3

HIGH-TECH HOMELESSNESS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

America’s last Skid Row is a half square mile of open-air tent encampments on the edge of the Los Angeles downtown entertainment district. In 1947, Hal Boyle of the Evening Independent called the neighborhood “the poor man’s underworld, a cross-section of American futility, the place where men who have lost hope go after they have jettisoned their dreams.”1 Fifty-eight years later, Steve Lopez at the Los Angeles Times described the neighborhood as “a rock-bottom depository and national embarrassment. A place [of] disease, abuse, crime and hard-luck misery … where business thrives in Porta-Potties … and urine still runs in the gutters.”2

I arrived in Los Angeles in December 2015 to explore its coordinated entry system, which is intended to match the county’s most vulnerable unhoused people with appropriate available resources. Touted as the Match.com of homeless services, the coordinated entry approach has become wildly popular across the country in the last half decade. Its supporters include the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a myriad of local homeless service providers, and powerful funders, including the Conrad N. Hilton and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations.

The proponents of coordinated entry argue that the system creates a “no wrong door” approach to the often dizzying array of services available to the unhoused and provides a standardized intake process to reduce waste, redundancy, and double-dipping across agencies. The system also collects, stores, and shares some astonishingly intimate information about unhoused people. It catalogs, classifies, and ranks their traumas, coping mechanisms, feelings, and fears.

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For many, Skid Row personifies timeless corruption and hopelessness. But, like any too-simple story, this narrative hides more than it reveals. In the 1870s the neighborhood was mostly orange groves. By 1921 Skid Row offered all the necessaries for family living: a public school, an emergency hospital, streetcar transportation, churches, factories, workshops, warehouses, and retail. As the population of migrant workers swelled in the 1930s, it became known as the poor man’s district. The neighborhood was filled with inexpensive housing and economic struggle, but also thriving community and vigorous politics. The Communist Party, for example, organized dozens of neighborhood Unemployed Councils under the motto “Don’t Starve—Fight!,” led protests of stingy soup kitchens, and resisted evictions during the Great Depression.

Despite the stereotype of Skid Row as home to older white men, the neighborhood has always been diverse. In a 1939 issue of the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Huston Irvine wrote, “The population is probably more motley than that in a similar district of any other American city,”3 describing the Jews, Greeks, Italians, Germans, French, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans who worked, lived, and played in the neighborhood. This population swelled during World War II, as new workers arrived looking for steady employment in the defense industries.

But the passage of the American Housing Act of 1949 spelled calamity. The legislation offered federal money to demolish blighted buildings, paired with support for developing 810,000 units of public starter housing geared to working-class families. Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of Victorian homes, boardinghouses, and low-cost hotels immediately northwest of Skid Row, was razed to the ground. The demolition removed 7,310 units of housing.

City building superintendent Gilbert E. Morris issued more than 65,000 building code violations in Skid Row alone. The violations required that building owners either rehabilitate and seismically retrofit their buildings, at their own expense, or demolish them. Many opted for demolition. The 1950s “rehabilitation” removed 4,165 hotel rooms and 1,379 other dwellings from Skid Row; nearly a thousand buildings were knocked down. A 1959 pamphlet written by Magner White for the Los Angeles Examiner bragged that Los Angeles was “Show[ing the] World How to End Slums.”

The changes in the neighborhood between 1921 and 1957 were stark. Gone were the small businesses: the drugstores, bookbinders, coffee roasters, and the Hippodrome Theater. Whole blocks of wood frame dwellings disappeared, their lots now used for automobile parking or sitting empty. Buildings that once boasted union halls now hosted missions of the “three hots and a cot” variety.

But when federally funded low-income housing was proposed to replace what had been demolished, white middle-class Angelenos vigorously resisted. Calling a plan to construct 10,000 affordable public units a “Red Plot to Control L.A. Housing,” opponents blocked the creation of Elysian Park Heights, a racially integrated public housing complex, and organized to have the City Housing Authority investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee on charges of Communism.

The battle against public accommodations had far-reaching impacts for Los Angeles, constricting available housing and deepening racial segregation. Demolition occurred primarily in neighborhoods that were home to large populations of people of color and poor whites: Bunker Hill had a sizable Native American population and the Chavez Ravine, the proposed home for Elysian Park Heights, was majority Chicano. After these neighborhoods were demolished, the white middle class thwarted plans to expand low-income housing through special referenda, hostility, and outright violence. Thus, Los Angeles built only a fraction of the number of public housing units of other cities its size, and most of it was built in communities of color. Half of the units built under the 1949 Housing Act were located in Watts, for example, one of the few neighborhoods where racially restrictive covenants had allowed African American residents to live.

In the 1960s available housing on Skid Row was halved again. The “Centropolis” master plan knocked down more buildings, constructed a band of light industry around the neighborhood, and focused redevelopment dollars on the nearby business district. Available housing stock shrank from roughly 15,000 units to about 7,500. Then, in the 1970s, planners prepared a proposal, popularly known as the Silver Book, which would clear the area of poor residents for good.

Named for its futuristic metallic cover, the Silver Book plan was a joint effort of a committee of downtown businessmen and the Los Angeles city government. It suggested that what was left of Skid Row, like Bunker Hill before it, be razed to the ground. Extensions of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, were to be built after the existing housing was demolished and neighborhood residents were sent to a massive detoxification and rehabilitation center.

But community activists and residents, led by the Catholic Workers, the Legal Aid Foundation, and the Los Angeles Community Design Center, produced a competing plan. Their Blue Book proposal protected the remaining single room occupancy (SRO) hotels on Skid Row and encouraged city government and local nonprofits to commit resources to improving housing and social services in the area. According to Forrest Stuart, author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row, the Blue Book plan prevailed, at least in part, because organizers and community leaders adopted an unorthodox strategy of embracing the perception of Skid Row as lawless and frightening.

Activists threatened that a wave of homeless and indigent people would be unleashed on the suburban neighborhoods of Los Angeles if Skid Row was demolished. For some, the Blue Book plan was a de facto agreement to designate Skid Row as a sacrificial zone to contain the homeless. For others, it was a surprisingly successful battle to protect land and housing for Skid Row’s poor and working-class inhabitants.

Until recently, the Blue Book’s pioneering strategy to defend Skid Row worked. The neighborhood continued to be a “set-aside community” for the poor, working class, and unhoused. For four decades, its residents have worked hard to create community in the face of the city’s strategy of malign neglect. But in the past decade, the neighborhood has undergone rapid transformation. Young professionals rejecting the suburbs and Los Angeles traffic sought out raw urban apartments and the services that cater to the wealthy followed: artisanal food shops, bespoke juiceries, craft coffee bars. Nightclubs capitalized on the neighborhood’s colorful past but roped off their entrances and upscaled their drink prices.

The resident population of downtown LA grew by more than 23,500 between 2006 and 2013. A building boom in luxury rentals over the last half-decade has driven the vacancy rate in downtown Los Angeles to 12 percent—its highest level since 2000—but the median price of a one-bedroom is $2,500, and affordable housing is hard to find. The boundary between downtown and Skid Row slipped east from Main Street to Los Angeles Street, and then another block to Maple, as loft-style housing for the creative class expanded. The spread of the Little Tokyo neighborhood put similar pressure on Skid Row’s northern border, which moved from 3rd Street to below 4th. Skid Row lost about 16 square blocks—a third of its size—in ten years.

Skid Row today is an area of highly visible, stark contrasts. On block after block, the neighborhood’s professional middle-class residents inhabit live-work lofts with high ceilings and stainless appliances while its poor live in makeshift tents. On weekends, pedestrians nudge BabyBjörn jogging strollers past their neighbors’ shopping carts of recyclables. On my first visit, I was stunned to see a man asleep on the sidewalk in front of the Pussy & Pooch pet boutique, which bills itself as “a design-forward, social experience for pets and people.” A lanky young African American, he was stretched out with his head at the curb and his black t-shirt pulled over his face to block the hot midday sun. A svelte and leggy dog and its equally willowy owner stepped past him to enter the store, perhaps to eat raw meat at the “paw bar.” The dog was wearing shoes; the man was not.

While many downtown residents—newcomers and old-timers alike—praise the area’s ability to contain such contradictions, there are signs that the social fabric is fraying. As Hillel Aron reported in LA Weekly, when a mental health center housed in the Little Tokyo Lofts planned to expand to fill the available first-floor commercial space, neighbors resisted, successfully petitioning to block any expansion of social services. A proposal to turn the long-neglected Cecil Hotel into a permanent supportive housing complex for 384 chronically homeless people was killed by county supervisors in 2014.

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Every night, approximately 2,000 Skid Row residents sleep in mission and emergency shelter beds. Another 6,500 are housed in SRO or supportive housing that includes social services for those struggling with mental illness, poor health, or addiction. Somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people sleep outside in encampments erected on the sidewalks of the neighborhood. Since 1950, more than 13,000 units of low-income housing have been removed from Skid Row, enough for them all.

The flophouses and tenements of the past have been replaced by rows of tents covered in blue and black tarps. Cardboard boxes, carefully cut down, provide floors and walls. Plastic storage bins protect clothing, food, dishes, and reading material from weather, dirt, and rats. Five-gallon buckets serve as storage, seats, and makeshift latrines. Shopping carts carry possessions from one area to another when police crackdowns or street cleaning crews arrive, moving the unhoused from block to block like human chess pieces.

On my walks around the neighborhood, I have been touched by the kindness and courage I’ve witnessed: a Bible laid on a neatly made-up sleeping bag inside a red tent, the affirmation “Let gratitude be your attitude” written in black magic marker inside a makeshift shelter on Gladys Avenue. I’ve had fascinating conversations on its street corners and been kindly chaperoned to the bus stop after dark by generous souls who then returned to sleep on the sidewalk. I’ve also been threatened by hustlers and knuckleheads, fondled, harassed, and followed by men muttering offers of drugs or “Dick … dick, dick, dick.”

Residents face real challenges on Skid Row but also find value and community here. As T.C. Alexander, a gravel-voiced 60-year-old community organizer living near the corner of Gladys and 6th, explained to me on my first tour of the area in January 2015, “It’s so real down here. I find more love here than I have anywhere in the city. As down and out as people are, they’ll stop and talk to you, shake your hand.” My tour guide, Skid Row human rights defender General Dogon, finished T.C.’s thought, “On the other side of Main Street, they’ll pass you like you a telephone pole.”

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The coordinated entry system was created in order to address the disastrous mismatch between housing supply and demand in Los Angeles County. Before coordinated entry, unhoused people navigated a complex system of waitlists and social service programs requiring a great deal of patience, fortitude, and luck. A rumor of an opening at one of the downtown single room occupancy hotels would create a rush of unhoused people who would wait outside in line for days for a chance at a room they could call their own.

Under the previous system, homeless service providers competed, both for limited funding and for rare available rooms for their clients. “Waiting lists before [coordinated entry] were often based on favors with property managers or the rental office,” Patricia McHugh, a coordinated entry matcher with Lamp Community, a Skid Row social service agency that works to house adults with mental illness and other disabilities, said. “People have really bad stories about how things were before, how corrupt.” At its worst, it was a system that rewarded the most functional people with housing that was not always an appropriate fit for their needs.

Coordinated entry is based on two philosophies that represent a paradigm shift in the provision of homeless services: prioritization and housing first. Prioritization builds on research by Dennis Culhane from the University of Pennsylvania, which differentiates between two different kinds of homelessness: crisis and chronic. Those facing crisis homelessness tend to be experiencing “short-term emergencies [such as] eviction, domestic violence, sudden illness, or job loss, or reentering communities after incarceration.”4 The crisis homeless, Culhane argues, often self-correct: after a short stay in a shelter, they identify family members they can stay with, access new resources, or move away. A small, time-limited investment can offer them “a hand up to avoid the downward spiral” into chronic homelessness.

Those experiencing chronic homelessness, on the other hand, tend to be homeless frequently and for longer stretches. Chronically homeless adults, according to Culhane’s research, “have higher rates of behavioral health problems and disabilities, and more complex social support needs.”5 For them, permanent supportive housing is an appropriate and effective solution. The shift to prioritization in Los Angeles acknowledged that the status quo was not serving the chronic homeless. There was a mismatch between needs and resources: the crisis homeless got resources most appropriate for the chronically homeless; the chronically homeless got nothing at all.

The other conceptual shift in coordinated entry is its housing first philosophy. Until very recently, most homeless services operated on a “housing readiness” model that moved individuals through different program steps before they could be housed. Someone who had been sleeping on the street or in their car might first enter an emergency shelter, then shift to a transitional housing program, and finally attain independent housing. At each stage, a set of behavioral requirements—sobriety, treatment compliance, employment—were gateways that controlled access to the next step. The housing first approach emerges instead from the understanding that it is difficult to attend to other challenges if you are not stably housed. Housing first puts individuals and families into their own apartments as quickly as possible, and then offers voluntary supportive and treatment services where appropriate.

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Home for Good, a collaboration between the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, combined prioritization, housing first, and technology-forward approaches to launch a coordinated entry program in 2013. They pledged to house 100 of the most vulnerable homeless people on Skid Row in 100 days. To achieve this ambitious goal, they needed to create a complete list of Skid Row’s unhoused, ranked in order of need. They chose an assessment tool that collects vast amounts of information and sifts it for risky behaviors, built a digital registry to store the data, and designed two algorithms to rank the unhoused in order of vulnerability and to match them to housing opportunities.

The coordinated entry process begins when a social service worker or volunteer engages an unhoused person through an in-house service program, during a shelter admission, or as part of street outreach using the VI-SPDAT (Vulnerability Index—Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool). The survey includes incredibly intimate questions, including:

• “In the past six months, how many times have you received health care at an emergency department/room? Used a crisis service, including sexual assault crisis, mental health crisis, family/intimate violence, distress centers and suicide prevention hotlines?”

• “Do you ever do things that may be considered to be risky like exchange sex for money, run drugs for someone, have unprotected sex with someone you don’t know, share a needle, or anything like that?”

• “Have you threatened to or tried to harm yourself or anyone else in the last year?”6

The survey also collects protected personal information: social security number, full name, birth date, demographic information, veteran status, immigration and residency status, and where the respondent can be found at different times of day. It collects domestic violence history. It collects a self-reported medical history that includes mental health and substance abuse issues. The surveyor will ask if it is OK to take a photograph.

The consent form that the unhoused are asked to sign before taking the VI-SPDAT informs them that their information will be shared with “organizations [that] may include homeless service providers, other social service organizations, housing groups, and health care providers,” and refers them to a fuller privacy notice that can be provided on request. If survey-takers request the more complete privacy notice, they learn that their information will be shared with 168 different organizations, including city governments, rescue missions, nonprofit housing developers, health-care providers, hospitals, religious organizations, addiction recovery centers, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) “when required by law or for law enforcement purposes … to prevent a serious threat to health or safety.” The consent is valid for seven years.

After assessment, their data is entered into a federally approved Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) for the Los Angeles area. The HMIS is not in itself a database: it is a set of universal data elements the federal government requires all organizations receiving homeless assistance funds to collect. There is no centralized federal registry of the homeless. But the information in HMIS, shorn of unique identifiers, is sent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, aggregated, and used to produce an unduplicated count of the country’s homeless, to facilitate trend analysis for the agency’s reports to Congress, and to evaluate homeless service organizations.

Once the data from the VI-SPDAT is entered into the Los Angeles HMIS, a ranking algorithm tallies up a score from 1 to 17. A “1” means the person surveyed is low risk and has a relatively small chance of dying or ending up in an emergency room or mental hospital. A “17” means the person surveyed is among the most vulnerable. Those scoring between 0 and 3 are judged to need no housing intervention. Those scoring between 4 and 7 qualify to be assessed for limited-term rental subsidies and some case management services—an intervention strategy called rapid re-housing. Those scoring 8 and above qualify to be assessed for permanent supportive housing.

Simultaneously, housing providers fill out vacancy forms to populate a list of available units. A second algorithm, the matching algorithm, is run to identify a person “who is in greatest need of that particular housing type (by virtue of their VI-SPDAT score)” and who “meets its specific eligibility criteria.”

If a successful match is made, the unhoused person is assigned a housing navigator, a special caseworker who helps gather all necessary eligibility documentation. A birth certificate, photo ID, social security card, income verification, and other documents must be collected in about three weeks. Once documents are in hand, the unhoused person fills out an application with the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA). HACLA then interviews the potential tenant, verifies their information and documentation, and approves or denies the application. If the application is approved, the unhoused person receives housing or related resources. If not, the match disappears and the algorithm is run again to produce a new applicant for the opportunity.

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According to the system’s designers and funders, coordinated entry upends the status quo in homeless services that privileged stronger clients. It builds new, deeper bonds between service providers throughout Los Angeles, leading to increased communication and resource sharing. It provides sophisticated, timely data about the nature of the housing crisis that can be used to shape more responsive policy-making. But most crucially, by matching homeless people to appropriate housing, it has the potential to save the lives of thousands of people. One of those people is Monique Talley.

I met Monique, a round-faced, freckled African American woman, at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), a nearly 40-year-old organization dedicated to addressing the needs of poor and unhoused women. The DWC opened a facility on South San Pedro Street in 2010 with 71 permanent supportive housing units, a store that sells crafts produced by women from the center, a health clinic, and a variety of other services for women in the Skid Row community. The DWC goes to great lengths to make the building feel like home—there are cabinets that hold pottery, vases, and teapots, and blond wood benches where 75 or so women sat drinking coffee and talking on the day of my visit. There are showers and an open cafeteria-style kitchen. There is a box of neatly folded toilet paper for visitors to take before they go back to the tent encampments.

Monique had a history of unstable housing before ending up in a shelter. She bounced from place to place, helping a niece run a small daycare center and caring for an elderly family member before she found Pathways, a 430-bed shelter in a light-industry district of South Los Angeles. When Pathways turned her out of the shelter early every morning, Monique took the bus to the DWC for support, company, and sanctuary.

Monique faced enormous challenges: maintaining sobriety, being separated from her children, and dealing with mental and physical health issues that grew more severe the longer she lacked housing. But she was fortunate to have a strong support system. Her boyfriend and his mother welcomed her into their home most weekends, and she was able to wash her clothes, take her time in the bath, eat a family meal, watch some TV. “Just do what normal people do,” she remembers, “have some normalcy in my life.”

A DWC caseworker approached Monique one day to ask if she wanted to take the VI-SPDAT survey and be entered into the coordinated entry system. The survey was a challenge, Monique remembers, “Because it was like I was talking to my therapist.” But Tracy Malbrough, a trusted ally and case manager at DWC, advised her to “just answer with all the honesty and pureness that your heart can offer,” Monique remembers. “So I was honest.”

“I would prefer to do [the VI-SPDAT] with somebody that I trust,” she says, laughing and sorting through her monkey-shaped backpack. “But I would have done it with a stranger if I had to do that to get housed.… If it was to get me a roof over my head, I will talk to you, and tell you the truth, and tell you what you want to hear.”

Malbrough called Monique one brisk day in December and asked her to come to the corner of South San Pedro Street and 5th. There, Monique got keys to an apartment in the Gateways Apartments, a $28 million permanent supportive housing complex built by SRO Housing Corporation. The nonprofit low-income housing developer had turned to the coordinated entry program to streamline the waitlist of more than 500 individuals competing for 107 units, and coordinated entry prioritized Monique. “It was December 17, 2013,” she says, “It was the best Christmas gift I ever got; I got a home.”

Her new apartment was a 350-square-foot studio with a closet, a kitchen, and her own bathroom. “I opened the door, I stood in the middle of the floor, and I cried,” she says. “I thank God first because he made it all possible. I thank the Downtown Women’s Center because they assisted God to get me off the streets.”

Monique is still not sure why coordinated entry prioritized her for housing. No one ever shared her VI-SPDAT score with her. “They never did explain to me how it worked,” she says, thoughtfully touching a twisted brass hoop earring. After I tell her that the VI-SPDAT prioritizes the most vulnerable homeless people using a 1 to 17 scale, she guesses that she might have scored a 10. Her mental and physical health were fairly stable until just a few months before she got into the Gateways, though she had gone off some of her meds. “I managed,” she says, “not to do anything stupid.”

As grateful as she is, it bothers Monique a little that she got housed while so many others at the DWC, who seemed to be in a similar situation, did not. “I know a lot of women who did the CES,” she reflects, “and almost three years later, they haven’t been housed. I thought it was kind of odd.… They went through the same shit that I did, and three years later they’re not housed. In the back of my mind it’s like … something’s wrong with that picture.”

In the end, she attributes her housing success to her faith in God, her honesty and openness, and to luck. She is profoundly grateful and is working hard to be a stable presence in her children’s lives. “I think things work out where they’re supposed to be,” she says. “I’m glad they worked out in my favor because if they didn’t, I’d probably still be in a shelter or in the psycho ward.… You get tired of being mentally, physically, and emotionally beat the hell down.… There’s three ways to go if you don’t get housed: jail, institutions, or death. I would not want to send my momma through that pain.”

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“Uncle” Gary Boatwright has had less luck with coordinated entry. At 64, he’s been on and off the street for ten years. On a blindingly bright day in May 2016, he is living in a gray and green tent on East 6th Street on the edge of Skid Row. There is a blue tarp over the top as extra rain protection and two shopping carts rolled up to protect the entrance. As I approach, calling out his name in lieu of a door to knock on, he is sweeping out the tent in preparation for my visit. He props the entrance open with a broom handle and offers me a folding chair (which I take) and a bottle of water (which I don’t, because bottled water is a prime commodity on Skid Row).

His tent is immaculate. There are crates with OxyClean, laundry detergent, and a bottle of bleach. Science fiction novels, a copy of It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, and a copy of the progressive magazine In These Times sit on his air mattress. He’s trying to stay healthy, so he’s switched to diet drinks, and there are maybe a half-dozen two-liter bottles scattered around: diet cranberry, Mountain Dew, Gatorade. Some sport a black-marker “X” on their twist top: they might contain rum or act as makeshift midnight latrines.

Gary is a straight-talking, wryly funny man with thinning white hair and Santa Claus–blue eyes. He smokes Pall Malls and shuffles through his meticulous paperwork, stored in clear Rubbermaid containers in his tent, while we talk. He has had a dozen careers: welder, mason, paralegal, door-to-door salesman, law student, and, most recently, document processor for a wholesale mortgage lender. He was laid off by his employer, GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, in the early 2000s, shortly before the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. “I stayed there longer than anybody else—there was a lot of turnover. I was pretty much in charge of outsourcing my whole department,” he says. “They found a place in India that would do the doc processing and email it across the planet.” GreenPoint went on to make the Center for Public Integrity’s “Subprime 25” list for their key role in causing the recession of 2007 and their intentional targeting of minority communities with predatory mortgage products.

Immediately after Gary was laid off, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He had planned a vacation in New Orleans, so he canceled his flight and hotel reservations, and hooked up with a caravan that was traveling to Covington, Louisiana, to help with relief efforts. In the tiny city at the fork of the Bogue Falaya and Tchefuncte Rivers, Gary slept out in the makeshift “Camp Covington” while he helped the city rebuild. “It’s still the best vacation I’ve ever had,” he says.

When he returned to Orange County, he applied for unemployment and went back on the job market. He has a bachelor’s degree and lots of experience with wholesale mortgages, but by that time the industry was collapsing. His housing in a sober living community near Disneyland became precarious when an unemployment check failed to arrive on time and he started “bumping heads with the housing manager.” Before he lost his job, he had purchased a late-model used car. “I paid sixty-five hundred dollars cash for that car,” he says. “It had low mileage, I kept it in good shape. That was my piggy bank. So I’m getting down to the last month for unemployment, thinking, ‘No big deal.’ Worst comes to worst, I can sell that, buy a thousand-dollar junker, and I’ve got a cushion. I was planning ahead. Doing what you’re supposed to do.”

Then, he got a ticket for leaving his vehicle in a public park—a charge Gary insists was unjustified and later challenged in court—and his car was towed and impounded. He couldn’t afford to get it out of impound, and he couldn’t sell it to free up some cash. “Basically,” Gary says, “a cop stole my piggy bank.”

He got kicked out of the sober living home when his unemployment ran out; he could no longer pay his rent. Homeless now, he headed to Santa Ana, where many of Orange County’s social service agencies are concentrated. But Santa Ana was also the center of a police crackdown on unhoused people. A 1992 ordinance made camping in parks illegal. Police Chief Paul M. Walters was widely criticized for instigating weekly homeless “roundups” that corralled and ticketed unhoused people in what he characterized as an effort to “fight crime before it happens.”

Gary started having regular run-ins with law enforcement. In five years, he racked up 25 separate tickets for crimes associated with homelessness: unlawfully entering or remaining in a park, failure to leave land as ordered by a peace officer, storage of personal property in public places, jaywalking, littering, and unauthorized removal of a shopping cart, among others.

Gary was facing jail time when a judge in Orange County Superior Court offered him a deal. He’d make all the tickets go away if Gary would leave Orange County and never come back. Gary took the deal and moved to Skid Row, 32 miles north.

Since moving to Skid Row, Gary has filled out the VI-SPDAT three times, and he’s lost patience with the process. His first time, in April 2015, he took an hour-long bus ride to the office of the Volunteers of America on Lankershim Boulevard, 17 miles away. He tried to arrive by 5 or 6 a.m. so he could get in line before the doors opened at 8. He met with CES Navigator Dylan Wilde from L.A. Family Housing and took the survey. Wilde got him an appointment with Alpha Property Management, a private firm that oversees hundreds of low-income apartment units in California.

But the visit was a bust. No one told Gary that he would have to have a three-to-five-year verifiable rental history and a good credit history in order to qualify for their waiting list. “How is that all relevant to getting housing for the homeless?” he asks me, his voice rising. Gary also refused to go out of pocket to pay for a copy of his birth certificate, which Alpha Property Management required to qualify for their waitlist. “I played this game way too long to go out of pocket and spend my money to not get housing. I think [Wilde] was fairly new, a new hire. He was a young fellow. I don’t think he realized what he was getting into. I tried to contact him for a follow-up, but he disappeared.”

Gary took the VI-SPDAT the second time with a representative from Housing for Health, a division of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services focused on creating housing opportunities for those with “complex medical and behavioral health conditions.” A caseworker asked for access to his mental health history, so Gary signed a consent form to release his psychiatric records from Orange County. “I did the survey, but I didn’t have my social [security card] with me, so I went back up to the office and we worked on that. He knows where I’m at, but I haven’t heard back.”

The third time Gary took the VI-SPDAT, the police and the Bureau of Sanitation were on East 6th Avenue, where he had pitched his tent. A street outreach worker was with them, George Thomas from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) Emergency Response Team. When Gary told him he had already taken the VI-SPDAT several times, Thomas responded that he could do the survey better than Housing for Health or L.A. Family Housing. “He said, ‘Oh, no. I do it better than them,’” Gary recalls. “According to him, he had some way of cutting through the red tape. He was working with the police, talking to people about housing.” Gary called at the time they had arranged for an appointment and left a message. Thomas called back and left a response on his cell phone, but spoke so quickly that Gary couldn’t understand him. He returned the call, asking for clarification. He never heard back.

Gary doesn’t think he scored very high on the VI-SPDAT. He’s 64 and, other than a little high blood pressure and a hearing problem, mostly healthy. Though he’s known by some as Commander Kush and keeps rum in a Mountain Dew bottle in his tent, his substance use doesn’t seem abusive or debilitating. He’s not sure what’s in his mental health files from Orange County; no one has ever shared his diagnosis with him. In fact, it was a surprise when a judge for a hearing on his Santa Ana tickets said he had a psychiatric record.

He suspects that he is seen as difficult by caseworkers in the neighborhood. “I make it clear that bedbug amenities are unacceptable,” he explains. “I learned to cope with them for a short period of time. But tenants cannot get rid of them. It’s a landlord’s job. And they don’t do it.” He was unable to take a place in a Salvation Army emergency shelter because he refused to give up his cell phone. “I need a telephone to get into the Salvation Army and then they want me to give it up? No.” Fundamentally, Gary finds trading his self-determination and adult decision-making for access to a roof unacceptable. “I don’t need a nanny,” he says. “Don’t tell me where to go and what to do and how to live my life. Any reasonable mature adult can’t handle that. Nobody wants a nanny with their head up your ass.” What is keeping him from housing, he guesses, is his “inability to bow down.” “I’ve still got my personal integrity,” he says. “And that’s not for sale.”

*   *   *

Skid Row has been ground zero for coordinated entry efforts in Los Angeles, and for good reason. Downtown Los Angeles has the largest number of homeless individuals—15,393 in 2017—and the most concentrated unhoused population. But just a few miles away lies a neighborhood with a nearly equal level of homelessness but far less attention: South Los Angeles. Coordinated entry is a very different experience for those who struggle with homelessness here in the shadow of the policy klieg light that shines downtown.

South Los Angeles is a 50-square mile area that drops below Highway 10, hugging midcity LA. It used to be known as South Central, but in 2003 the area was rebranded by the city council. Some say the current proliferation of “Sell your house for CA$H” signs and the expansion of the Expo and Crenshaw light-rail lines presage a wave of gentrification to come.

Taking the bus from Skid Row to South LA, I am reversing Monique Talley’s daily commute from the Pathways shelter to the DWC. The two neighborhoods have a deeply entwined history. Alameda Street runs like an aorta from Union Station through downtown, along the eastern edge of Skid Row, under the freeway, and then south through Vernon, Watts, and eventually into Compton. The Alameda corridor was home to Los Angeles’ defense and auto industries, which grew explosively after World War II.

The street also outlines one of Los Angeles’ firmest racial boundaries. Before the Supreme Court found racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional in 1948, 80 percent of property in Los Angeles carried covenants barring Black families. To the east of Alameda Street were working-class white suburbs. To the west were South Central and Watts, two of the few areas where African American families were able to live.

After a period of rapid postwar economic advancement in South LA, declines in military spending and auto plant closures resulted in a stubborn unemployment rate of 14 percent, the highest in Los Angeles County. The neighborhood is home to the two largest public housing complexes in Los Angeles: Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs. Nevertheless, it has the most crowded housing in the United States.

Many working-age Black men in South LA who lost their jobs during the 1980s deindustrialization found their way to Skid Row. In the last decade, the trend has reversed. The rise in aggressive policing and gentrification pressures downtown have pushed many unhoused people into South LA. But the area has meager resources with which to respond. It has less than half as many shelter beds and one-seventh the number of permanent supportive housing beds as downtown. Yet, according to a 2008 report by Services for Groups, downtown and Skid Row received $1,132 in grants per homeless person per year while South LA received only $607.

The rise in local homelessness, influx of unhoused people from other neighborhoods, and extraordinarily limited resources in South LA have resulted in the creation of a massive open-air tent city. According to the 2017 homeless count for greater Los Angeles, 75 percent of the homeless in South LA are completely unsheltered. While 2,364 unhoused people find shelter beds or permanent supportive housing, another 6,879 live in the makeshift shelters that have become South LA’s de facto source of low-income housing. Seventy percent of them are Black.

*   *   *

Quanetha Hunt is the former director of homeless services at Pathways to Home, the largest supplier of emergency shelter in South LA. The day I visit, in February 2016, her office is adorned with posters of civil rights figures and religious sayings and smells like vanilla. Her calendar proclaims, “My trust is not in money or things, my trust is in the Lord.” But Hunt, born and raised in South LA, has a markedly secular way about her, and a nearly wicked sense of humor. She sports tall black leather boots and a perfect coral manicure. Tucked beneath the edge of her computer monitor is a tiny sign on a polka-dotted background which reads, “Fuck it: My new personal motto.”

“South LA is like every other community,” she says. “You have low-income, poverty, middle class, your very affluent. West over Crenshaw, that is Leimert Park: a middle-class African American community, homeowners. If you go further, you’re in Windsor Hills, which is affluent. Southeast, you get to poverty-stricken areas. But we’re all community. On my street, we all know each other. The people in South LA have the same desires: a decent meal, a roof over their head, their kids getting a quality education. South LA is very family oriented. My grandmother saw five generations here.”

Surrounded by flatlands and low warehouses full of stitching garment workers, the shelter has a dramatic view of downtown, floating like a jeweled island three miles north. Pathways to Home is trying to bridge the gap between South LA’s housing crisis and its thoroughly inadequate resources, offering beds to approximately 315 men and 115 women nightly. It is a low, large, beige building packed wall-to-wall with bunk beds with about two hand-spans of space between them. Despite the staff’s attempts to make everyone feel welcome and to preserve clients’ dignity, it feels like what it is: a warehouse for people.

Pathways follows a harm reduction, housing first philosophy, case manager Richard Renteria explains as he gives me a tour. This means that Pathways staff will do everything in their power to keep someone sheltered once they’re in the door. If you’re drunk, they’ll get you a meal and put you to bed. If you’re belligerent, they’ll put you outside on the patio to cool off. They’ll take “290s,” sex offenders who have been released from prison and have nowhere else to go. Only those who persist in trying to start fights are put out to fend for themselves.

Renteria and other employees make sure to greet visitors warmly, to make eye contact, to engage. “Everybody has a story,” he says, “Every single person has a different story with their own obstacles, goals, and dreams.” But the shelter has only so much space, and the blocks nearby are strewn with mini-encampments: tents sit under the trees at the corner of Broadway and West 38th, and another handful, with sad irony, can be found on the corner of Broadway and Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard.

Pathways is officially a 90-day shelter, but getting people housed in three months is nearly impossible. There is “zero inventory of housing” in the area, says Hunt. Affordable housing is particularly difficult to find, she remarks, “And fair market value? Our population can’t afford it.” William Menjivar, Pathway’s coordinated entry specialist, agrees. “We can’t match a person to a unit here,” he says. “There are no units accessible through CES to put somebody in.”

Using coordinated entry in South LA is less like finding a date online and more like running an obstacle course. The first hurdle is the VI-SPDAT survey itself. Staff at Pathways regularly see clients who have been assessed elsewhere and scored very low. After spending some time getting to know case managers at Pathways, many open up more freely. One client Menjivar recalls was surveyed at another social service organization, and scored a 1 out of 17. He arrived at Pathways, was reassessed, and scored a 16. “I agree with data,” says Hunt, “but data is only as good as the collector.”

Pathways focuses on listening, using story-work to build trust. “Unless you have that human touch,” says Renteria, “you can’t truly assess where they’re at. We have to gain their trust first in order to get them to open up.” But in South LA, a high VI-SPDAT score is a catch-22. There is very little permanent supportive housing in the area, so Pathways clients have to go through a second interview with the housing authority to determine if they are able to live independently in private housing. A high VI-SPDAT score might qualify a Pathways client for a Section 8 voucher. But it can also be an indicator that he is too vulnerable to live on his own.

“The housing authority can be very, very tricky,” says Menjivar. If a Pathways client scores a 16 on the VI-SPDAT, Menjivar explains, he should qualify for a shelter plus care voucher providing both rental assistance and supportive social services. “But then the housing authority says, ‘You’re not really capable of living independently. Go and get something from a doctor or psychiatrist letting us know that you won’t put some water to boil and burn down the building.’ It seems that the housing authority wants to interview you out of services,” he says, “whereas I’ve interviewed you into services.” So Pathways caseworkers counsel their clients to treat the interview at the housing authority like a court proceeding, to behave as if they are on trial. “We don’t want to prime our clients, but we tell them, ‘You answer what’s being asked; don’t divulge any additional information.’”

If case managers and clients successfully navigate the rocky shoals of the VI-SPDAT and the housing authority interview, they attain a coveted Section 8 voucher. But the voucher program relies on the private real estate market instead of permanent supportive housing like that built by nonprofits in Skid Row. Real estate capitalism, an ever-tightening rental market, and landlord bias are the last hurdles in the South LA coordinated entry obstacle course. There is no guarantee that Pathways clients will find housing from a private landlord, even with a Section 8 voucher in hand.

When Pathways staff take “vulnerable clients, who barely function day to day” to look for housing, says Renteria, “landlords will see the person, see the way they look, and assume the worst.” Section 8 vouchers expire after six months, and the process starts all over again. “Clients are out there looking. They are getting frustrated,” Renteria says, sighing. “A lot of clients just walk away.” The units are not turning over nearly quickly enough to address need. “If [we] fill a unit,” concludes Menjivar, “by the time that person decides to move, finds a job and lives independently, passes away or is evicted, we’ve already assessed another thousand people.”

Those who can complete the VI-SPDAT, succeed in their HACLA interview, get their Section 8 voucher, and keep up a lengthy and taxing search may finally find housing through gumption, shoe leather, and a lot of support. But for many unhoused people, the unfulfilled promise of coordinated entry has been demoralizing. “We started to discover within the first three months that people were getting upset when we started to try to re-engage them,” says Veronica Lewis of the Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System (HOPICS), also in South LA. “Like, ‘Where’s the housing?’ There was a period of time, a lull of people being unresponsive to us. People were upset because—you come out here, you’ve been collecting information, what is the outcome?”

Their cynicism is not unwarranted. It is not the first time the homeless have been offered a magic-bullet solution to the seemingly intractable housing crisis in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of services out there where they will meet with you, ask you all of these questions, promise you something, and never come back,” says Richard Renteria. “So, they got all this information to create this database, talk about how many thousands of people are homeless, [but] never come back to serve them.”

*   *   *

For Monique Talley, coordinated entry was a gift from God. The system functions well, for some, if there is housing available. When Monique took the VI-SPDAT, the new Gateways Apartments complex was just about to open. Her name was chosen from among 500 applicants and her life changed for the better.

But in the absence of sufficient public investment in building or repurposing housing, coordinated entry is a system for managing homelessness, not solving it. At Lamp Community, Hazel Lopez spent most of 2015 encouraging her staff not to oversell the system. “It’s definitely about managing expectations,” she said. “When CES first started, people had this interpretation that [if] you put your person in, [they’re] going to get matched to housing opportunities. Over time we’ve had to continuously create a message: We’re not working with additional resources; we’re just trying to target and utilize resources in a more efficient manner.”

“Without increasing resources, we don’t solve homelessness,” said Molly Rysman, housing and homelessness deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl. “There is this pressure to stretch every dollar as far as you can, to make sure that you’re being as absolutely efficient and effective as possible. Coordinated entry has made us much more efficient. But there’s no chance of ending homelessness without resources.” Chris Ko, architect of coordinated entry, agreed. “Coordinated entry is necessary but not sufficient,” he said. “It’s a tool to more efficiently use the resources fed into it. But we need permanent sources of subsidy.”

*   *   *

In June 2015 Ko told me that he hoped that coordinated entry could provide more precise information about the county’s housing crisis and contribute to progressive policy change. “For housing advocacy, we’ve never had such clear data on supply and demand,” he said. “It can identify what kind of housing is needed by what kind of populations.” By May 2017, it was beginning to look like his optimism and the community’s hard work would pay off.

The current mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, released the most comprehensive homeless strategy in the city’s history in January 2016. It provides significant support for coordinated entry. It promotes rapid re-housing programs for those on the edge of homelessness, providing small amounts of money for expenses like deposits, rental assistance, moving costs, and case management. It supports converting existing commercial structures into short-term bridge housing and provides incentives to encourage landlords to accept Section 8 housing vouchers.

More recently, Los Angeles voters passed two ballot measures that provide increased funding for low-income housing and homeless services. Measure HHH authorized the city to issue $1.2 billion in bonds to buy, build, or remodel 13,000 units of housing, mental health–care facilities, medical clinics, and other services for the unhoused. It passed with an impressive 77 percent of the vote in November 2016. A second measure, Measure H, authorized a ten-year 0.25 percent county sales tax increase to fund homeless services and prevention. Measure H passed with 69 percent of the vote in March 2017.

Ko suggested that coordinated entry played a modest but important role in these unprecedented policy changes. The data collected by the system helped inform a preliminary budget gap analysis provided to the mayor’s office by Home for Good. They used coordinated entry data to “dial in the ratios” of what kind of housing is needed: about 10,000 units of permanent supportive housing, plus new transitional housing beds and additional resources for rapid re-housing. Ko encouraged local coordinated entry partners to create “a dream budget” that included both housing and human resources—new units, but also caseworkers “to actually walk beside each person on their way home.” They “spitballed” the cost of staffing at about $100 million. “It was something I did over the weekend,” Ko said. “And somehow it got passed along to the mayor’s office because that [number] popped up in a statement about what we need.” The regional networks that grew out of the design and implementation of the coordinated entry system also helped solidify community support to pass Measures H and HHH.

But Ko believes that the measures really passed because of the sheer scale and visibility of the housing crisis in Los Angeles. Two court cases—Jones v. City of Los Angeles in 2006 and Lavan v. City of Los Angeles in 2012—reestablished unhoused people’s right to life, liberty, and property. Los Angeles has one of the most restrictive antihomeless ordinances in the country, Los Angeles Municipal Code 41.18(d), which threatens six months’ imprisonment and a fine for sleeping or sitting on the sidewalk. In Jones, the court declared that the sitting and sleeping ban, in the absence of available shelter beds, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment: it criminalizes the unhoused rather than confronting homelessness. The court required that the LAPD issue a policy directive stating that it would not enforce 41.18(d) between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. until an additional 1,250 units of permanent supportive housing are constructed in the city of Los Angeles.

Until 2012 the LAPD also regularly confiscated and destroyed tents, tarps, sleeping bags, shopping carts, and other property of the unhoused without prior notice. Before the Lavan case, it was common for Skid Row residents to talk with a caseworker, shower, or grab a meal and return to find all their worldly possessions gone. The Lavan ruling barred city employees from seizing property unless it presents a threat to the public or is evidence of a crime, and required that any property collected as “abandoned” be held in a secure location for 90 days before it is destroyed. Lavan and Jones found that the Eighth, Fourth, and Fourteenth amendments apply to the unhoused as well as the housed, and that the government cannot arbitrarily imprison the homeless, invade their privacy, or seize their property.

These two rulings, in re-affirming the rights of the unhoused and suspending the most common practices used to harass and arrest them, virtually guaranteed the growth of semi-permanent tent encampments across the city. Measures H and HHH passed now, Ko believes, because Jones and Lavan “exploded the visibility of homelessness.”

Ko pointed out that coordinated entry allowed members of the CES network to arrive at city council and board of supervisors meetings with impeccable regional numbers showing exactly what kinds of resources were needed in each community. But the real driver behind Angelenos’ decision to take collective responsibility for the housing crisis was not better data. It was the spread of tent cities.

*   *   *

According to the LAHSA’s 2017 homeless count, there are 57,794 unhoused people in Los Angeles County. Since 2014, the homeless services community has managed to survey 31,124 individuals with the VI-SPDAT, somewhere between 35 and 50 percent, assuming that many people cycled between homelessness and housing in the intervening three years. Of those, coordinated entry has managed to connect 9,627 people with housing or housing-related resources. Ko estimates that coordinated entry has cost approximately $11 million so far, if you include only the cost of technical resources, software, and extra personnel, not the cost of providing actual housing or services. CES eased the way to some kind of housing resource for 17 percent of the overall homeless population at a cost of approximately $1,140 per person. It is easy to argue that this is money well spent.

While the unhoused population of Los Angeles waits for Measure HHH’s low-income housing units to be built, $10 million in emergency relief from the mayor has been earmarked for rapid re-housing. Rapid re-housing helps homeless individuals and families exit shelters and get into permanent housing quickly by providing financial assistance for housing-related expenses such as back rent payments and moving costs. A 2015 report by the Urban Institute found that rapid re-housing helps families exit homeless shelters quickly. But it also suggests that the subsidies may be too small and too time-limited—lasting six months to two years—to create permanent change. “Rapid re-housing, does not … solve long-term housing affordability problems,” wrote the report’s authors, Mary Cunningham, Sarah Gillespie, and Jacqueline Anderson. “After families exit rapid re-housing, they experience high rates of residential instability.”7

Home for Good counts both permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing as a “match” in the coordinated entry system. Chris Ko told me via email in May 2017 that they do not differentiate between these two vastly different kinds of interventions in their data. And while Ko estimates that 80 to 90 percent of those matched stay in their new housing, Home for Good would not release any retention data. “Retention is always an afterthought,” said Hazel Lopez from Lamp Community in 2015. “There really is no mechanism to follow up.” So it is impossible to know how many of the 9,627 people matched by coordinated entry received a place to call home, how many received assistance finding an apartment or a few hundred dollars to help with a rental deposit, and how many received assistance but since became homeless again.

Rapid re-housing is aimed at the crisis homeless. Coordinated entry in Los Angeles, which initially focused on getting the most vulnerable unhoused people into permanent supportive housing, now aims to match the newly homeless with short-term support. That leaves those in the middle—too healthy to qualify for a rare unit of permanent supportive housing but out on the street far too long to make a major change with the limited resources of rapid re-housing—out in the cold.

For Gary Boatwright and tens of thousands of others who have not been matched with any services, coordinated entry seems to collect increasingly sensitive, intrusive data to track their movements and behavior, but doesn’t offer anything in return. When I asked T.C. Alexander about his experience with coordinated entry, he scoffed, “Coordinated entry system? The system that’s supposed to be helping the homeless? It’s halting the homeless. You put all the homeless people in the system, but they have nowhere for them to go. Entry into the system but with no action.”

*   *   *

Some suspect that all that data is being held for other purposes entirely: to surveil and criminalize the unhoused. As of this writing, the protected personal information of 21,500 of Los Angeles’ most vulnerable people remains in a database that may never connect them with life-saving services. It is possible to revoke your consent to be included in coordinated entry and HMIS, but the process is complicated. Even after expungement, some data stays in the system. No one I spoke to during my reporting, not even those who had been successfully housed, had requested that their coordinated entry record be expunged.

In the pilot phase of coordinated entry, there were more rigorous procedures for protecting personal data and providing alternate routes to resources. The original database, kept in an enormous Google spreadsheet, used a unique client identifier rather than a social security number to protect respondents’ confidentiality. A certain percentage of services were set aside for those who did not want to go through the coordinated entry process, for whatever reason: perhaps the VI-SPDAT questions were too intrusive, or the individual was fleeing intimate violence and wanted to remain anonymous. Protecting the identities of the unhoused was the pilot system’s default.

But then coordinated entry migrated to HMIS, which requires social security numbers. In theory, it is still possible to access resources while refusing to supply protected personal information, but the United Way concedes that they are “not sure how many people use this option.” It is hard to imagine that many unhoused people compromise their chances at housing by refusing to supply a social security number. Protected personal information is now collected by default; the system requires the unhoused to “opt in” to confidentiality.

The coordinated entry system now serves as the primary passage point for all homeless services in Los Angeles. “It is now formally the service delivery system for the city and the county,” Chris Ko told me in 2017. In other words, there is virtually no other path to homeless services in Los Angeles County except through coordinated entry.

According to federal data standards, service providers may disclose protected personal information in HMIS to law enforcement “in response to … [an] oral request for the purpose of identifying or locating a suspect, fugitive, material witness or missing person.”8 The information that the LAPD can access is limited to name, address, date and place of birth, social security number, and distinguishing physical characteristics. But there is no mandatory review or approval process for oral requests. There is no requirement that the information released be limited in scope or specific to an ongoing case. There is no warrant process, no departmental oversight, no judge involved to make sure the request is constitutional. Writing about lax data protection in HMIS, legal scholar J. C. O’Brien concludes, “This relaxed standard for disclosures based upon oral requests serves no purpose other than to make information more easily accessible to law enforcement.”9

There is a long history of social services and the police collaborating to criminalize the poor in the United States. The most direct parallel is Operation Talon, a joint effort of the Office of Inspector General and local welfare offices that mined food stamp data to identify those with outstanding warrants, and then lured them to appointments regarding their benefits. When targeted recipients arrived at the welfare office, they were arrested.

According to Kaaryn Gustafson’s 2009 article “The Criminalization of Poverty,” before the 1996 welfare reforms, public assistance records were only available to law enforcement through legal channels. But today, she writes, “Welfare records are available to law enforcement officers simply upon request—without probable cause, suspicion, or judicial process of any kind.”10 Operation Talon and other initiatives like it use administrative data to turn social service offices into extensions of the criminal justice system.

In the absence of strong data protection rules, it seems likely that coordinated entry’s electronic registry of the unhoused will be used for similar purposes. Outstanding warrants for status crimes provide justification for dragnet searches. Mobile and integrated administrative data can turn any street corner, any tent encampment, or any service provider into a site for a sting operation.

*   *   *

This kind of blanket access to deeply personal information makes little sense outside of a system that equates poverty and homelessness with criminality. As a point of contrast, it is difficult to imagine those receiving federal dollars through mortgage tax deductions or federally subsidized student loans undergoing such thorough scrutiny, or having their personal information available for access by law enforcement without a warrant. Moreover, the pattern of increased data collection, sharing, and surveillance reinforces the criminalization of the unhoused, if only because so many of the basic conditions of being homeless—having nowhere to sleep, nowhere to put your stuff, and nowhere to go to the bathroom—are also officially crimes. If sleeping in a public park, leaving your possessions on the sidewalk, or urinating in a stairwell are met with a ticket, the great majority of the unhoused have no way to pay resulting fines. The tickets turn into warrants, and then law enforcement has further reason to search the databases to find “fugitives.” Thus, data collection, storage, and sharing in homeless service programs are often starting points in a process that criminalizes the poor.

The great majority of unhoused people in Los Angeles exist somewhere between the categories of chronic and crisis homelessness. Coordinated entry follows the resources: permanent supportive housing on one side of the spectrum and rapid re-housing on the other. Barring a financial intervention that is an order of magnitude larger than Measures H and HHH, coordinated entry will fail the tens of thousands of unhoused who fall somewhere in the middle.

Some have been incarcerated, or have drug or alcohol problems. Some are unable to find jobs that sustain the basic material requirements of living; others have been traumatized by violence and abuse. All who go unsheltered face severe and ongoing stresses that can lead to disability. “A lot of people like me, who are somewhat higher functioning, are not getting housing,” said Gary Boatwright. “[Coordinated entry] is another way of kicking the can down the road.”

*   *   *

Before the Jones and Lavan injunctions, Skid Row was one of the most policed neighborhoods in the world. William Bratton, the architect of the New York City Police Department’s CompStat (Computerized Statistics) program, became the LAPD chief in October 2002. In 2006, Bratton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa launched the Safer City Initiative (SCI), which earmarked $6 million annually to target status crimes associated with homelessness: sitting on the sidewalk, jaywalking, littering, camping, and panhandling.

According to urban sociologist Forrest Stuart, LAPD officers made roughly 9,000 arrests and issued 12,000 citations in the first year of the initiative, in an area with only 12,000 to 15,000 residents. An assessment of SCI by Skid Row social justice organization Los Angeles Community Action Network showed that more than half of the 200 Skid Row residents they surveyed—both housed and unhoused—had been arrested in a single year. A 2008 analysis showed that the Safer City Initiative produced no statistically significant drop in serious crime, except for a small decline in burglaries.11

I visited Skid Row’s police station—the Central Division—in January 2015 to talk with Senior Lead Officer Deon Joseph, who has worked for the LAPD for two decades, 18 of them on Skid Row. Officer Joseph is emblematic of the new approaches to community policing that attempt to reconnect police officers with the neighborhoods in which they work. He considers himself a homeless advocate and markets himself as an inspirational speaker. He started a Ladies’ Night program to provide Skid Row women with information about their legal rights and basic self-defense training. He is well known for passing out hygiene kits to the unhoused. He is genuinely beloved by many in the community.

In many neighborhoods, community policing is preferable to reactive, incident-driven law enforcement. But it also raises troubling questions. Community policing casts officers as social service or treatment professionals, roles for which they rarely have appropriate training. It pulls social service agencies into relationships with police that compromise their ability to serve the most marginalized people, who often have good reason to avoid law enforcement. Police presence at a social service organization is sufficient to turn away the most vulnerable unhoused, who might have outstanding warrants for status crime tickets associated with being homeless.

Officer Joseph attends coordinated entry meetings at Lamp Community, participates in street cleaning campaigns with the Health Department, and, he said, “shows these social service providers where the most chronically homeless are.” He sees community policing, integration into the community’s social service networks, and surveillance as mutually reinforcing. “I’ll go out, walk a foot beat, go right into the missions, into the courtyard where people are sleeping, tell them about what is happening in the area,” he said. “I’ll sit on the rooftops and watch the drug activity, so I can know who the ringleaders are. I’ll go and do consensual encounters to meet people, talk to them to gather information, if they are willing to give it to me.” The relationships he develops through community policing bring him intelligence: informants seek him out, the missions and other social service agencies share their surveillance camera footage. He believes in community policing, he says, because “it helps me solve crimes. It helps me improve the quality of life. It helps me get cooperation from individuals that normally wouldn’t cooperate with the police.”

Further integrating programs aimed at providing economic security and those focused on crime control threatens to turn routine survival strategies of those living in extreme poverty into crimes. The constant data collection from a vast array of high-tech tools wielded by homeless services, business improvement districts, and law enforcement create what Skid Row residents perceive as a net of constraint that influences their every decision. Daily, they feel encouraged to self-deport or self-imprison. Those living outdoors in encampments feel pressured to constantly be on the move. Those housed in SROs or permanent supportive housing feel equally intense pressure to stay inside and out of the public eye.

*   *   *

The experience of General Dogon, human rights defender with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, is emblematic. After spending 90 days on the street, he finally found housing in the Sanborn, an SRO. After being in the building for a few days, he went outside to smoke a cigarette. A private security guard working for the Business Improvement District approached him on what looked like a police bicycle. He asked, “How long you going to be standing out here?” General Dogon replied, “Well, I don’t know.” The security guard asked, “Is someone coming by? Are you going to meet somebody? You can’t be just standing outside. You’re loitering.”

“I am?” Dogon asked. “I thought loitering was hanging out with criminal intent.” The security guard replied, “Well, yeah, technically. But we want to keep people moving. Can you walk and smoke?”

It got so bad, Dogon explained, that everyone who lived in his SRO hid inside the building all day. “People in my hotel, they are so scared and shook up, that one day they was drawing straws to see who’s going to make the store run,” he said. “Leaving the house was like going to Vietnam or something. You wasn’t sure you was gonna come back.”

The over-concentration of police in the Central District leads to more officers responding to calls, people being over-ticketed, and excessive use of force. Tickets turn into warrants and then arrests. Because Skid Row residents can’t afford bail, many of those arrested remain incarcerated waiting for their day in court. Charges for crimes associated with homelessness are often dismissed when cases come to trial, but in the meantime Skid Row residents might spend three or four months locked up. As a result, they lose their housing, their documents, their few possessions, and are passed over for social services. “It’s like the guy that’s homeless on this block is just being recycled,” said Dogon. “He’s got to do all that nonsense again.”

Key to the neighborhood’s survival was the strategic grassroots plan to “keep Skid Row scary.” In the face of gentrification and intensified surveillance and policing, that strategy is beginning to fail. With the creative class attempting to claim downtown Los Angeles, pressure to recuperate Skid Row for the wealthy means increased pressure to make its poor inhabitants manageable. Coordinated entry and other high-tech tools make the behavior of the unhoused more visible, trackable, and predictable. If this subtle discipline fails, Skid Row’s poor face incarceration.

*   *   *

The unhoused in Los Angeles are thus faced with a difficult trade-off: admitting risky, or even illegal, behavior on the VI-SPDAT can snag you a higher ranking on the priority list for permanent supportive housing. But it can also open you up to law enforcement scrutiny. Coordinated entry is not just a system for managing information or matching demand to supply. It is a surveillance system for sorting and criminalizing the poor.

To understand coordinated entry as a system of surveillance, it is crucial to differentiate between “old” and “new” surveillance.12 Older analog systems of surveillance required individualized attention: a small number of law enforcement or intelligence personnel would compile a dossier by identifying a target, tracking her, and recording her movements and activities. The targets of older forms of surveillance were often chosen because of their group membership: COINTELPRO (the COunter INTELligence PROgram of the FBI), for example, focused on civil rights activists for both their race and their political activism. But wiretaps, photography, tailing, and other techniques of old surveillance were individualized and focused. The target had to be identified before the watcher could surveil.

In contrast, in new data-based surveillance, the target often emerges from the data. The targeting comes after the data collection, not before. Massive amounts of information are collected on a wide variety of individuals and groups. Then, the data is mined, analyzed, and searched in order to identify possible targets for more thorough scrutiny. Sometimes this involves old-school, in-person watching and tracking. But increasingly, it only requires finer sifting of data that already exists. If the old surveillance was an eye in the sky, the new surveillance is a spider in a digital web, testing each connected strand for suspicious vibrations.

Surveillance is not only a means of watching or tracking, it is also a mechanism for social sorting. Coordinated entry collects data tied to individual behavior, assesses vulnerability, and assigns different interventions based on that valuation. “Coordinated entry is triage,” said Molly Rysman, the Housing and Homeless deputy for LA’s Third District. “All of us have thought about it like a natural disaster. We have extraordinary need and can’t meet all of that need at once. So you’ve got to figure out: How do we get folks who are going to bleed to death access to a doctor, and folks who have the flu to wait? It’s unfortunate to have to do that, but it is the reality of what we’re stuck with.”

In his prescient 1993 book, The Panoptic Sort, communication scholar Oscar Gandy of the University of Pennsylvania also suggests that automated sorting of digital personal information is a kind of triage. But he pushes further, pointing out that the term is derived from the French trier, which means to pick over, cull, or grade marketable produce. “Although some metaphors speak for themselves, let me be clear,” he writes. In digital triage, “individuals and groups of people are being sorted according to their presumed economic or political value. The poor, especially poor people of color, are increasingly being treated as broken material or damaged goods to be discarded.”13

If homelessness is inevitable—like a disease or a natural disaster—then it is perfectly reasonable to use triage-oriented solutions that prioritize unhoused people for a chance at limited housing resources. But if homelessness is a human tragedy created by policy decisions and professional middle-class apathy, coordinated entry allows us to distance ourselves from the human impacts of our choice to not act decisively. As a system of moral valuation, coordinated entry is a machine for producing rationalization, for helping us convince ourselves that only the most deserving people are getting help. Those judged “too risky” are coded for criminalization. Those who fall through the cracks face prisons, institutions, or death.

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Despite the successes of Measures H and HHH, the faith that faster, more accurate data will succeed in building the units Los Angeles needs may be naïve. Angelenos voted to pay a bit more in sales and property taxes in order to house the homeless. But will the housed let the homeless move into their neighborhoods?

Evidence suggests that building new low-income housing or repurposing older buildings to house the homeless will prove challenging. Two recent proposals to build storage units for the unhoused’s belongings erupted into community-wide protest. In fall 2016 a proposal to build a storage facility in the beachside community of Venice led to an acrimonious series of community meetings and a homeowner lawsuit to stop the project. A similar storage center planned for San Pedro was scuttled when the housed community organized to stop it. As the perception of increased resources for the homeless rises, the city’s fragile tolerance for homeless encampments may unravel. Shortly before voters committed to providing new resources to shelter the unhoused, the city council rewrote a municipal ordinance to reauthorize the kind of aggressive sweeps of tent encampments that were common before the Jones and Lavan rulings.

Like the public housing that was supposed to replace the boardinghouses and SRO hotels demolished during urban renewal in the 1950s, new affordable housing development may founder in the face of active obstruction by professional middle-class and wealthy Angelenos. The problem is not that the city lacks adequate data on what kind of housing is needed to address the homelessness problem. Rather, poor and working-class people and their allies may not be able to overcome explicit political resistance from organized elites.

The proponents of the coordinated entry system, like many who seek to harness computational power for social justice, tend to find affinity with systems engineering approaches to social problems. These perspectives assume that complex controversies can be solved by getting correct information where it needs to go as efficiently as possible. In this model, political conflict arises primarily from a lack of information. If we just gather all the facts, systems engineers assume, the correct answers to intractable policy problems like homelessness will be simple, uncontroversial, and widely shared.

But, for better or worse, this is not how politics work. Political contests are more than informational; they are about values, group membership, and balancing conflicting interests. The poor and working-class residents of Skid Row and South LA want affordable housing and available services. The Downtown Central Business Improvement District wants tourist-friendly streets. The new urban pioneers want both edgy grit and a Whole Foods. The city wants to clear the streets of encampments. While Los Angeles residents have agreed to pay a little more to address the problem, many don’t want unhoused people moving next door. And they don’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to really solve the housing crisis. These are deeply conflicting visions for the future of Los Angeles. Having more information won’t necessarily resolve them.

Systems engineering can help manage big, complex social problems. But it doesn’t build houses, and it may not prove sufficient to overcome deep-seated prejudice against the poor, especially poor people of color. “Algorithms are intrinsically stupid,” said public interest lawyer, homeless advocate, and emeritus professor of law at UCLA Gary Blasi. “You can’t build any algorithm that can handle as many variables, and levels of nuance, and complexity as human beings present.” While coordinated entry may minimize some of the implicit bias of individual homeless service providers, Blasi reflected, that doesn’t mean it is a good idea. “My objection to [coordinated entry] is that it has drawn resources and attention from other aspects of the problem. For 30 years, I’ve seen this notion, especially among well-educated people, that it’s just a question of information. Homeless people just don’t have the information.”

“Fraud is too strong a word,” said Blasi. “But homelessness is not a systems engineering problem. It’s a carpentry problem.”

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The last time I saw Gary Boatwright, in October 2016, he looked less healthy, wilder, and his mental health seemed to be deteriorating. He was furious with a street sweeper he believed had stolen possessions from his tent. Later that month, he was asked to remove himself from his tent site in front of the LA CAN offices on East 6th Street after conflicts with other community members. Because LA CAN has been such a staunch defender of the rights of the unhoused, the block in front of their building serves as a sanctuary space, where the LAPD refrains from ticketing and arresting the homeless for status crimes. Boatwright moved his tent to Spring Street. A few weeks later, on December 2, he was arrested.

When he called from Men’s Central Jail in January 2017, he told me that he had been charged with breaking the window of a bus with a plastic broom he bought at a 99 Cent Store. “Defying the laws of physics!” he asserted. “They showed up [to court] with a photograph of a bus with a broken window, and I suggested that the DA was withholding evidence that’s exculpatory. Next thing, they came at me with a deal. It’s impossible that they don’t have video. Public buses have at least a half-dozen video cameras, don’t they?” He was optimistic that he’d only spend a few months in jail before release. After his release in 2017, he faced all the struggles General Dogon described: he lost his tent, all of his possessions, his meticulously filed paperwork, and his social network. He had to start back at square one.

And the next time he takes the VI-SPDAT, he will likely score lower. The model counts prison as housing. The system will see him as less vulnerable, and his prioritization score will slip even lower. He’ll stay trapped, too vigorous for intervention and too marginal to make a go of it without support. “I’m a criminal,” he said, “just for existing on the face of the earth.”