From Definitions to Data: Ending Street Homelessness in Your City

On June 5-6, 2017, 115 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from 30 countries came together in Chicago, USA for the Institute of Global Homelessness’s biennial conference, Ending Street Homelessness in Your City. The conference built on work that emerged from 2015’s Homelessness in a Global Landscape, which focused on developing a framework for understanding global homelessness.

This year, focus shifted from defining the problem to defining the solution. Participants discussed what an end to street homelessness looks like, and how to measure progress, as well as how to approach some of the most difficult and entrenched obstacles cities face in their drive toward this goal. The conference agenda included workshops on using data; tackling complicated questions of enforcement, migration, and begging; and building coalitions to share knowledge, resources, and strength. The first day opened with a discussion of measurement: how do we measure homelessness, and how do we measure whether homelessness has been “ended”? What does it mean to “end homelessness” and how do you operationalize that definition?

In her keynote plenary, Rosanne Haggerty, President of Community Solutions, noted that Ending Street Homelessness in Your City was an opportunity for a group of people to take responsibility to finding the answer to those questions. She called on participants to use the two-day conference to accelerate, broaden, and share their work: “It’s time we take ownership of ending street homelessness everywhere. … It’s not some other group of people outside of this room that is going to take ownership of the mindset, behavior, and resource problems that will need to be solved to put us on the path to ending street homelessness. There isn’t a collection of people in the world that knows more than we know or has more experience than we have. It lands here.”

To that end, many of the workshops and presentations dealt with the new and innovative way that cities are trying to grapple with understanding their homelessness problems. In 2015, Homelessness in a Global Landscape argued that you couldn’t solve a problem you couldn’t name or define; Ending Street Homelessness in Your City built on that argument to say you can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand its scope.

Participants from Santiago, Chile and Montevideo, Uruguay discussed their use of census data to calculate the scope of homelessness in their cities; in Montevideo, the most recent census helped reveal vital insight on what the major routes of inflow to homelessness were. Other cities use point-in-time counts, registry weeks, and service site surveys. Many countries used a combination of these strategies: in Cambodia, efforts to count children experiencing homelessness led cities to map hotspots, capture/recapture counting, and conduct individual interviews.

Jessica Marcus, Deputy Director of Data and Performance Management at Community Solutions, presented on the use of real-time data in communities participating in Community Solutions’ Built for Zero campaign. The effort defines “real-time” data as “data collected in a consistent, timely fashion—as often as possible.” This allows communities to evaluate not just their progress, but also system dynamics, inflow causes and commonalities, and problem areas or bottlenecks within the system. Without this information, practitioners and policymakers aren’t able to strategize or implement effectively.

“Lack of data has been one of the major barriers to homeless work,” said Beth Rubenstein, whose work with Columbia University was part of Cambodia’s push for data. “This data gap is particularly stark in the international arena … which leaves us with very, very skewed portraits of development progress.”

Isabel Lacalle, Executive Director of Corporación Nuestra Casa and co-founder of the Chilean group Callelink, which helps build networks and coalitions between people and homelessness NGOs, agreed. In 2015, Lacalle presented at Homelessness in a Global Landscape about the 2011 Chilean homelessness count; this year, she talked about the 2017 National Census and the changes they saw in their data. Vitally, NGOs in Chile included people with lived experience in the volunteer teams, and formed an agreement with police departments to keep officers off the street during the Census in order to create a more welcoming environment, given the complicated relationship that many people experiencing homelessness have with the police.

“This was the first year we included people experiencing homelessness in the National Census,” she noted. “In other years, the Census was only performed in houses, so people in the streets weren’t counted.”

But this is changing as nations and cities begin to recognize the importance of data in their work, both as a scope-defining tool and as a way to understand not just the end results of homelessness but its root causes. And though some countries have more robust data collection systems than others, there are still areas where almost everyone is lacking; Ending Street Homelessness in Your City allowed for collaborative thought on how to fill these data gaps.

Freek Spinnewijn, Director of the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA), dug even deeper into this idea of improving data to help cities develop better policies and approaches to ending homelessness: “What makes some countries do better than others on homelessness? … When you look at countries that have very profound data collection systems, and a housing policy is developed, there is quite a strong link. But there is a number of sorts of data that are very informative for policy-making that are missing in many countries at the European level.”

The type of data that Spinnewijn refers goes beyond simply enumeration; he made the case for counting time spent on the street, complexity of need, and pathways both in and out of homelessness. In order to understand and combat the forces pushing people onto the street, we need to know what they are and how they are linked to one another.

Data is one approach to this. But what do we do with data once we have it? What do we do if that data reveals cracks in the systems we have built?

On this question, Haggerty reflected, “It was sobering to realize how slow I was to ask the right questions… [and] to recognize that we had become part of an institutionalized system that was getting in the way of ending homelessness. But what we know is that the key to solving complex problem is in truthful data, collaboration, and accountability to the result and to the necessary behavior changes—especially our own behavior changes.”

An example of why this kind of introspection is necessary emerged in Tuesday’s sessions on migration, legal and enforcement issues, and addressing encampments. Harry Tan, of Monash University, discussed his study of homelessness in Singapore—a country that adamantly claims to have no homelessness. “Singapore is … a country that really prides itself on its affordable public housing policy and often boasts that every citizen will have a roof over their head,” Tan said. But recent studies have shown that this is untrue. In fact, the people experiencing homelessness in Singapore are largely over fifty, have some education, and have experienced many of the same push factors as elsewhere, including strained familial relationships, addiction-related problems, and mental illness. Indeed, the government-run welfare homes which claim to prevent sleeping rough were reported to be part of the problem: forced routines, lack of freedom, and lack of dignity were all reasons cited by participants in the study for why they avoided intake.

Jeremy Rosen, who has worked with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, argued that the widespread criminalization of homelessness throughout the U.S. utterly fails to address the problem of homelessness and instead can exacerbate it—particularly policies which simply seek to “get rid of people experiencing homelessness in plain sight,” rather than face the complex issue of homelessness itself.

Cases like these reveal why honest data evaluation is so important: it allows us to develop better policies that don’t hide a problem, but solve it.

But solutions require more than simply moving people experiencing homelessness out of public view, and in the session on strategies for addressing encampments, Jeff Kositsky and Jason Albertson from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing in San Francisco discussed lessons learned from their recent campaigns. Their program evaluation suggested that intensive and ongoing outreach, service provision, and collaboration between housed and unhoused people affected by encampments were critical to moving people into housing and preventing the encampment from re-forming. Their analysis also revealed that any strategy must be “humane, legal, and effective.” A critical piece to ensuring the plan met all three criteria was partnerships with other agencies; no single agency was able to provide the wide range of services and programs that the encampments required.

In homelessness work it is vital to build coalitions. Take RedLAC (the Latin American & Caribbean Homelessness Network) a network of social educators, researchers, NGO leaders, and policymakers working together to share resources and knowledge across seven Latin American and Caribbean countries that began to take shape at Homelessness in a Global Landscape. In “The IGH Framework of Homelessness in Argentina, Brazil, and Puerto Rico,” RedLAC presented on what they have accomplished together since 2015: the first PIT counts in Argentina and Nicaragua, a new Brazilian homelessness network, Chile’s inclusion of homelessness on the National Census, and the first female-focused homelessness research project in San Juan, Puerto Rico. These accomplishments are the direct result of shared responsibility, accountability, and collaboration.

“That’s what’s different about this gathering,” Haggerty mused. “It’s not merely an aspiration, it’s a shared vision of an end state where a different set of ideas and behaviors about homelessness have prevailed. … We know that homelessness is not inevitable. It’s the result of human-made systems, institutions, and rules. But ideas, institutions, and behavior can change.”

We know that they can change because, on our own, we have begun to change them. Imagine how amplified that work will be when it is strengthened by connective webs across thirty countries. In that regard, Haggerty captured the spirit of the gathering when she said that Ending Street Homelessness in Your City “[felt] momentous, actually—and hopeful, too.”

#ighconf