July 21, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 29

Feature

Data glitches could cost homeless funding

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

Safe Harbors doesn’t add up

Sola Plumacher, the city’s manager of Safe Harbors, says the quality of the database’s reports has improved. The federal government awarded the city a $1 million bonus for the progress, though service providers say problems persist

Photo by: Joshua Huston , Contributing Photographer

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In a world driven by numbers, it’s no surprise that the federal government will soon require homeless shelters to use one central database to file their annual reports on how many people they served in a year and what their characteristics and problems were. If they don’t report through the system, they’ll lose their federal funding.

It’s something that’s been coming for a decade with the rollout of federally required homeless management information systems like Seattle’s Safe Harbors. But in a city known for its high-tech prowess, what is surprising is the state of Seattle’s data and the panic it has caused this year among some shelter and housing providers, who say that Safe Harbors has cost the homeless federal funding before and that it could happen again.

Last year, the city and county, which apply together to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for an annual allocation of about $20 million in McKinney-Vento homeless assistance funds, got their $20 million. But they failed to get $1 million in McKinney “bonus” or extra funding due largely to the quality of the data, says Sola Plumacher, the city manager for Safe Harbors.

Earlier this month, HUD announced Seattle and King County would get the $1 million bonus for 2010, showing that Safe Harbors has improved, Plumacher says. But shelter and housing providers say problems persist with the system, which the city and county first implemented in 2005 and scrapped last year for new software sold by a contractor – at a total cost of $3.5 million over the past five years.

A report currently posted on the Safe Harbors website for the period of Oct. 1, 2009, to April 30, 2010, illustrates some of the problems. It lists the number of people served at 178 publicly funded programs that participate in Safe Harbors (it’s now up to 262, Plumacher says) and how many gave their name, Social Security number, date of birth, race, prior living situation and other personal information. As a measure of efficiency, the report also lists how many beds were used on three specific dates over the past year, but, in many cases, the numbers make it appear that multiple people shared one bed on a single night.

At various rental units paid for by the Downtown Emergency Service Center, one of Seattle’s largest shelter and housing operators, the report shows that more than 300 people slept in a total of 60 beds on each of the three nights – a bed utilization rate of more than 500 percent or five people to a bed. At the single rooms that DESC rents at its main building, in the old Morrison Hotel, the utilization rate is nearly 200 percent, or two people to a bed. For many programs, the bed-use rates are similarly skewed or missing altogether.

The numbers aren’t right, of course. To greater or lesser degrees that not everyone agrees on, they go wrong in two particular places – on the shelter end, where staff or volunteers are often too busy helping the homeless to enter data into the system or within the design and function of Safe Harbors, which must upload data each month from some 40 “legacy systems” or software that large housing providers such as DESC were using before Safe Harbors started in 2005.

With last May’s passage of the HEARTH Act, Obama Administration legislation that rolls McKinney and other homeless programs into one funding stream, HUD is now requiring annual reports come directly from government information systems like Safe Harbors as shelters and housing providers start their new contracts over the course of 2010 and 2011. Between that, new reporting demands from other funders and a new rule put in place July 1 by the state Department of Commerce that all invoices for a rental assistance program must match the numbers in Safe Harbors, some housing providers say they’re worried about the database’s potential to wreak havoc on funding.

“As funders other than HUD have added to reporting requirements and guidelines,” says Tamara Brown, program manager of Solid Ground’s JourneyHome program, “the input process has become more labor-intensive for staff and thus more prone to system issues, which are sometimes user error and sometimes program design.”

The city rolled out Safe Harbors II in June of last year, and Plumacher says her staff, which includes seven city employees, has just finished a series of trainings to get all 262 of the database’s user agencies ready to run their HUD progress reports. But even with the new system, Plumacher says the city had to forgo applying for special federal funding set aside for veterans this year. “We started to do that and we couldn’t,” Plumacher says. “There were so many missing elements.”

That, she says, is a function of legacy systems that may not call for veteran status. Other problems are tougher to solve. Nearly 70 percent of those recorded in the system today, Plumacher says, have provided their names. But if there’s no name or other identifying information to go on, she says, it’s still difficult to sort out duplicates who may have left and come back to a shelter or used more than one program or service in the system.

Despite ample city training, Plumacher says, the shelters also frequently fail to “exit” their clients – that is, indicate when they are no longer staying at a shelter or have completed or left a program. Even when they do, there is little more than “numbers served” to gauge the success or failure of a homeless program.

Out of more than 23,000 records in the system in 2008, according to the latest annual Safe Harbors report (culled from the old software), nearly 5,000 were duplicates and another 5,300 were simply unidentified, leaving 13,000 records on homeless people in King County – 9,305 single adults and 1,358 parents with 2,300 children. Of those, 4,744 were chronically homeless, but just 128 of them had exit records indicating where they went when they left the shelter or program – 75 to permanent housing and 53 to temporary housing or what the report calls “non-housing.”

But duplicates and the failure of shelters to record client departures doesn’t explain all of Safe Harbors anomalies, says Nicole Macri, director of administrative services, which uploads its data to Safe Harbors once a month – and is still finding discrepancies.

“Currently the numbers shown in our Safe Harbors-generated [HUD progress reports] do not reflect the numbers shown by our internal data systems,” Macri says. “Over the past month, we have worked closely with Safe Harbors staff to troubleshoot and correct data problems, and we’ve made progress in increasing the accuracy of DESC data.”

“However,” she says, “we still have work to do.” 

 

 

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Comments

Safe Harbors is a complete waste of time of money which should be allocated to keep people together and safe off the streets rather than tracking them down.
3.5 millions spent on that fallacy while the City is facing budget cuts and some shelters have closed and others are in danger of closing is absolutely shameful.
The bureaucrats should be ashamed of themselves!!

Beatrice Friberg | submitted on 07/23/2010, 5:25am

Your are misinformed.  Safe Harbors does not track people down as you so eloquently put it. It is a Federal requirement for funding. HMIS works in many other places in the country, but not in politically correct Seattle. Yes there are some issues with this particular software, but the premise is to make sure that homeless individuals and families are not only served but moved out of homelessness, which is really the goal, isn’t it?

TheSilentOne | submitted on 07/27/2010, 3:21pm

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