Houston's Data-Driven Blueprint for Housing-First Homeless Strategy

Editor’s note: This is the fourth piece in a series on the factors that have led to the success of Houston’s homeless response system and the challenges the city faces and will continue to face in addressing homelessness.

In Houston, the financial resources dedicated to serving individuals experiencing homelessness are finite. Leaders of the region’s continuum of care, The Way Home, must therefore be highly selective in deciding which organizations receive funding and for what specific purposes.

Last year, the system had over $60 million at its disposal from federal, state, and county sources to address homelessness in the region, according to Marc Eichenbaum, a special assistant to Houston’s mayor for homeless initiatives. Notably, the city does not allocate general funds to this issue, relying solely on federal grants. In total, the Houston region spends the least on homelessness compared with “virtually any other major city in America,” Eichenbaum said.

“With such a limited amount of public resources, we’re going to invest it wherever the data shows that we get the biggest rate of return,” Eichenbaum said. He serves on the steering committee that sets the continuum’s goals and strategies and collaborates with the city and counties on how to use and leverage various funding sources.

“Often, agencies will come to us with amazing ideas,” Eichenbaum said. “But at the end of the day, our response is, ‘Show us the data.’ And we’re going to let that data guide us onto what we’re going to be investing [in] and championing.”

This data-driven approach has been instrumental in implementing a housing-first strategy that has reduced homelessness in the region by 63% since 2011.

All homelessness systems that receive federal funding must consistently enter client-level data into centralized management systems, enabling analysis and reporting of system performance, said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Washington, D.C.; Portland and Multnomah County, Oregon; and King County, Washington, are among communities that use homelessness data in ways similar to Houston, Oliva said in an email.

Still, it is “very uncommon” for cities to achieve Houston’s level of data integration, “where decision-makers can see families interacting with multiple systems,” said Alisa Hartwell, data and research analyst at New York University’s Housing Solutions Lab.

Oliva noted that highly data-driven systems possess “rich” understandings of who experiences homelessness and what resources are available. “Data makes systems more efficient,” she said. “It identifies outcomes for programs — both positive and negative — and helps communities identify gaps in services and resources that might not otherwise be obvious.”

How the data is collected

Every time a person engages with Houston’s homeless system — whether receiving homeless-dedicated health care, walking into a local soup kitchen, seeking shelter, or interacting with an outreach coordinator — service providers enter data into its Homeless Management Information System. “They are basically getting clocked in,” Eichenbaum said. All agencies can view much of that system-level data through a single dashboard, he added.

Typically, more than 21,000 individuals interact with Houston’s homeless system each year, said Eichenbaum. Many of those people are not homeless but utilize the system and engage with partners to meet basic needs. The Coalition for the Homeless, which manages the continuum, refines the data to identify those who are actually experiencing homelessness.

Houston officials also gather data during the annual point-in-time count, when jurisdictions nationwide take to the streets to tally each person experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. Houston received a waiver from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to extend its count to three days, ensuring the city can capture everyone, including those living in wooded areas and bayous, Eichenbaum said. Enumerators ask individuals a list of survey questions that yield additional data, such as how long they have been homeless, veteran status, substance abuse issues, and domestic violence history.

Data entry and evaluation by communities tracking such homelessness information must be consistent and completed to a high standard to provide the necessary information, said Oliva. The continuums of care that operate Homeless Management Information Systems have relationships with city staff that vary by community. While these data systems are not rare, the sharing and analysis of data “often depends on the level of collaboration and coordination between the two sectors,” Oliva said.

Acting on the data

The data enables continuum and local government leaders to examine trends and assess whether the broader housing-first strategy is working, Eichenbaum said, by analyzing the relationship between the number of individuals placed into housing and the reduction of the region’s overall homeless population.

Real-time data also helps city officials determine where the most people experiencing homelessness are living or moving to, and what their biggest needs are. That information guides decisions on where to deploy money and resources to provide services or launch new programs.

Moreover, the data helps leaders make difficult decisions about programs that are popular and fully utilized but not having an impact. When evaluating providers, continuum leaders consistently ask: Are the programs housing more people? Are they reducing homelessness? Can they be brought to scale? If not, they stop investing in the program.

For instance, the continuum decided not to invest in some transitional housing programs, partly because officials found that people in time-limited housing often returned to homelessness at higher rates than those who received permanent housing with wrap-around services, Eichenbaum said.

“We can build things that get 100% used, but at the end of the day, if it is not having an impact, it’s not worthy of our limited financial resources,” Eichenbaum said. “We solely focus on what’s impactful because that’s our guiding North Star.”

That required a culture shift, he said. Instead of a soup kitchen celebrating that it served 500 more meals than the previous year, it should celebrate when it serves 500 fewer meals in a year, for example. “That means there’s less need,” he said.

Organizations serving the homeless population in greater Houston can still tap into other sources of support, mostly private funds, whether or not they participate in the continuum. Some organizations in the region are not part of The Way Home and do not receive money from it but still operate through private funding, Eichenbaum said. However, “they are few and far between,” he added.

Many organizations that are part of The Way Home also receive little or no funding through the continuum and mainly rely on private funds, said Catherine Villarreal, director of communications at the Coalition for the Homeless.

Sometimes the data allows the continuum to improve the daily lives of homeless individuals, Eichenbaum said. For example, leaders can see that people leave a specific shelter early in the morning, take public transportation five miles down the road to get coffee at a place that serves breakfast. Instead of forcing people to travel that far, they could locate a breakfast provider closer to the shelter within the system.

The system also alerts leaders when a housing unit becomes available, allowing them to match it with a person needing permanent supportive housing. When that person checks into a soup kitchen or interacts with the system, staff can tell them to contact their case manager to get placed in the home.

Continuum leaders can also see which people housed through its efforts are still engaging with various services. If needed, they can contact case managers to check on individuals, helping prevent them from becoming homeless again, Eichenbaum said.

Benefits and costs

Houston’s housing-first model would not be possible without using high-level data to drive decisions, said Sara Martinez, vice president of communications and development at the Coalition for the Homeless. Data-driven decisions allow the continuum to use public and private funding and federal housing vouchers as efficiently as possible to help produce successful outcomes for clients, she said. “We no longer make decisions based on anecdotes,” said Martinez. “Our access to real-time data allows us to make strategic decisions based on real people and real needs.”

The Coalition for the Homeless is also able to “look at the characteristics of people experiencing homelessness across our whole community to understand their needs and identify any gaps or shortages in programming,” said Martinez.

While the system is “still a work in progress,” the continuum has continued to build on the collected data, said Thao Costis, president and CEO of SEARCH Homeless Services, a Houston-based agency that is a member of The Way Home. It has provided “more consistency … for the entire homeless service system and clients who intersect,” Costis said in an email.

Oliva noted that Homeless Management Information System operators often face challenges with data collection, analysis, and use. It requires dedicated funding and personnel to maintain quality, privacy, and security. There are numerous technical components that city governments need to prioritize.

Transparency is another factor. Many effective systems led by continuums, cities, and counties have built publicly available dashboards that provide information to community stakeholders, ensuring transparency and accountability, Oliva said.

“The collection and use of personal data about people experiencing homelessness requires trust between the government and service providers and people whose data is in the system,” Oliva said. Misuse of data by any entity will likely result in a decline in data quality and usefulness, as people and organizations may “refuse to provide information because the system is perceived as untrustworthy,” she said.

For case management, Hartwell said, it can be “incredibly useful” to have detailed information about clients. But evaluating the effectiveness of a single program is difficult if multiple services are so fully integrated, she said. Still, when a city can effectively track the enormous costs of homelessness and shelter stays, “developing long-term affordable housing seems less exorbitant by comparison,” she added.