Combating Homelessness in Los Angeles County
Using GIS to make a difference
If you could do something to help the homeless, you would. And you can help, actually. You can help by lending a hand—literally, your hands on the keyboard here—and learning, step-by-step, how to unearth the spatial patterns of homelessness. Then, you can apply the GIS skills you learn to data for your own hometown. Begin making a difference; be part of the solution.
More than 57,000 men, women, and children are homeless on any given night in Los Angeles County, and this number is increasing. According to the 2017 point-in-time count, homelessness was up 23 percent between 2016 and 2017. This, despite more than 14,000 people moving out of homelessness into permanent housing.
Tragically, the fastest growing group of homeless are age 18 to 24 (up 64 percent), followed by those under age 18 (up 41 percent). Some are runaways, others have been kicked out of their homes or have aged out of foster care and other juvenile services. Some are addicted or have been abused.
All of the shelters have waiting lists, and even with rent vouchers, permanent housing just doesn't exist. Consequently, only 26 percent of Los Angeles' homeless are provided shelter. The remaining are living on the streets, along river beds, under freeway overpasses, in their cars, behind buildings, in parks or in other makeshift encampments.
For many reasons, not the least of which are health concerns, public works crews have cleaned more than 16,000 homeless encampments and removed 3,000 tons of trash. Unfortunately, this didn't prevent a recent Hepatitis A outbreak among the homeless population.
Homelessness is expensive. Impacting cities across the country, it costs Americans billions of dollars each year. Getting a handle on this problem could not be more important.
How can GIS make a difference?
Not just undaunted but truly optimistic, analysts from agencies across Los Angeles County are using GIS to help combat this humanitarian crisis. They recognize they will need a comprehensive, coordinated and efficient, data-driven action plan that can ensure homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring.
Using public data from Los Angeles for demonstration purposes, this case study will walk you through analyses that you, or any city, can use to help address homelessness. The workflows presented include:
1. Creating a risk surface for homelessness and examining the spatial patterns of various risk factors.
2. Mapping the distribution and characteristics of the homeless population.
3. Weighing different options for locating new homeless resources.
4. Developing a framework to quantify and monitor performance (return on investment).
To learn more about how these workflows might apply to your own city, consider completing the detailed, step-by-step tutorial using the data for Los Angeles, and then repeating the steps using your own data.
Where are people becoming homeless?
Prevention is much less costly than dealing with the complications of long-term homelessness. Consequently, a key component of the Los Angeles Homeless Initiative is early intervention. This requires knowing where people in Los Angeles are becoming homeless.
While the point-in-time count tells us where homeless people are (and you will make good use of this data later), unfortunately, it doesn't tell us where they were when they became homeless.
You will need to predict where people become homeless using the key factors known to contribute to homelessness. These key factors include poverty, addiction, lack of affordable housing, unemployment, mental illness, domestic violence, and high health care costs. All risk factors are given equal weighting for this analysis.
With census tract data in hand, you will create a hypothetical tract with the worst-case values for each of the risk factors. Then, you will rank all other tracts against this worst-case, and map the results (see the tutorial for details). The result is shown below. The areas with the darkest red coloring have the highest combined risk for generating homelessness.
Where is risk for becoming homeless highest?
A 2018 survey from Bankrate reminds us that many Americans are only one paycheck away from the street: 61 percent of respondents said they wouldn't be able to cover a $1,000 emergency, such as a car wreck or an unexpected medical bill.
Locations with one or more risk factors are much more likely to generate new homelessness.
Click on the map to explore risk level, population, and risk factors.
The risk factors analyzed include poverty, unemployment, disabilities, public assistance, paying more than 50 percent of total income for rent, domestic violence, mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Veterans, lack of health insurance, and substance abuse.
Where should programs to prevent homelessness be implemented?
While the risk factors and the underlying causes for homelessness are complex, they are also spatial, and this is so important. By applying the Science of Where, you can identify where to prioritize targeted remediation to help prevent homelessness.
Ending Veteran homelessness, for example, remains an important priority in Los Angeles. Other remediation opportunities exist to address the lack of affordable housing, and unemployment.
One option is to create remediation plans that span the entire county (at great cost). The alternative is to use GIS to identify the locations where specific remediation programs are likely to have their greatest impacts.
The maps below show you where specific risk factors are prominent.
Where should prevention be focused?
These 25 tracts represent priority locations for projects specifically designed to prevent homelessness by focusing on unemployment.
Click on the map to learn more.
These tracts represent priority locations for projects designed to prevent homelessness by addressing the lack of affordable housing.
Over half a million people in Los Angeles County are paying more than 50 percent of their total incomes on rent.
These tracts represent priority locations for Veteran support designed to prevent homelessness.
Based on estimates, approximately 23,000 Veterans in Los Angeles County suffer with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) putting them at risk for homelessness.
Where are the homeless?
Spatially-informed strategies to prevent homelessness are only part of the solution. Additional projects are needed to help existing homeless families and individuals move into permanent housing.
You can explore homeless and residential population densities across the county using hot spot analysis. The results are shown below.
Where do homeless people live in relation to homed county residents?
Los Angeles County Total Population
This map shows where the County's homed residents concentrate. Click on the map to explore population patterns.
The next map shows where homeless communities concentrate.
Homeless Population
The largest concentration of homeless people in Los Angeles County are found downtown, in and around Skid Row.
Click on the map to see details.
While individual tracts in the central hot spot may or may not have high numbers of homeless people, the clustering of high numbers of homeless throughout the hot spot region is statistically significant.
Unsheltered Homeless Population
During the point-in-time homeless count, January 2017, more than 42,000 people (74 percent of the homeless population in Los Angeles County) were living on the streets, in their cars, or in other makeshift situations.
This map shows concentrations of unsheltered homeless people downtown (Skid Row), but also near Santa Monica and Venice.
Knowing where homeless people are concentrating is important, but so is recognizing differences among these communities. The homeless in Venice Beach or Hollywood, for example, have different characteristics than the homeless in Skid Row. Consequently, the needs in each of these areas will be different.
To demonstrate these differences, you will create maps identifying where homeless people are staying in shelters; living in cars, vans, or campers; living in tents and other makeshift encampments; or living on the street. Click on the maps below to explore estimates of other characteristics of the homeless population including veteran status, gender, age, race/ethnicity, and factors contributing to homelessness.
How do homeless communities differ across the county?
This map shows where people are sleeping in emergency shelters, transitional housing, and safe havens.
Click on the map and scroll through the graphs to explore other characteristics of homeless communities: race/ethnicity, gender, age, and factors contributing to homelessness.
This map shows where homeless individuals and families are living in cars, vans, or campers.
Click on the map and scroll through the graphs in the pop-up to learn more.
This map shows where people are living in tents and makeshift encampments.
Click on the map to explore the characteristics of the different homeless communities.
This map shows where homeless people are living on the street.
Click on the map to get additional information.
Where should new resources go?
Los Angeles County has outlined an action plan with projects ranging from expanding rapid rehousing programs to building many thousands of new housing units (focusing primarily on supportive housing for the chronically homeless).
Where should these new resources go? Any number of different scenarios could be considered. Each scenario puts value on different objectives.
Where should new resources go?
Optimize social equity
One option is to promote social equity. If we believe that everyone has a responsibility to share the burden of homelessness, the goal will be to distribute resources equitably. From this perspective, a location with 1% of the population should be associated with 1% of homelessness.
For this scenario, adding new resources to the red tracts would improve equity.
Optimize access to resources
A second option is to prioritize access by putting new facilities where existing homeless people live.
Adding new resources to the red tracts will improve access.
Focus on high risk areas
A third option is to locate new resources in the highest risk areas. If resources are available where they become homeless, people are more likely to remain close to existing communities where their children attend school, where they know their neighbors, and where they are likely to have existing resources.
For this scenario, avoid the lightest tracts and add new resources to the red tracts.
This is the strategy the mayor of New York is promoting.
Centralize resources
Another option is to consolidate new resources into homeless triage centers by encouraging centralization of resources.
Adding new resources to the red areas will promote centralization.
This is the model San Francisco has adopted.
Street strategy
A final option focuses on the most vulnerable homeless populations, evidenced by high numbers of 311 calls and crime incidents related to homelessness, and high numbers of chronically homeless individuals. These locations become candidates for rapid-response, focused interventions aimed at getting every homeless person precisely the resources they need to move out of homelessness permanently.
Research indicates a small portion of the homeless population use a majority of money targeted for homelessness. Addressing these people first, will have the biggest impact on reducing costs.
Other possible options for locating new resources might prioritize access to transportation centers, or perhaps give preference to low-crime areas. If you are considering a Housing First solution, you will likely want to prioritize locations where permanent housing could be built or where existing housing could be converted into housing for the homeless.
You can overlay each of these scenario maps to see if there are any locations that optimize multiple objectives. The result for the five scenarios mapped above, is shown below.
Which locations best serve multiple objectives?
Overlaying the maps for each scenario reveals solutions that optimize one or more objectives.
Click the map to see which objectives are met in each location.
The map above gives equal weighting to each scenario, but other options are possible. For stakeholders with conflicting priorities, these maps provide neutral ground to discuss different perspectives, encouraging both transparency and collaboration.
What's working?
It will be critical to assess the effectiveness of both the new and the existing programs created to end homelessness. The point-in-time count, required by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, will be a key component of these efforts. Counts are conducted once every year or two across the United States. The Los Angeles count is the largest in the nation involving almost 8,000 volunteers over three days and nights.
The data collected provides information about the number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless. The survey asks questions about why people became homeless, and tracks demographic information such as race, age, gender, family structure, and Veteran status.
Adding questions about where people became homeless (address or ZIP Code of last permanent residence) will be important for effective prevention.
The 2017 and 2018 counts will become the baseline for a multi-billion-dollar program funded by two Los Angeles ballot measures: proposition H and proposition HHH. The money from these initiatives will most likely be used to deploy outreach teams composed of case workers and health specialists; to generate bridge housing to help prepare homeless people for permanent homes; to expand a rapid rehousing program and rent subsidies; to increase supportive services such as job training, substance abuse counseling, and mental health treatment; and to construct 10,000 new units of permanent-supportive housing.
A coordinated effort across agencies and departments is necessary to register all homeless services and to track both utilization and capacity. With linked records across agencies, each encounter with a homeless person will provide data to help quantify the effectiveness of services rendered. Metrics to measure program impacts will answer questions such as these:
1. Is the average number of days a person remains homeless going down?
2. Is the percentage of chronically homeless decreasing?
3. Are outreach programs (for substance abuse, domestic violence, unemployment or institutional discharge, for example) assisting a larger number of people and as a consequence, are the percentages of people homeless due to these factors decreasing?
4. Has every homeless veteran been placed in permanent housing?
5. Does emergency shelter and housing capacity match the number of newly homeless each month?
Reducing the number of days a person remains homeless is critical for managing the well-being of individuals and families. It also greatly reduces costs and impacts on public health and safety resources overall. Long-term homelessness takes a toll on physical and mental health, and is correlated with long-term unemployment. The longer a person is out of the job market, the harder it is to re-enter, and this is expensive from an economic, governmental, and societal perspective.
Next steps
Homelessness in America has reached crisis levels. We will need to leverage every single tool we have available in order to combat it. Initial efforts need to focus on stopping the increase, and must be followed by strategic, monitored, action-oriented plans aimed at ending homelessness. GIS and the Science of Where provide powerful tools to help meet this challenge.
Feel free to download the data and to work through the tutorial created for this case study to see if elements of these workflows might help your own city move toward ending homelessness. Explore applications for counting the homeless, for maintaining an inventory of homeless services, for helping the homeless find local resources, and for engaging the community in reporting homeless activities.
While both the data and the context for the analyses outlined in this case study are real, the actual workflows described have been selected to purposely highlight specific GIS functionality. The author is tremendously grateful for feedback and help from staff at the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Data Used for the Analyses above: Homeless Count 2017 Results By Census Tract (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Homeless Count, Data & Reports. Accessed 2/26/2018); 2017 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count - Data Summary - Skid Row (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Homeless Count, Data & Reports. Accessed 2/26/2018); 2017 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count - Data Summary - Venice (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Homeless Count, Data & Reports. Accessed 2/26/2018); 2017 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count - Data Summary - Hollywood (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Homeless Count, Data & Reports. Accessed 2/26/2018); Crime Incident Data (Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Accessed 2/26/2018); Past ACS data (Available from the Census Bureau. Accessed 2/26/2018); Homeless Shelters and Services (Los Angeles County, Terms of Use. Accessed 5/15/2018); 311 Homeless Encampments Requests (#DataLA. Accessed 2/26/2018); Crime, Homeless Victim 8/16 - 8/17 (#DataLA. Accessed 2/26/2018)
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City of Los Angeles
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Resources
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Homelessness gets some much needed help from technology
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Better Serving the Homeless
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