow Map
Coordinated Entry Systems (CES) have four core components under its service flow mapping: access, assessment, prioritization and referral. It is important to have a shared view of the system flow so that organizations know where they fit in the system of care and know referral protocol. It also is important for more clear communication across systems (e.g. health, faith).
In 2012, HUD mandated that Continuum of Care participants must establish a coordinated entry system by January 2018. On May 22, 2019, HUD released a final set of CE data elements to communities to aide in the standardization of data collection on four core components of CE. With this information now available, now could be an ideal time to develop a map for cities concurrently with a CE system.
Example: Youth-Specific CES in San Diego: San Diego and San Diego County are implementing a Youth Coordinated Entry System to match housing and services to the needs of young people, specifically those experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
Action Items
a. Design the flow based on the current system.
b. Present the initial design to the local Continuum of Care
c. Work with Youth, Domestic Violence, Substance Use Disorder, and Veteran Groups to make population specific diagrams
d. Utilize the CES when speaking about the city’s approach to homelessness
2. Continuum of Care Composition
Increase city participation in the local Continuum of Care: Cities can better utilize their local Continuums of Care as a valuable convener. Local Continuums of Care often want participation from individuals, agencies, businesses, government, housing developers, educational institutions, and community groups. Cities can benefit from diverse collaboration if more sectors participate in the Continuum of Care.
Continuum of Cares are mandated by HUD to foster community-wide commitment to ending homelessness as well as to serve as a conveyer for the federal funding process. Continuum of Cares are funded by HUD and are required to exist, so building homelessness efforts around that table is a sustainable action. To be successful, the meeting dates and locations must be made fully public with a revamp of the local Continuum of Care website.
The mission of the local Continuum of Care is to unify community efforts around the prevention of homelessness. The local Continuum of Care general assembly meetings are public and it lists individuals, agencies, businesses, government, housing developers, educational institutions, and community groups as key participants. According to the local Continuum of Care, though, the only consistent attendee at meetings is the Planning Department.
One way to encourage more diverse participation is to task the Continuum of Care as the implementer of the City’s homelessness strategy, if it isn’t already, and to encourage city departments to send a representative to CoC meetings.
Cities can learn from the following CoC compositions:
Boston: BContinuum of Care’s Leadership Council is 19 members: three council officers and 16 additional members including the Department of Neighborhood Development, Public Health Commission, and the Boston Public Housing Authority, MA Department of Housing and Community Development, faith community, philanthropy community, private business, and an individual with lived experience.
Louisiana BoS: They have members from their Police Jury, School Board, LA Department of Education, LA Department of Veterans Affairs, LA Housing Corporation, their Sheriff’s Office, Homeless Experience Representative, LA Department of Children and Family Services, LA Department of Corrections, and LA Department of Health.
Maricopa/Phoenix: AZ Homeless Coordinator, Housing Authority, AZ Housing Coalition, Mesa Police Department, AZ Behavioral Health Corporation, and more.
McHenry County, IL: Catholic Charities, Consumer Credit Council, Head Start, County Department of Transportation, Department of Planning & Development, Sheriff’s Office, and more.
Action Items
a. Nominate the local Continuum of Care to develop or implement the Homelessness Strategic Plan.
b. Key city departments and organizations should send representatives to the monthly Continuum of Care meetings. These departments may include: Mayor’s Office, Health Department, Fire Department, Police Department, and Welfare Department, Local Jail, Housing and Redevelopment Authority, School District, Welfare Department, and Chamber of Commerce.
