LOS ANGELES (AP) — Billions of dollars have been spent in California to help homeless people on the streets, but outdated computer systems riddled with data errors often fail to provide basic information like where shelter beds are available on any given night, and the inefficiencies can lead to disastrous results.
The problem is particularly acute in Los Angeles, where more than 45,000 people suffering from serious mental illness, drug addiction, or both live in trash-strewn encampments that have spread to virtually every neighborhood, with rows of rusting recreational vehicles lined up across entire blocks.
Even in the state that’s home to Silicon Valley, technology has not kept up with the lingering crisis. At a time when anyone can book a hotel room or rent a car with a few taps on a cell phone, there’s no system for comprehensively listing available shelter beds in Los Angeles County, home to more than 1 in 5 homeless people in the United States.
Mark Goldin, chief technology officer for the nonprofit group Better Angels United, described Los Angeles’ technology as “systems that don’t talk to each other, a lack of accurate data, no one on the same page about what’s real and what’s not real.”
“The system can’t answer exactly how many people are outside at a particular time. Where are they?” he said.
For someone living on the streets, the impact can mean the life-threatening difference between whether or not they can sleep outside one more night.
“They’re not serving people when they need it or when they’re ready to receive it,” said Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of Better Angels.
The problem was apparent at a squalid encampment in the city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, where Sara Reyes, executive director of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, led volunteers in distributing water, socks and food to homeless people, including some who appeared unconscious.
She handed out postcards with the addresses of nearby churches where the coalition was providing hot meals and services. A small dog jumped out of a tent and barked frantically, and a unkempt man in a jacket stumbled past a stained mattress in the sweltering heat.
At the end of the visit, Reyes began typing notes on his cell phone that were later re-entered into a coalition spreadsheet and eventually copied back into the federal database.
“When you move from one medium to another, data can get lost. We know we don’t always have the whole picture,” Reyes said. “The victims are the people the system is supposed to serve.”
While the homeless population is soaring, technology is stagnating, leading some to question how to address the problem without reliable data to gauge its scope. An annual tally of the city’s homeless population recently found a slight decline in the number, but some experts have questioned the accuracy of the data, and tents and encampments remain ubiquitous.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has cited technology shortcomings as one of the obstacles facing homelessness programs, describing the city’s efforts to slow the crisis as “building a plane as we fly it.”
She said earlier this year that three to five homeless people die on the streets of Los Angeles every day.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday ordered state officials to begin removing homeless camps on state land, his boldest move yet as governor, following a Supreme Court ruling that gives cities more power to ban sleeping in public places.
Currently, there are no uniform procedures for collecting and entering information about homeless people interviewed by caseworkers (including paper notes) into a database. As a result, information can get lost or recorded incorrectly, and the time lag between the interview and its entry into the database means the information quickly becomes out of date.
A key federal data system, known as the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), was designed as a desktop application, making it difficult to navigate on a mobile phone.
“One of the reasons the data is so bad is because case managers inevitably take notes on their phones or notepads, or try to remember them, and then typically enter them hours, days, a week or longer after they return to their desks,” Miller said.
All organizations that coordinate services for homeless people use the HMIS program to comply with data collection and reporting standards mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But not all systems are compatible.
Sam Mutnick, deputy director of data for People Assisting the Homeless, a large Los Angeles-based service provider, said his organization is among those having to re-enter data because Los Angeles County uses its own data system that doesn’t communicate with the HMIS system.
“Manual double-entry can lead to all kinds of errors,” Mutnick said. “A small numerical error can mean the difference between someone being able to evacuate or not.”
Bevin Kuhn, deputy director of analytics for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that coordinates homeless housing and services for Los Angeles County, said work is underway to create a database of 23,000 beds by the end of the year as part of a technology upgrade.
For case managers, “just looking at the overall bed availability is a challenge,” Kuhn said.
Kuhn said other changes include rebooting the HMIS system to make it more compatible with mobile apps and developing ways to measure whether caseworkers are entering data in a timely manner.
It’s not uncommon for field workers to encounter homeless people in crisis situations that require immediate attention, which can cause delays in data collection. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority aims to enter data into the system within 72 hours, but that standard isn’t always met.
To fill this void, Better Angels has assembled a team with experience building large-scale software applications. They are building a mobile-enabled prototype for outreach workers that will be donated to participating organizations in Los Angeles County, followed by a system for shelter operators and a comprehensive shelter bed database.
Because homeless people are mobile and difficult to locate for follow-up services, the feature creates a map of where individuals have been encountered and allows case managers to narrow their search.
Services are often available, but linking them to homeless people in real time is a challenge, so the data profile would show the services an individual has received in the past and any medical issues they may have, making it easier to connect with health care workers if needed.
As a secondary benefit, if enough agencies and providers agree to participate, the software will be able to generate insights and data visualizations that can reveal where homeless people are moving around the county and concentrations of places where homeless people congregate.
One of the key goals of the prototype is that it is easy to use, even for employees with limited digital literacy: information entered into the app is immediately pulled into a database, eliminating duplicate re-entry and keeping the information up to date.
Time is often crucial: Once a shelter bed is found, people have 48 hours to apply for the spot, but Reyes said only about half of the applications are processed, and insufficient technology sometimes means the coalition doesn’t realize there’s an opening until the deadline has passed.
She has been impressed with the speed of the Better Angels app she is testing and believes it will reduce the number of people who miss out on housing opportunities and increase trust for people trying to access services.
“I hope Better Angels can help bring some humanity back into this situation,” Reyes said.
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Hur reported from San Francisco.
