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Tag: Housing

The Work Behind Work: Combatting Homelessness with Jobs

February 14, 2024 / By Seth Pickens, Daniel Flaming, Manuel Gomez and Ana Alvarez

The most common reason unhoused individuals give for why they do not have a place of their own to live is unemployment and lack of income. Homelessness is primarily a problem of income. Upstream interventions that lead to employment will significantly reduce the number of men, women and children who experience homelessness.

Hungry Cooks: Poverty Wages and Homelessness in the Fast Food Industry

May 1, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

The fast food industry is a poverty employer, with a larger share of its workers in poverty than any other industry. All low-wage workers face some level of risk that they will become homeless. This risk is compounded in the fast food industry by the combination of low wages, part-time work and employee churn. These interlocking hazards undercut workers’ ability to pay their rent.

Recognizing and Helping High-Need Homeless Individuals: Five Homeless Predictive Screening Tools

March 2, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

Preventive vs. Remedial Screening Tools The Economic Roundtable has developed five predictive screening tools to identify and prioritize high-need homeless individuals who will have high future public costs because of ongoing crises in their lives that are resolved in expensive institutional settings, including jails and hospitals. 

Breaking the Fall: Successful Homeless Interventions in the Covid Pandemic

December 14, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming, Seth Pickens and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

Breaking the Fall – Covid Interventions Prevented Homelessness Struggling workers are either everyone’s responsibility now or everyone’s problem later. When poorly paid workers become jobless at the thin edge of the job market and then unable to pay rent, homeless destitution follows. In fact, we are equipped with the tools we need to protect workers from the sharper edges of joblessness and to combat homelessness. 

Places for Homes: Where Los Angeles Can Build More Housing: Concept Paper on Redeveloping Rent Stabilized Properties in the City of Los Angeles

September 20, 2022 / By Patrick Burns, Daniel Flaming and Ken Baar / Economic Roundtable

A Quarter of a Million New Homes: Concept paper exploring the potential for redeveloping existing, rent-stabilized housing sites at higher density to meet LA City's mandate to allow construction of 255,433 new homes, including 130,553 units for lower-income households.

Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the Covid Economy

January 11, 2021 / By Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns and Seth Pickens / Economic Roundtable

COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession. The Economic Roundtable used data from the 2008 Great Recession to estimate the linkage between job loss and homelessness and forecast the amount and type of pandemic-driven homelessness in Los Angeles, California and the United States. 

Too Big to Govern: Public Balance Sheet for the World’s Largest Store

November 26, 2019 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

Households in the Los Angeles metro region paid $7.2 billion for packages from Amazon.com in 2018. Less publicly visible was more than $790 million paid out in public subsidies and uncompensated public costs that supported Amazon’s profitability. It is time for Amazon to come of age and pay its own way. This means paying its full costs to the communities that host it and the workers who create its profits.

Outcomes from Rent Stabilization in San José: Research to Support 2019 Updates to the Apartment Rent Ordinance Regulations

November 25, 2019 / By Patrick Burns and Daniel Flaming / City of San José California

San José, California's third most populous city, regulates rent increases for older apartment units through its Apartment Rent Ordinance (ARO). To help inform ongoing policy deliberations by the San José City Council and Housing Department staff, this update report gathers recent data about the demographic characteristics of ARO tenants and characteristics of ARO apartments.

Prioritizing Homeless Assistance Using Predictive Algorithms: An Evidence-Based Approach

April 6, 2018 / By Daniel Flaming / County of Santa Clara, Destination: Home

The current issue of HUD’s peer-reviewed journal, Cityscape, includes an article on the Silicon Valley Triage Tool that was developed by the Economic Roundtable. This statistical model provides a fair, objective tool for triage—prioritizing which individuals should have immediate access to permanent supportive housing. Santa Clara County voters have approved major investments in affordable housing for people experiencing homelessness, but the number of individuals who need housing still substantially exceeds the amount of housing that is available for them.   

Who Counts: Assessing Accuracy of L.A.'s Homeless Count

November 20, 2017 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

Within the past year, Los Angeles County and City voters approved $4.75 billion for services and housing to combat homelessness. The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count is crucial for identifying how this money should be used to help people escape homelessness. The Count is an increasingly comprehensive effort to count and describe Los Angeles’ homeless residents, but it is not yet sufficiently accurate to identify year-to-year changes in homelessness. 

Prioritizing Which Homeless People Get Housing Using Predictive Algorithms: An Evidence-Based Approach to Prioritizing High-Cost and High-Need Homeless Persons for Permanent Supportive Housing

April 29, 2017 / By Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

This paper explains the methods used to develop the Silicon Valley Triage Tool for identifying homeless individuals in jails, hospitals and clinics who have continuing crises in their lives that create very high public costs. The model is very robust and accurate, taking advantage of advanced prediction methodologies and a unique and exceptionally valuable database created by Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, linking service and cost records across county departments for the entire population of residents who experienced homelessness over a six-year period – a total of 104,206 individuals. 

City of San José ARO: Research to Support 2016 Updates to the Rent Stabilization Regulations

April 16, 2016 / By Ken Baar, Patrick Burns and Daniel Flaming / City of San José California

San José, California's third most populous city, regulates rent increases for older apartment units through its Apartment Rent Ordinance (ARO). To help inform policy deliberations by the San José City Council and Housing Department staff, this report analyzes demographic characteristics of ARO tenants, characteristics of ARO apartments, compares ARO allowable rents increases with Rent Stabilization Ordinances in other cities, analyzes the debt-service pass-through, and financial outcomes of ARO rental properties.

Silicon Valley Triage Tool: Identifying and Housing High-Cost Homeless Residents

February 17, 2016 / By Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / County of Santa Clara, Destination: Home

Why the Silicon Valley Triage Tool is Important: The number of homeless people needing housing far exceeds the available housing supply, and there is not a fair, objective system for prioritizing who gets to be housed. The triage tool addresses this problem by identifying individuals for whom the solution of housing costs less than the problem of homelessness.  

Home Not Found: The Cost Of Homelessness In Silicon Valley

May 26, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming, Halil Toros and Patrick Burns / Destination: Home

This report identifies the characteristics of the most vulnerable, distressed and costly homeless residents of Santa Clara County to guide strategies for stabilizing their lives through housing and supportive services, improving their wellbeing and reducing public costs for their care. The county spent $520 million a year providing services for homeless residents over the six years covered by this study. Costs are heavily skewed toward a comparatively small number of frequent users of public and medical services. Individuals with costs in the top 5% accounted for 47 percent of all costs and had average costs of over $100,000 per year.

Getting Home: Outcomes from Housing High Cost Homeless Hospital Patients

September 1, 2013 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns, Gerald Sumner - Statistician and triage tool developer and Susan Lee - Corporation for Supportive Housing / Economic Roundtable, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Corporation for Supportive Housing, UniHealth Foundation

Evaluating the outcomes for 163 hospital patients screened from April 2011 to May 2013 by the 10th Decile Project in Los Angeles, which works with hospitals to identify the 10 percent of homeless patients with the highest public and hospital costs – the 10th decile – and provide immediate services for placing these individuals into permanent supportive housing.

Stabilizing Homeless Adults in Crisis: Public Costs for Homeless Clients of San Francisco’s Collaborative Courts

December 1, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / the Corporation for Supportive Housing - Bay Area Office

This study extrapolates data about public costs for homelessness in Los Angeles County to clients of three San Francisco Collaborative Courts: Drug Court, Community Justice Center (CJC) and Behavioral Health Court. This information identifies the probable level of engagement by health care providers, public assistance agencies and the jail system in providing services to different cohorts of court clients that are experiencing homelessness. For clients with the most acute problems, who have recurrent encounters with hospitals and jails, information about high public costs associated with homelessness can point the way toward cost-effective investments in housing and supportive services that reduce net public outlays.

Hospital to Home: Triage Tool II for Identifying Homeless Hospital Patients in Crisis

November 18, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns, Gerald Sumner, Manuel H. Moreno and Halil Toros / Economic Roundtable

Different conditions of body and mind found among homeless adults provide a basis for predicting who will have very high public costs – in the 10th cost decile. This report presents a triage tool developed specifically for use in hospitals or clinics where there is not access to data from other agencies about the use of non-medical public services. 

Jobs, Wages and Housing: Affordable Housing Benefit Fee Study

November 1, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns, Michael Matsunaga, Yasmin Tong and Ken Baar / City of Los Angeles

New development solves housing problems for some workers by creating new jobs that pay sustaining wages. At the same time, it creates additional demand for affordable housing because some of the workers who will be employed will not earn enough money to afford market-rate rental housing. This report analyzes a possible affordable housing benefit fee for new development in Los Angeles. If approved, this fee would recover a portion of the public cost for meeting the demand for affordable housing that results from new development.

Rental Housing 2011: The State of Rental Housing in the City of Los Angeles

February 1, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable, the Pat Brown Institute

Inadequate housing takes different forms, all of which are detrimental to the well-being of families and individuals. The most prevalent problem is housing that costs more than households can afford to pay. The causes include a housing inventory that has grown slightly less than the population and renter incomes that have increased much less than the cost of housing.

Crisis Indicator: Triage Tool for Identifying Homeless Adults in Crisis

August 1, 2011 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns, Gerald Sumner, Manuel H. Moreno and Halil Toros / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Corporation for Supportive Housing

The triage tool, or crisis indicator, identifies homeless individuals in hospitals and jails who have continuing crises in their lives that create very high public costs. This redesigned tool is four times more accurate than the earlier screening tool released in 2010. The tool is developed for use in jails, hospitals and clinics where homeless individuals with high levels of need and high public costs are most likely to be found. Discovery of the exceptionally high public costs for people in the 10th cost decile has led to interest in identifying these individuals and giving them high priority for access to permanent supportive housing. This group accounts for well over half of all public costs for homeless adults, and their costs decrease by 86 percent when they live in permanent supportive housing.

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