Last year, in mid-October, a U.S. Army veteran joined a program serving homeless residents in Southern California.
This wasn’t the first time he asked for help. The man, disabled, had already participated in several initiatives without finding permanent housing.
Yet after more than two months with Volunteers of America, he received both housing and rental assistance.
This level of detail about one person’s journey, along with information on more than 195,000 others who were recently helped in the same area, is publicly available because they were in Los Angeles.
The same data is not as accessible in San Diego.
The different levels of access partly reflect how counties have created very different bureaucracies to oversee homeless services. But it also raises more fundamental questions about how leaders balance the need for transparency – particularly when it comes to the vast sums spent on the homeless – with fears that the privacy of vulnerable people will be compromised. raped.
The public wants to know that taxpayer dollars are being spent on programs that work. Homeless residents need to be able to trust the organizations that offer them help.
Can both happen simultaneously?
A contract vs. an email
The issue surfaced recently amid a public dispute between a local government watchdog agency and the organization overseeing San Diego’s Homeless Management Information System, known as HMIS, which tracks how thousands of people participate in a range of programs.
Several years ago, the San Diego County Taxpayers Association requested HMIS data from the Regional Homeless Task Force. Anyone wanting access must fill out a form that asks, among other things, what the records will be used for and may be for a fee of $500 an hour.
This cost doesn’t just affect researchers: When San Diego officials want certain HMIS data, the city also has to pay $500 an hour, according to spokesman Matt Hoffman.
The task force initially agreed to share anonymized records with the taxpayers’ association, meaning names would be removed, and the resulting “Data Transfer and Use Agreement” had parameters strict. The recordings were not to be shared, any published analysis had to be approved in advance by the working group and the exchange could end “without cause” at any time.
When board members later voted to end the agreement, the association had to scrap what it had.
Los Angeles works differently.
In late March, the San Diego Union-Tribune emailed the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which manages its HMIS data, requesting much of the same documentation the ratepayers association wanted in San Diego. This included a year’s worth of demographic information on people experiencing homelessness (such as gender, race, and veteran status), the programs each person had joined, and whether they were successful in obtaining permanent housing.
About seven weeks later, the agency, known as LAHSA, sent the requested data free of charge. There were no signed agreements or limits on how the documents could be used.
There is an obvious reason for these divergent responses. LAHSA is a government agency while the San Diego Task Force is a non-profit organization.
“The California Public Records Act only applies to public agencies,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. Although the task force was created decades ago by a San Diego mayor and remains a key part of the system for distributing taxpayer dollars to the homeless, it was granted tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in the mid-2000s.
These organizations may be exempt from laws requiring public access to records. “This is a problem of privatization of public functions,” Loy added.
‘Sensitive information’
The working group shared the HMIS data with other researchers, including Jennifer Nations, executive director of the Homelessness Hub at UC San Diego, and Patricia Leslie, professor emerita of social work at Point Loma Nazarene University.
“The information in the system is really important to the community – and I think the task force has guarded it well,” Leslie said.
One of his main concerns was that homeless people could be identified if records were more accessible.
Suppose the data includes only two Aboriginal women. If anyone could verify if he was disabled or had served in the military, it might be possible to find out his name. Additionally, if you were able to find that a woman was participating in a program known to treat alcoholics, could this later affect her job prospects? Or the possibility of finding accommodation?
“In general, it’s difficult to truly anonymize data,” said Gary Blasi, a professor emeritus of law at UCLA who has long studied homelessness.
At the same time, Blasi was not aware of any instances where Los Angeles HMIS data was used to publicly identify individuals. So does a spokesperson for the LA Alliance for Human Rights, which sued the city and county of Los Angeles over their response to homelessness. Representatives from two area service organizations — Union Station Homeless Services and Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System — did not immediately provide examples of abuse of HMIS records.
However, there were debates in Los Angeles over who could see all the data, including names.
In 2022, the Los Angeles City Council considered a proposal to give government personnel broad access to HMIS records. The nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless, which employs outreach workers throughout the region, spoke out against it.
“When people choose to share their personal information with us – including their medical histories, personal traumas and service needs – they do so knowing that sensitive information will only be passed on to service providers,” wrote Zeke Sandoval, a PATH representative. members of the Council. Giving others direct access to the data could cause homeless people to withhold “key information if they fear political interference or disclosure under the Public Records Act.”
A PATH spokesperson said a compromise was later reached, giving LAHSA, which manages Los Angeles’ data, more control over sharing of records.
A LAHSA representative wrote in an email that anyone misusing HMIS data loses access to it. “In the limited instances where this has occurred, we have determined that no sensitive customer information was compromised,” Ahmad Chapman said.
Supporters of San Diego’s approach also worry about how the data could be misinterpreted.
Homelessness is so complex that experienced researchers are needed to analyze which efforts actually work, said Omar Passons, deputy city manager for the city of San Jose and former director of the San County Department of Homeless Solutions. Diego.
But, he added, “there is always room for more availability.”
Transparency and confidentiality
Many California officials agree that greater transparency is needed.
A recent state audit criticized how homeless-related spending has been monitored so far. Gov. Gavin Newsom said cities that don’t document their finances won’t receive state grants and San Diego County officials are undergoing a thorough review of all their contracts.
Amid this changing landscape, the Taxpayers Association has publicly called on the San Diego Task Force, or RTFH, to release more data.
“I think it’s time to start pushing RTFH to do what the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is doing,” wrote Haney Hong, president and CEO of the association, in a recent message to mayors and municipal directors. “Think about what your agency could do in terms of evaluating your programs. »
The working group uses HMIS data to produce a number of public reports available online.
You can track how outreach workers sheltered a smaller proportion of people from 2020 to 2022. One report concluded that Black residents were 3.9 times more likely to lack shelter. It’s only because of nonprofits that we know homelessness has increased for 25 straight months.
But task force leaders have been reluctant to widely disseminate the raw data behind those numbers.
“People experiencing homelessness deserve the same privacy protections as everyone else,” said Tamera Kohler, CEO of the task force.
Spokesman Jordan Beane wrote in an email that Los Angeles’ public data contained enough detail to identify at least some people.
Regarding what the task force charged to release records in San Diego, Beane said not everyone was obligated to pay $500 an hour. The fee “is in no way related to staff size nor is it a fixed price,” he said. “Everything is managed on a case-by-case basis. »
If San Diego ever changes course, the data could shine a spotlight on organizations that run local shelters.
Leaders of Project Alpha, People Assisting the Homeless and Father Joe’s Villages all said releasing new records would not affect their work.
Hanan Scrapper, manager of PATH’s San Diego office, added that the task force has significantly improved HMIS data in recent years, making it easier for service providers to track customers.
She was skeptical that wider access could lead to a more efficient system.
Deacon Jim Vargas, president and CEO of Father Joe’s, further cautioned against judging programs based on just a few data points.
Helping people who have lived outside for a long time is complicated, he said. Sometimes it took months to develop a relationship. Even if housing was the goal, “there are so many things that factor into the whole equation.”
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