After almost a year of study, more than 200 pages and three reports, the District has four recommendations to improve its homeless services.

At the June 17th meeting of D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH), Dr. Martha Burt of the Urban Institute presented an overview of the main recommendations of her recently completed comprehensive evaluation of D.C’s homeless-assistance programs. The presentation took place before a standing- room-only audience at the Community for Creative Non-Violence building on 2nd Street, Northwest.

Urban Institute researchers, under a Department of Human Services (DHS) cont ract , conducted a nearly yearlong review, the results of which run to 200-plus pages in three separate reports. Those reports, available on the Urban Institute’s Web site (www.urban. org), present detailed analyses of virtually all the city’s homeless programs, processes, problems and populations served.

During her session at the ICH meeting, Burt, the study’s lead researcher, described and explained the major steps she believes that the District must take to create an efficient and effective homeless-services system. Burt focused her ICH presentation on an overview of the study’s four main recommendations. They are that the District should:

(1) Establish permanent supportive housing (PSH) units with excellent housing characteristics and excellent supportive services to be allocated to the city’s most vulnerable homeless;

(2) Create a process for establishing priorities as to who among the city’s chronically homeless and most at risk will have access to the new PHS units as they become available;

(3) Reconfigure the city’s existing emergency shelter system to one with smaller shelters, better facilities and more complex services; and

(4) Revise The Community Partnership’s homeless management information service (HMIS) to make it more flexible, useful and open than today’s version.

The study points out that the first three recommendations are broadly congruent with the directions in homeless policy that Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration and the ICH are currently pursuing. In particular, Burt notes the work being done by the ICH’s Supportive Housing Working Group to develop and implement plans to fulfill the Mayor’s commitment to create 2,500 net new units of PSH. However, she also cautions that the new approach is only just beginning.

The Community Partnership

The first of the three reports, “The Community Partnership and the District of Columbia’s Public Homeless System,” provides a detailed assessment of the activities and performance of The Community Partnership (TCP), the nonprofit organization through which funds from DHS and Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) flow to the city’s publicly-funded homeless assistance programs.

The TCP report addresses two broad questions: What does D.C. get for the money it pays TCP? And, what does TCP do for D.C.’s community? In doing so, it covers several specific topics, including: (1) the upkeep of emergency shelters, (2) financial management of contracts and grants, (3) quality assurance and monitoring of resident programs, (4) data collection and analysis, (5) performance standards, and (6) training, communications and leadership.

The report’s authors highlight a number of areas where improvement is needed. For example, they note that Districtowned shelters remain in poor physical condition, that the numbers of clients per shelter is too high; and that TCP’s ability to conduct complex analyses using the data they collect is hampered by software inadequacies and the inability to share data across programs (a “closed” system).

On the question of TCP’s leadership role, the report points out that although TCP cannot provide the same degree of leadership it did in the middle and late 1990s, it still remains more flexible and nimble than DHS or any other government agency; knows the city’s homeless system intimately, and knows how to get things done. Even if TCP is no longer the leadership organization on homelessness in D.C., it can “get modifications and new ideas through the system better than anyone else,” the report’s authors assert. As a member of the District’s ICH, TCP is seen as having the implementation skills needed to bring ICH-generated ideas to fruition.

Transforming the System

The second report, “Transforming the District of Columbia’s Public Homeless Assistance System,” describes the makeup of D.C.’s homeless population and evaluates the various housing and supportive services available to them. It looks at how single adults and families use the city’s emergency shelters, transitional housing programs and permanent supportive housing, their average length of stay in shelters, and their use of other assistance programs.

The report offers some interesting figures on shelter use. For example, an estimated 12,768 different single adults stayed in D.C. emergency shelters during the 12 months between Oct 1, 2006 and Sept. 30, 2007. Of that population, almost half – 47% – stayed fewer than 7 days. And 86% stayed fewer than 6 months.

On the other hand, a mere 4% stayed 365 days or longer, and another 10% stayed between 181 days and 365 days. Consequently, 14% of the single adult homeless population accounted for over 50% of emergency shelter beds.

The report’s authors note that, because of that high-intensity shelter use, moving the 14% long-term residents into permanent supportive housing could allow the city to reduce emergency shelter beds by half. That would free resources to allow the city to design smaller, less crowded, and more effective emergency shelter programs for the 86% relatively short-term shelter residents.

The report also calls for more coordination, communication, long-term planning, and systematic cross-agency data sharing. “Ending homelessness for many people,” the report notes, “requires coordinated services and information from widely differing areas of responsibility – from affordable housing, to employment, substance abuse, domestic violence, physical disabilities, and mental health.” A successful system needs efficient coordination across government departments and service providers.

When that coordination is absent, according to some interviewees the authors talked to, homeless individuals can bounce around from emergency shelter, to clinics, to hospitals, to detoxification centers, to jail – in a process sometimes referred to as “the homeless shuffle” – unbeknownst to the public agencies and service providers who might otherwise be able to assist them.

Major Recommendations

The third report, “Major Recommendations,” is essentially an executive summary of the two longer reports.

The researchers’ first major recommendation is to move the District’s chronically homeless and at-risk individuals and families into permanent supportive housing. Burt stresses the importance of making sure that the various supportive services that people need are made available along with the housing units. That, she notes, would require the active involvement and financial support of several District agencies.

The second recommendation is for the city to develop procedures for identifying and prioritizing who would be offered access to the next available permanent supportive housing. In determining who will have access to the planned 2,500 new units of permanent supportive housing, the report suggests that appropriate criteria might include each candidate’s (a) length of stay in shelters or on the street, (b) frequency of use of emergency rooms, emergency medical services, detoxification facilities, psychiatric programs and jails; and types and levels of disabilities. A “vulnerability index” could be devised using a blend of such factors.

The third recommendation is for the District to eliminate the “warehousing” that occurs in a system of large shelters with limited case management and other services. Instead the city administration is urged to create smaller, specialized shelters with targeted services to help shortterm residents achieve rapid exits.

According to the report’s authors, that sort of reconfiguring of the system would require new intake, assessment and triage procedures, and a vastly improved HMIS. But it would also allow the District to establish measurable performance standards for the various types of smaller shelters that would emerge.

The fourth recommendation is that the current HMIS be expanded and revised. The report calls on the District to collect more detailed client information from people using the city’s shelter system, particularly longer-term users. It suggests the HMIS also collect information from outreach programs that work with “street” (as opposed to “sheltered”) homeless.

“There [were] questions about homeless people or homeless-assistance programs that we could not answer,” complained the report’s authors, “because the Districts homeless management information system either did not have the relevant data or could not externalize the data it did have in a way that made analysis possible.”

The authors also emphasize making the information system more “open” so as to allow information to be shared within the homeless assistance networks (although not with public agencies).

During her ICH presentation, Burt stressed that a more complete and useable HMIS could help improve assistance to individual clients, allow service providers to better track program performance, and give policy makers better data to use in future planning and program evaluation efforts.

June 25, 2008