Conclusions from AP article on ineffective technology slowing efforts to get homeless people off the streets

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles is the nation’s epicenter of homelessness, where more than 45,000 people live in weather-beaten tent camps and rusting RVs. But even in the state that is home to Silicon Valley, technology has not kept up with the long-term crisis.

Billions of dollars Much money has been spent on getting the region’s homeless off the streets, but outdated computer systems with error-ridden data are too often unable to provide even basic information.

Better Angels United is developing a series of apps — to be distributed to participating groups — that the nonprofit hopes could revolutionize shelter and homeless services, including a mobile-friendly prototype for field workers. It will then develop systems for shelter operators and a comprehensive database of shelter beds, which the region currently lacks.

Here are some of them key findings Associated Press:

What’s going on? Nobody really knows

More than 1 in 5 of all homeless people in the U.S. live in Los Angeles County, or about 75,000 people. every night. The county is the most populous in the country, with 10 million people living there, roughly the population of Michigan.

Dozens of governments and service groups in the county use a mishmash of software to track homeless people and services, resulting in what amounts to a technological gridlock: Systems can’t communicate, information is out of date, data is often lost.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’s no system that provides a comprehensive list of available shelter beds in Los Angeles County. Once a bed is found in a shelter, there’s a 48-hour window to fill it. But homeless caseworkers say that window sometimes closes before they realize a bed is available.

“The availability of beds alone is a challenge,” said Bevin Kuhn, acting deputy chief of analysis for 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 biggest 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 take notes on paper, others may type a few lines into a cell phone, still others may try to remember their interactions and recall them later.

All of this information then goes into one or more databases. This makes the data prone to errors or long delays before the information recorded on the street is entered.

Mark Goldin, chief technology officer at Better Angels, described LA technology as “systems that don’t communicate with each other, no accurate data, and no consensus on what’s real and what’s not.”

How did the tech industry fall behind Silicon Valley?

There is no single reason, but the challenges the pandemic has posed to the county’s expanding administrative structure have contributed.

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

Another problem: finding consensus among disparate government agencies, interest groups and county elected officials.

“The size of Los Angeles makes this incredibly complicated,” Kuhn added.

In search of a solution, creating an application

Better Angels conducted more than 200 interviews with social workers, data scientists, managers and others involved in homeless programs as part of developing its software. They found surprising gaps: For example, no one was measuring the system’s effectiveness in moving people off the streets into housing and services.

One of the biggest challenges: getting governments and advocacy groups to participate, even though Better Angels will give its software to Los Angeles County residents.

“Everything is safe, everything is secured, everything is uploaded, 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.”