There are many different causes and every individual's path to homelessness varies but there are some common risk factors that contribute to the current rates of homelessness. Mapping out these risk factors help organizations identify at risk communities. 

Esri provides tools, such as ArcGIS Community Analyst, to help understand populations by integrating a wide variety of data sets allowing organizations to explore risk factors and quickly produce neighborhood level details to guide their overall efforts.

Once an organization determines which risk factors they will focus their efforts on they can develop threshold values used to identify the most "at-risk" communities (click areas in red for more details). After identifying these areas organizations can prioritize them for a variety of targeted intervention and outreach efforts to ensure they are applying limited resources where they are needed the most. 

Example Risk Factors

• Unemployment Rate 
• Household Poverty Levels 
• Median Home Value
• Average Rent 
• Percent Uninsured

In addition to locating at risk communities, organizations also need to understand the extent of homelessness. Surveys, such as the well-established sheltered and unsheltered counts from Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), provide a way to count the homeless. Traditionally, these counts are done using a set of volunteers paired with internal staff using paper and pencil forms.

ArcGIS apps such as Collector or Survey123 can be configured to provide an efficient method to complete these Point-in-Time Count surveys (Video). These tools extend an existing workforce while eliminating the need for paper, improving data quality and providing immediate analysis capabilities (Video).

Homelessness is a problem year-round so providing a way for citizens to report homeless activity (Video) in their communities and route that report to the correct contact (Video) is also key to allocating the resources required to reduce homelessness. 

Note: These maps contain sample data that has been created for demonstration purposes only. 

Internal staff and external community partners need access to the location of the homeless being collected by field teams as well as the information on at-risk communities. They can use this information to provide the necessary resources and measure the effectiveness of their intervention efforts. An Operations Dashboard provides a great tool to share information in real-time in a way that is easily understood and is always up-to-date. (Video)

Note: These maps contain sample data that has been created for demonstration purposes only. 

Once at risk communities and homeless individuals are located organizations need to ensure the correct set of resources are available to help reverse this trend. Resource locators available across different devices and platforms help connect these populations with the community resources they need (click near any red icon in the map to get a list of the closest provider along with detailed information on the services they provide as well as driving directions)(Video).  

In order for any resource locator to be effective it has to include a method for responsible organizations to easily inventory available resources, add new locations and update details on existing providers (click any icon in the resource editor window and then click any point in the map to create a new point)(Video). 

Note: These maps contain sample data that has been created for demonstration purposes only. 

Many organizations are currently using ArcGIS to address homelessness in their communities.  

• Aurora, Colorado 
• Anchorage, Alaska
• City of Rancho Cucamonga & Redlands, California
• Dekalb County, Georgia
• Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority
• Hennepin County, Minnesota

Each of these organizations used easily configured applications that did not require writing a line of code or extensive GIS expertise to deploy.

If you are interested in learning more about the specific ArcGIS Solution Templates available from Esri to reduce homelessness in your community explore them on the ArcGIS Solutions for Local Government website. To learn more about existing offers to address generic field data collection workflows visit the Solutions for Mobile Data Collection page or to get more details on the specific ArcGIS Solution to Reduce Homelessness click here.