Map Monday: The Long Beach Homelessness Dashboard

Map: Long Beach Homelessness Dashboard

Geographic Area: City of Long Beach

Year Published: 2023

Goal: Provide information about services available to unhoused folks in Long Beach, as well as provide demographic data and track status of homeless population.

Datasets: Long Beach HMIS, Long Beach’s Call Management System, the Long Beach Housing Authority, and city shelters and service centers.

Complementing Harvard’s Map of the Month series, Map Monday highlights a data visualization that enhances understanding of or helps resolve a critical civic issue.

The first step to solving a problem is understanding it. Without saying ‘this is an issue and these are the facts,’ very little can be done to address, mitigate, and prevent the problem. For countless cities across the US, homelessness is one of the biggest, a seemingly intractable challenges. And one of the aspects that makes it so tough to tackle is the difficulty in measuring the size, complexity, needs, and demographics of the unhoused population in a given city.

The current standard in estimating the scale of homelessness is through the point-in-time (PIT) count, which is required by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and is an annual “a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January.” That information is then delivered to HUD through the Homelessness Data Exchange and stored in the Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) database. However, this information is not widely or publicly shared.   

For decades, California has had a disproportionately higher percentage of the country’s unhoused population, and while there are many contributing factors to homelessness the high housing costs and generally mild weather do contribute to the state’s high rate. In just the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the issue; in the city of Long Beach, CA, homelessness increased by 62 percent from 2020 to 2022. This astronomical jump contributed to the city council’s decision to declare a state of emergency for homelessness.

Under new mayor Rex Richardson, who took office in December 2022, the city has also released a new public data dashboard that details the existing homelessness population engaged in support programs and the various efforts underway to provide interim housing, services like mental health support and case management, and eventually permanent housing.

The first page of the dashboard, which was built using PowerBI, provides demographic details to establish context and give a clearer picture of who is part of different homelessness prevention programs; these details include age, racial makeup, gender, and veteran status. As seen in the charts, most of the people experiencing homelessness in Long Beach identify as Black, African-American, and/or African. The vast majority of folks in the Age Group Served chart are between the ages of 25-61, meaning that most people first enrolled in services when they were in that age bracket. The ages are broken down like this to reflect specific categorizations; youth is 0-17 years, transitional aged youth are 18-24, adults are the largest group from 25-61 years, and the elderly are 62 and over.

The explanations behind the demographic categories and delineations are provided in further detail on the city’s correspondingGitHub page. For example, when discussing the gender data, city leaders had to choose how to categorize folks who either “did not answer the question, those whose gender is not known, or those who select "Transgender," "A gender other than singularly female or male (e.g., non-binary, genderfluid, agender, culturally specific gender)," or "Questioning." In the final data dashboard, this group is displayed as "Gender Expansive or Decline,” representing just over one percent of participants. This page also provides source details for the data, which mostly comes from the Long Beach HMIS, the city’s Call Management System, the Long Beach Housing Authority, and manual data reported by shelters and service centers. Users can filter through the data by year, from January 2018 to present.  

Services that the city offers include interim and permanent housing and access to care. For Long Beach, interim housing (also called emergency shelter, transitional housing, and safe haven) provides “immediate assistance to an unhoused individual at a city or partner-run shelter.” Support services cover a wide range, including providing food, drinks, and clothing, assistance with housing applications, case management, and referrals to different assistance programs. The dashboard has charts that dive into other angles, like how much time people spend in each stage (i.e. monthly and quarterly changes in housing status), and the demographics showing how race, age, and veteran status interacts with participation in programming (i.e., are more veterans enrolled in programming that are represented in the total homeless population). By cross-tabbing so much data, city and community leaders can see if there are discrepancies in access to care, success in transitioning out of interim housing, and median days before securing permanent housing. 

The second page provides more information about availability and usage of city services, particularly in light of Mayor Richardson’s January 2023 emergency declaration. In addition to the Multi-Service Center, a central building for assistance with 10-plus regular services and frequent pop-ups with community health groups and other partners, the new Mobile Access Center is a large vehicle for direct-to-street outreach that meets individuals experiencing homelessness where they are. Staff on the vehicle can help with case management and connections to housing, and amenities like mail service and routine health checkups. According to the dashboard, at the time of writing 10,896 folks had been helped at the Multi-Service Center and the Mobile Access Center had provided 222 services for over 100 people.

Further charts show trends over time in terms of daily visits to the Multi-Service Center and encampment visits over the past year. There is also data on who requested an encampment visit, if there were or were not people in the encampment during the visit, and how many people accepted services. One trend over time graph shows shelter utilization over time; shelter occupancy nearly tripled once the city opened a hotel-based shelter in January. This simple bar chart highlights the fact that declaring an emergency situation helped free up funds to quickly address the need for greater interim housing capacity.

Clearly, progress has been made in Long Beach. A dashboard like this is not only crucial for understanding the problem but also in telling an accurate story about homelessness in the city. This data dashboard helps with accountability, keeps the public informed with a common set of facts that are updated weekly, and provides a way of seeing trends over time. By measuring what does and doesn’t work, the city can most effectively and humanely help those experiencing homelessness and improve quality of life for all residents of Long Beach.