A woman walks past homeless tents on a street in Los Angeles, California on February 1, 2021.
FREDERIC J. BROWN | AFP | Getty Images
In December last year, single mother Courtney Peterson was fired from her job at a transitional living program in hospitals, which has now closed. In addition to the flexibility that allowed her to sometimes bring her seven-year-old son to work, she paid enough to cover the rent on a studio apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they lived for a year and a half.
Peterson said she began researching possible avenues for help, immediately concerned about January’s rent. When her son was an infant, they lived in a travel trailer, she said, a situation she didn’t want to return to.
“I started reaching out to local churches or places that said they offered rental assistance,” Peterson told CNBC. “But a lot of them wanted me to have active eviction notices to help me. I felt like I had no options. I had reached out to just about everyone I could think of with no luck.”
Instead of an eviction notice, Peterson received a letter from the Homeless Prevention Unit at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, offering a lifeline. The pilot program uses predictive artificial intelligence to identify individuals and families at risk of homelessness, offering assistance to help them stabilize and stay housed.
In 2023, California had more than 181,000 homeless people, up more than 30 percent from 2007, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A report from the California State Auditor found that the state spent $24 billion on homelessness from 2018 to 2023.
Launched in 2021, the technology has helped the department serve nearly 800 individuals and families at risk of homelessness, with 86 percent of participants maintaining permanent housing when they leave the program, according to Dana Vanderford, deputy director for homelessness prevention. homeless at the county Dept. Health Services.
Individuals and families have access to between $4,000 and $8,000, he said, with the majority of funding for the program coming from the American Rescue Plan Act. Locating people for help and convincing them that the offer is real and not a scam can be a challenge, but once contact is made, help is quickly set in motion.
“We often see our clients within days of becoming homeless or days after they’ve had a medical emergency. The time we see people with is critical,” Vanderford said. “Our ability to come out of nowhere, cold-call a person, provide them with resources and prevent that impending homelessness for 86 percent of the people we’ve worked with is remarkable.”
Peterson said she and her son received about $8,000 to cover rent, utilities and basic needs, allowing her to stay in her apartment while she looks for a new job. The program works with clients for four months and then follows them at the six-month and 12-month mark, as well as 18 months after discharge. Caseworkers like Amber Lung, who helped Peterson, say they can see firsthand how important preventative work is.
“Once people lose that housing, it feels like there are so many other barriers to getting back [being] are housed, and so if we can bridge a little bit of a gap, maybe help them keep that housing, I think it’s a lot easier to stabilize things than if people end up in a shelter or on the streets to get them back to this position,” Lung said.
Risk prediction
The AI model was developed by the California Policy Lab at UCLA over several years, using data provided by the Los Angeles County Chief Information Office. The CIO incorporated data from seven different county departments, which were not identified to protect privacy, including emergency room visits, behavioral health care and major public benefit programs from food stamps to income support and homeless services, according to Janey Rountree , executive director of California. Policy Laboratory. The program also drew data from the criminal justice system.
This data, linked together over many years, is what will be used to make predictions about who will experience homelessness, developed over a period of time in which the policy lab had the effect of testing the accuracy of the model.
Once the model identified patterns in the people experiencing homelessness, the lab used it to try to make predictions about the future by creating an anonymous list of people ranked from highest to lowest risk. The lab provided the list to the county so it can reach out to people who may be at risk of homelessness before it happens.
However, previous research found that anonymous data can be traced back to individuals based on demographic information. An extensive data privacy study, based on 1990 US Census data, found that 87% of Americans could be identified using their zip code, date of birth and gender.
“We have a deep, multi-decade shortage of housing in California, and the cost of housing is going up, more and more, and that’s why our people are experiencing homelessness,” Rudry said. “The biggest misconception is that homelessness is caused by individual risk factors, when in fact it’s very clear that the root cause of this is a structural economic issue.”
The Political Lab provided the software to the county for free, Rudry said, and does not intend to monetize it. Using AI in close collaboration with people who have relevant subject matter expertise from educators to social workers can help promote positive social outcomes, he said.
“I just want to emphasize how important it is for any community experiencing homelessness to test and innovate around prevention,” she said. “It’s a relatively new strategy in the lifetime of homelessness services. We need more evidence. We need to do more experiments on how to find people who are at risk. I think this is just one way to do that.”
The National Alliance to End Homelessness found in 2017 that a chronically homeless person costs the taxpayer an average of $35,578 per year, and those costs are cut in half on average when placed in supportive housing.
Los Angeles County has had initial talks with Santa Clara County about the program, and San Diego County is also exploring a similar approach, Vanderford said.
Government Use of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence in the hands of government agencies has faced scrutiny because of potential outcomes. Police reliance on AI technology has led to illegal arrestsand in California, voters rejected a plan to repeal the state’s bail system in 2020 and replace it with an algorithm to determine individual risk, due to concerns that it would increase bias in the justice system.
Broadly speaking, Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, said the ethics around government use of AI depends on the context of use and the security of identifiable information, even if it is anonymous. Mitchell also points out how important it is to get informed consent from people seeking help from government programs.
“Does the world know all the signals being collected and the risk associated with them and then the dual-use concerns of malicious use against them?” Mitchell said. “There’s also the issue of how long that data is kept and who can ultimately see it.”
While the technology aims to provide help to those in need before their housing is lost in Los Angeles County, which Mitchell said is positive from a “moral virtue” standpoint, there are broader questions from a utilitarian standpoint.
“Those would be concerns like, ‘What’s the cost to the taxpayer and how likely is this system to actually prevent homelessness?’ he said.
As for Peterson, she is in the process of looking for a job, hoping for a remote position that will allow her flexibility. Down the road, she hopes to earn her professional nursing license and one day buy a house where her son has his own room.
“It meant a lot just because you know my son didn’t always have that stability. I didn’t always have that stability,” she said of the help from the program. “To be able to call this place home and know that I won’t have to leave tomorrow, my son won’t have to make new friends right away… It means a lot to both me and my son.”