Tool Helps Prioritize Homeless Individuals for Permanent Supportive Housing

A paper from Economic Roundtable, Prioritizing Which Homeless People Get Housing with Predictive Algorithms, documents the development of a new assessment tool for prioritizing homeless individuals for permanent supportive housing (PSH). The tool, known as the Silicon Valley Triage Tool (SVTT), applies a statistical predictive model to administrative data from the health, mental health, criminal justice, and social service systems in Santa Clara, CA in order to identify and rank homeless persons with the costliest utilization of public services. The tool allows the homeless service system to prioritize homeless clients with the highest public service costs for the scarce supply of PSH, in an attempt to ensure efficiency in the allocation of resources and maximize the public cost-savings of the intervention.

The developers of the SVTT note that they view “the tool as an interim means of prioritizing need in the context of social failures to provide an adequate supply of affordable housing or to provide more effective social safety net interventions that will reduce the flow of people into chronic homelessness.”

Learn more about the development of the Silicon Valley Triage Tool at: http://bit.ly/2rlb5iB.