Finding housing for homeless people in L.A. County? Now there’s an app for that
When the apartment became vacant in February, the man who would eventually live there was spending his days under a tree in Pan Pacific Park and sleeping at night in a storage compartment.
Four months later, after making his way down a slow trail of written applications, Terrance Whitten finally moved in.
The length of his wait was hardly unusual. Homeless services officials estimate that on average it takes them four to six months to complete the cumbersome process for filling a vacancy in one of the thousands of supportive housing units in Los Angeles County, leaving hundreds of units vacant for weeks on end.
The bureaucratic barriers responsible for that backlog come in a plethora of paperwork: different application forms to request housing vouchers from each of the county’s 19 housing authorities and different rental applications required by the dozens of housing providers.
L.A.’s search for new solutions to a growing homelessness crisis is running up against residents’ love of their beaches and park spaces.
Now the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has launched a digital app to cut through that paperwork. Called the universal housing application, it allows caseworkers to fill out a single digital form for every purpose. That form auto-fills basic information about the client from LAHSA’s Homeless Management Information System. It also contains blanks for more detailed information required by the various housing projects to validate eligibility for apartments that are restricted to specific groups such as veterans, older people or mentally ill people.
Besides streamlining the preparation of multiple applications, the digital form, launched this month, is designed to cut down on errors and omissions that often cause applications to be rejected and put back at the bottom of the pile.
“Roughly half of all apps were coming in incomplete or had an issues that required a back and forth,” Emilio Salas, executive director of the Los Angeles County Development Authority, said on a Zoom videoconference introducing the new app. “Meanwhile, someone is waiting for a voucher.”
Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority officials who have been trying to figure out how to trim the months that subsidized units remain vacant characterized the digital form as an incremental step rather than a panacea.
Officials are hoping to cut the delay by 30 days, said Amy Perkins, head of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Housing Central Command, a committee of city, county and nonprofit agencies formed last year to seek solutions.
Other obstacles — validating a person’s homeless status, getting identification and applying for benefits — remain. Then there’s the difficulty caseworkers have merely in tracking down their clients who have qualified for housing.
For now, the application works only for what is called project-based housing — apartment buildings that have subsidy allotments and are managed by nonprofits that have portfolios of hundreds of units.
In the three years since the Los Angeles Fire Department began tracking them, fires related to homeless camps have more than doubled.
To build the form, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority polled the major providers such as Skid Row Housing Trust and LA Family Housing to compile the information they require for all their programs.
There’s still no common application for the myriad market-rate apartments that accept people who have individual subsidies such as those in LAHSA’s rapid rehousing program.
“If you have someone on rapid rehousing and you’re going to take them to three different units, you have to fill out three different applications,” Perkins said. “The dream for us would be one uniform application across all rental properties in Los Angeles County.”
That’s the next step, but a much bigger one.
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