Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Embraces GIS for 2023 Count of People Experiencing Homelessness

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires a biennial Point-in-Time (PIT) count of people experiencing homelessness. Across the country there are close to 600,000 Americans experiencing homelessness, and at least 30 percent of these people reside in the state of California. Many state and local government organizations are taking a geographic approach to better understand how to identify residents experiencing homelessness and connect them to the resources they need. In January 2023, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) used geographic information system (GIS) technology to analyze location data in conducting the largest Point-in-Time (PIT) count in the nation.

The PIT count helps the state, Los Angeles County, and the City of Los Angeles better understand what the needs are of the population experiencing homelessness and assists the decision-makers in planning for targeted services and allocation of resources. Over a three-day period in January 2023, LAHSA staff and a team of volunteers used ArcGIS QuickCapture, a location-enabled mobile application, to complete the count with the assistance of Esri business partner Quartic Solutions.

Homelessness is often inherently a geographic concern in both urban and rural areas. In a large county like Los Angeles, determining the number and geographic extent of unsheltered people is critical in order to address needs and plan targeted services.

For the count, teams of volunteers and staff completed 2,967 out of the 3,193 census tracts over three nights. Outreach teams conducted counts in census tracts located in various areas including creeks and rivers.

For this year's PIT count, LAHSA staff applied a variety of tools and lessons learned to improve the organization's processes. These improvements included optimizing team deployment of volunteers and staff sites, training LAHSA staff, and implementing new digital tools. LAHSA provided an application, built using GIS technology to over 6,000 volunteers and staff members. The application enabled them to document the number of unsheltered people and identify which census tracts that these individuals were found in. LAHSA also set up quality assurance processes, including the following:

• Distribution of backup paper maps and tally sheets to the count teams
• Dashboard visibility of incoming data in real time for volunteers and deployment site leads

LAHSA's mobile application can be used to capture field observations from a moving vehicle, conduct aerial surveys, or assess damage. Real-time analytics can also be sent back to the office to reduce time spent manually processing paper-based data collection, and results can be viewed in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Creating visual mapping boundaries of where volunteers were on the days of the PIT count also helped reduce the amount of double counting people experiencing homelessness. Aside from the application LAHSA also leveraged GIS tools such as ArcGIS Dashboards which allowed them to visualize the data coming in from the count in real-time on one single screen. This allowed LAHSA staff back in headquarters to easily monitor the count and its results.

LAHSA teams were able to capture 95.6 percent of the census tract data for the 2023 PIT count. The organization's GIS-powered mobile data collection application contributed in large part to the success of this year's count. Staff and volunteers were able to adapt to the new technology to successfully collect and upload PIT count information.

The 2023 results are not available yet, but LAHSA and similar organizations will make critical decisions based on their data. By using location-based strategies and software, they can demonstrate the need for funding more targeted programs that address the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles.