More than 12,500 Cincinnati families faced eviction last year, according to Strategies to End Homelessness. The nonprofit organization is leading a partnership with eight other groups on a $2.1 million city grant.
The grant is the first Impact Award through the city's Human Services Fund.
President and CEO Kevin Finn says the goal is to innovate to prevent homelessness.
"We're going to analyze data to determine, what are the characteristics of households that later experience eviction or become homeless? What are the patterns that we can see among those households that are most predictive of future instability? so that we can then begin to identify families that have those characteristics," Finn said.
Once those families are identified, the goal is to intervene with wraparound services like utility and rental assistance. Contacting those families may be a challenge.
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"The system is really built at this point around serving people who reach out for some sort of service," Finn said. "But typically people don't reach out for some sort of service until their crisis has gotten to a certain level. And again, we're trying to identify people before their crisis has escalated."
The organizations also plan to facilitate partnerships with landlords to maximize the city's limited supply of affordable housing.
Finn presented details about the project to City Council's Climate, Environment and Infrastructure Committee Tuesday morning.
See the full presentation below (story continues after):
Other organizations named in the grant include:
- Bethany House Services
- Found House Interfaith Housing Network
- The Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati
- Lighthouse Youth and Family Services
- The Society of St. Vincent de Paul
- YWCA of Greater Cincinnati
- 84.51 (retail data science, insights, and media company)
- Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub (startup accelerator)
Finn says excitement for the project started growing long before they even submitted the application.
"I got a call yesterday from the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Apartment Association; they want to know how they could provide data and partner with us in helping to identify households that are at-risk," Finn said. "I can remember pre-pandemic, I tried to get an audience with them and couldn't. Now they're calling me."
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Council Member Reggie Harris, a former housing developer, expressed some hesitation about the potential impact.
"So we have in the nondiscrimination code that you can't discriminate against folks who have vouchers, and yet it happens blatantly, all of the time," Harris said. "The data and the work and the wraparound services, all of that is going to be good, and it's going to be top notch ... But those structural barriers are just going to be problems that I don't know that we'll be able to solve for without changing those things."
Finn says there's no doubt those structural barriers exist and will be difficult to overcome. But, he says that's all the more reason for a project like this.
"Data is the most powerful way to make the case for a policy change," Finn said. "My hope would be that we would be able to put together data to back up what the impact is of some of those things that could then be used to help make the argument at the state level or even the federal level that there needs to be policy changes."
Separately, Strategies to End Homelessness is managing nearly $2 million in funding from Hamilton County's federal stimulus. That will be distributed to other organizations through smaller grants with the goal of preventing homelessness.
