After months of planning, a local program using data analysis to predict and prevent homelessness is on track to launch in July.
The concept is to determine what situations put families at higher risk for losing housing, identify families in those situations, then intervene with financial and other support.
The project has $2.1 million in funding from the city of Cincinnati through the Impact Award, a new part of the human services funding in the annual budget. Strategies to End Homelessness is the lead agency. CEO Kevin Finn says this kind of work is entirely new and very expensive.
"Since this is a service that's not currently being offered, we don't really know what we're going to find in terms of expenses," Finn told a City Council committee last week. "My hope is that instead of paying back rent, we're going to be contributing something to help Mom get to work, which would probably be at a lower dollar figure, but would have a longer term impact on that household."
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Finn says the data analysis part alone costs $500,000 a year, and the city's Impact Award includes just $100,000 a year for that part. The groups are fundraising to fill in the gap, plus raise enough to fund the emergency assistance and case management portions.
The first set of predictive data will include information from Hamilton County's 513 Relief program; Central Access Point helpline; emergency rental assistance through both the city and the county; the Legal Aid Society helpline; the Homeless Management Information System; the Shelter Diversion program; St. Vincent de Paul requests for service; and the YWCA domestic violence hotline.
All households identified will be assigned a case manager, plus receive other support depending on their specific needs.
"We're developing a plan for how we're going to outreach to the households, depending on which data sets they appear in," Finn said. "In some of the data sets, we might have an email address or the cell phone number. In others, we may not even have a name. So we might have to go back through whatever organization provided us with data on that household and ask them to make contact with the family on our behalf."
Finn says they plan to add more data as the project continues, in order to identify more families at risk of homelessness. The second phase, planned for October, will include data from the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority, county arrest records, multi-family property sales, and applications for service through the Freestore Foodbank.
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The second phase will also include a new idea generated as part of the project's "hack-a-thon" earlier this year: Tenant Guard, where families can self-identify that they are at risk for losing housing.
A third phase of the project is planned for January 2025, with up to 18 other sources of data.
