The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has a unit called the Homelessness Prevention Unit that has been working to stop and help people who are homeless since it opened.
The number of homeless people in California has gone up a lot. Last year, there were almost 200,000 homeless people in the state. With the program in place, it has helped more than 800 families and people stay in their homes instead of being kicked out.
Dana Vanderford, who is the associate head of homelessness prevention at the county’s Department of Health Services, talked about how this program helps people and their families. Vanderford said that people who are looking for help because they are homeless can get between $4,000 and $8,000 in aid. The American Rescue Plan Act is also where she says most of the money is coming from.
Vanderford talked about how important the services were by saying, “We often meet our clients just days after they’ve lost their housing or had a medical emergency.” The time we meet people seems very important.”
She went on, “It feels amazing that we can just show up out of the blue, cold-call someone, give them resources, and stop 86 percent of the people we’ve worked with from losing their housing.”
Three years of work were put into making the AI model by the California Policy Lab at UCLA. They used data gathered by the Chief Information Office of Los Angeles County. People are being asked for information that will help us figure out who is most likely to become homeless in the future.