Los Angeles' scoring system for identifying homeless people most in need of permanent housing ranks Black people and Latinos lower than white people.
Homelessness among Latinos has shot up in Los Angeles County while other demographic groups have seen a decline over the last two years.case managers use to determine people’s scores has dozens of questions that must be answered. The questions on the survey ask whether the person took an ambulance recently or spoke to the police after witnessing a crime. If so, the survey asks how many times.
The points are tallied into the “vulnerability” score. The higher the person’s vulnerability, as measured by the survey, the higher priority they’re supposed to be for permanent housing. When a new building opens or a vacancy otherwise arises, designated “matchers” are responsible for finding the most qualified unhoused clients for the space. They make this choice based on any criteria particular to the building as well as the vulnerability scores.In L.A.
USC professor Eric Rice is part of the team studying how to make LAHSA’s system more equitable, including testing a tool that more accurately predicts outcomes and potentially changes how housing is allocated. “We’re talking hundreds, if not thousands, of people who could be helped who are maybe being overlooked,” Rice said.Black people make up 8% of L.A.
Individual case managers will also vary in how they score and place people. Sometimes, Montoya said, a case manager may have just started their first social services job a week before — “no training, no guidance” — and not be able to administer the survey properly.Another might try to game the system in their clients’ favor. “Sometimes we have case managers that are notorious for everybody on their caseload being a 17,” Montoya said, “because they also know that higher acuity equals housing.
suggested the tool was a relatively poor way to predict who would fall back into homelessness, concluding that “scores did not significantly predict risk of return to homeless service.”from C4 Innovations, a consultancy group that works on homelessness services, examined similar systems in four counties across three states.
There are remedies for someone with a low score. People experiencing homelessness who are aware of the scores and concerned that theirs is not high enough can request that a case manager survey them again, and LAHSAon exactly how the score should be reassessed. The People Concern recommends that people request new scores as their circumstances change so case managers can assess whether they should be ranked higher on the vulnerability scale.
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