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Tag: Welfare

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.

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. 

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.

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.  

Long Beach Rising: A City that Works for Everyone

October 13, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming, Halil Toros and Patrick Burns / AFL-CIO, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

Over 54,000 workers employed in Long Beach’s formal economy will be affected by increasing the minimum wage to $15. The annual earnings of workers will increase by about $405 million. The largest share of increased wages—almost $130 million—will go to workers who also live in the City of Long Beach The greatest number of affected workers and the largest payroll increases will be in restaurants, retail trade, education, transportation and warehousing, and health care. The economic stimulus from increased consumption by workers' households will create an estimated 3,186 new jobs and generate $442 million in increased sales in the region.

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.

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.

Ebbing Tides in the Golden State: Impacts of the 2008 Recession on California and Los Angeles County

June 8, 2009 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns and Michael Matsunaga / Economic Roundtable, the California Endowment

The most concrete characteristic of a recession is that demand disappears for some of the commodities produced by workers and unwanted unemployment is imposed on a large segment of the labor force. With growing job losses in the current recession it is important to know, whose boat falls when the economic tide recedes? 

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 Nebojsa Mladjenovic, "1693 Leave this prison and be free.... ~ Rumi~." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on December 20, 2013, taken on February 26, 2009. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Prisoners of Hope: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

July 1, 2003 / By Patrick Burns, Mark Drayse, Daniel Flaming and Brent Haydamack / Economic Roundtable

Why aren’t more welfare parents becoming economically self-sufficient after participating in the LA County Welfare to Work Program, GAIN (Greater Avenue for Independence)? What has happened to these parents since entering the labor market after GAIN? The answers to these and other questions are presented in “Prisoners of Hope,” a report originally requested by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on December 19, 2000. 
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. 
Photograph "P1060350-Edit.jpg [Poverty is a Cage]" by Neil Ballantyne. Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 29, 2011, taken on May 28, 2011. Protected under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED license. The Economic Roundtable has not changed, remixed, transformed, or built upon the material, and is not using it for commercial purposes.

The Cage of Poverty

September 1, 2000 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

In his 1963 letter from the Birmingham jail Martin Luther King, Jr. described the despair of people “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” It is important to understand the extent to which this image of entrapment still describes the wage-earning lives of the working poor as they try to support their families. 
Los Angeles County, Department of Public Social Services, 2014.

On the Edge: A Progress Report on Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1999 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

The loss of a welfare safety net for most adults for most of their lives makes the quality of jobs available to the working poor and their success in finding and keeping jobs increasingly important. The economic and civic life of the Los Angeles region will be shaped by connections that are made, or fail to be made, between the growing ranks of working poor and opportunities for steady, sustaining, productive employment. 

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. 
Photograph by Todd Shaffer, "Cigarette Nap," part of the series "Without A Bed." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on October 5, 2009, taken on October 2, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA - La Brea and Sunset Blvd. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Jobs, Welfare, and Homelessness

January 8, 1995 / By Susan Einbinder-USC School of Social Work, Daniel Flaming, Yeheskel Hasenfeld-UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, Julie Henly-UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research and Jennifer Wolch-USC School of Geography / Economic Roundtable

SYNOPSIS Lack of jobs for California’s labor force has growing costs in the form of poverty, welfare, homelessness, sickness, crime, and diminished futures for the state’s children. The Southern California Inter-University Consortium on Homelessness and Poverty has prepared this report to provide objective information about the broadly shared interest of California residents in reducing the social and personal costs of poverty and welfare. 

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