LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles is the homeless capital of the United States, with more than 45,000 people living in weather-beaten tents and rusty campers, but even in the state home to Silicon Valley, technology has not kept up with the long-running crisis.
Billions of dollars have been spent to help the region’s homeless, but outdated computer systems with error-ridden data too often fail to provide even basic information.
Better Angels United is developing a series of apps to be donated to participating organizations that the nonprofit hopes will revolutionize homeless shelters and services, including a mobile-friendly prototype for outreach workers, to be followed by a system for shelter operators and a comprehensive shelter bed database, which the region currently lacks.
Key findings from the Associated Press include:
What’s going on? Nobody knows
More than one in five homeless people in the United States live in Los Angeles County, about 75,000 of whom live there on any given night. The county is the most populous in the country, with 10 million people, roughly the population of the state of Michigan.
Dozens of agencies and service organizations across the county use a disparate mix of software to track homeless people and services, creating a so-called tech logjam: Systems can’t communicate, information is out of date and data is often lost.
Homeless people want shelter, but are there any beds available?
Then again, it’s possible that no one really knows: Los Angeles County doesn’t have a system for comprehensively listing available shelter beds. Once you find a shelter bed, you have 48 hours to apply for it, but homeless caseworkers say that sometimes that time is up before you even realize a bed is available.
“Just looking at the availability of beds is a challenge,” said Bevin Kuhn, deputy director of analytics for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that coordinates homeless housing and services for the county.
If bad data goes in, bad data comes out
One big challenge is that there is currently no standardized way for caseworkers to collect and enter information about homeless people they meet into a database. Some caseworkers scribble information on paper, others type a few lines into their phones, and still others memorize interactions and try to recall them later.
All of this information is later entered into one or more databases, which makes the data susceptible to errors and takes a long time for information recorded on the road to be entered.
Mark Goldin, chief technology officer for Better Angels, described Los Angeles’ technology as “systems that don’t talk to each other, a lack of accurate data, and no one on the same page about what’s real and what’s not real.”
Why has technology lagged behind in its home of Silicon Valley?
There’s no single reason, but challenges to the county’s sprawling government structure from the pandemic are contributing factors.
As homelessness numbers soared, “funding exploded, organization exploded, everyone was learning at the same time, and then the pandemic hit on top of that,” Kuhn said. “Everybody in the world froze.”
Another challenge is finding consensus among the county’s various government agencies, advocacy groups and elected officials.
“When you think about the size of Los Angeles, it’s incredibly complicated,” Kuhn added.
Find a solution and build an app
As part of developing its software, Better Angels conducted more than 200 interviews with caseworkers, data experts, administrators, and others involved in homelessness programs. They found startling gaps: No one was measuring how effective the system was at getting homeless people off the streets and into housing and services.
One of the biggest challenges is getting government and service groups to participate, even though Better Angels will be donating the software to people in Los Angeles County.
“Everything is safe, everything is secured, everything is uploaded, everything is available,” Goldin said.
But, he added, “it’s very hard to get people to do things differently.” The more people use it, the more useful it will be.