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Tag: Prevention

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. 

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. 

Early Intervention to Prevent Persistent Homelessness: Predictive Models for Identifying Unemployed Workers and Young Adults who become Persistently Homeless

March 19, 2019 / By Halil Toros, Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / The John Randolph Haynes Foundation

In major U.S. metropolitan areas, the number of long-term homeless needing housing far exceeds the available housing supply, making it difficult to move persistently homeless individuals off of the streets. One of the most promising approaches to reducing these numbers lies in early identification and quick, effective intervention to help those most likely to become persistently homeless. Two new screening tools from the Economic Roundtable can help the most vulnerable people get access to the public services they need as soon as they become homeless, or even before they are homeless, and reduce the flow of people into chronic homelessness.

Model-Based Triage of Permanent Supportive Housing: Improving the Allocation of Supportive Housing Resources

July 1, 2018 / By Jane Carlen, Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / Santa Clara County Center for Population Health Improvement (CPHI)

This streamlined triage tool was developed for the Santa Clara County Center for Population Health Improvement (CPHI). It provides an empirical tool for prioritizing patients for permanent supportive housing using close-to-real-time data that is available to CPHI. In addition, an industry-wide switch in medical diagnostic classification systems necessitated a conversion of all diagnostic variables from the ICD-9 classification system to the ICD-10 system. 

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.  

All Alone: Antecedents of Chronic Homelessness

August 25, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

Public assistance programs are Los Angeles’s primary interface with individuals experiencing homelessness and can be a catalyst for connecting at-risk and homeless recipients with crucial services and reducing the massive public costs associated with chronic homelessness. The vital role is to identify tripwire events among all recipients, particularly children and transition-age youth, and quickly connect at-risk individuals with needed employment, behavioral health and housing services.

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.

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. 

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.

Dividends of a Hand Up: Public Benefits of Moving Indigent Adults with Disabilities onto SSI

March 1, 2011 / By Daniel Flaming / the Health Consumer Alliance of California

Counties bear large hidden costs for individuals with disabilities who are indigent or homeless. This includes costs for health care, jails and probation in addition to readily identifiable county costs for public assistance. A large share of this cost is health related – costs that the federal and state governments would pay through Medi-Cal if the individuals were receiving Supplemental Social Security Income (SSI). 

Where We Sleep: The Costs of Housing and Homelessness in Los Angeles

November 1, 2009 / By Daniel Flaming, Michael Matsunaga and Patrick Burns / The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

The central question investigated in this study is the public costs for people in supportive housing compared to similar people that are homeless. The typical public cost for residents in supportive housing is $605 a month. The typical public cost for similar homeless persons is $2,897, five-times greater than their counterparts that are housed. This remarkable finding demonstrates that practical, tangible public benefits result from providing supportive housing for vulnerable homeless individuals. The stabilizing effect of housing plus supportive care is demonstrated by a 79 percent reduction in public costs for these residents.

10-Year Strategy to End Homelessness

June 1, 2006 / By Daniel Flaming and Paul Tepper / The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

A comprehensive strategy with 25 actions, accountable agencies, timelines, and performance benchmarks to prevent and end homelessness in Los Angeles County. From 2002 through 2004 the Economic Roundtable and the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center carried out research, listened to ideas from community stakeholders, and met with public officials in order to prepare this strategic plan for ending homelessness in Los Angeles County. 
Photograph by the Greens MPs, "Laurel Tree House Childcare Centre." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 23, 2013, taken on May 23, 2013 in Glebe NSW 2037, Australia. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Running Out of Time: Voices of Parents Struggling to Move from Welfare to Work

July 1, 2002 / By Daniel Flaming, Patricia Kwon and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

How do people change their lives? What kinds of help do working poor parents need to lift their families out of poverty? What obstacles do they face in trying to get a sustaining job? More than eight thousand people answered these questions through a survey undertaken to learn directly from working welfare parents and other poor families about the problems they face and the kinds of help they need to become self-sufficient. 

By the Sweat of Their Brow: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1998 / By Daniel Flaming, Peter Force, Julie Henly-UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research and Mark Drayse / Economic Roundtable

Welfare reform raises the prickly question of what mix of understanding, support and pragmatic pressure is needed to move welfare recipients into employment. Many workers are scrambling to keep the wolf from their own doors in the face of industry restructuring, rapid technological change, and intense pressures to increase corporate profits. 

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