Homeward 2020 believes in data-driven planning and actions.

These accessible, interactive dashboards are used by the Homeward 2020 Collaborative and the broader community to monitor data to help our community realize our vision to make homelessness rare, short-lived and non-recurring.

Population data helps us better understand who is experiencing homelessness and to deliver efficient services from our response system. We now understand unique categories of people in the system to help us build targeted, right-sized services and housing supports. We know who is eligible for existing resources – seniors, veterans, persons with disabilities, and youth, for example. We see opportunities for targeted services to fill gaps, such as dedicated staff to help with Medicaid enrollments, mental health and substance use concerns, job placements, and the need for housing subsidies to access market-rate housing rentals among persons with extremely low and limited incomes.

We know how many people need supportive housing today. We can also better see flow in and out of our system over time. We closely monitor the rates at which people are entering long-term homelessness, as well as the growing number of people in the system seeing no status change over time due to a lack of ability to ‘exit’ them from the system by finding permanent solutions. A large part of our system effort is to reduce the large ‘iceberg’ feature you see in our System Cumulatives – the ongoing ‘actively homeless’ with no status change over time.