In 2023, Cincinnati City Council set aside just over $2 million in funding to be put toward one project that Councilmembers thought had the greatest potential to reduce evictions and housing loss in the city.
Strategies to End Homelessness applied to the city for this funding and was chosen as the city’s first ever Impact Award recipient. And the Housing Stability Collaborative was formed.
Housing Stability Collaborative
Concept: Use data and predictive data analytics expertise to identify families in the early stages of a housing crisis – perhaps before the head of household even realizes the situation could lead to housing loss – and proactively offer assistance to resolve the crisis.
Predictive Data Analytics conducted by Strategies to End Homelessness identifies which households are most at-risk of receiving an eviction notice, and our partner agencies will proactively reach out to these households, offering services and assistance targeted toward addressing their emerging housing crisis.
Goal: Families identified as having the highest risk of eviction and housing loss do not receive an eviction notice.
Background: Strategies to End Homelessness (STEH) is the leader of a coordinated system of care for the homeless, and those at–risk of becoming homeless, in Greater Cincinnati, and was named the Impact Award recipient in June 2023.
Many organizations are helping people who are already on the streets and in shelters, and Shelter Diversion services are available and targeted toward households who are living with friends and family (“doubled-up”).
Meanwhile, during the COVID pandemic, agencies have spent millions of government dollars assisting households that have received eviction notices. However, little was previously being done locally, nationally or internationally, to develop systems that proactively assist people in the early stages of a housing crisis so that at-risk households do not receive an eviction notice.
STEH and our partners spent a year planning for and building a new, data-driven, cost-effective service delivery model to proactively prevent households from ever receiving an eviction notice, and this new system for reducing instability and preventing housing loss went live on July 1, 2024.
With the first iteration of the predictive data model ready for use, Strategies to End Homelessness (STEH) staff began utilizing the predictive data model for the first time at the end of that month. We were initially able to identify a large number of households potentially at risk of eviction (48,226). We then limited that list to only those households in the City of Cincinnati (44,837).
Next, we used our data to remove households that had already become homeless, already received an eviction notice, or did not have minor children. We then focused on the top quintile of households of household remaining (5,196). From that number, we continued prioritizing households as outlined previously.
Proactive Service Delivery
Starting at the beginning of July, STEH staff began providing our partner agencies with information regarding those households identified and prioritized as described, and they began outreach to those households.
Positives Factors Identified
Most of the households contacted were extremely grateful to be contacted.
Predictive Data Model is working. Overwhelmingly, the households contacted validated that their housing is, or at least recently was, at-risk.
Our partner agencies providing System Navigation services are fully staffed as of October 2024.
Efforts to begin collecting feedback from households served will be ramped up after issues with increasing the number of households enrolled in the program have been addressed.
We learned positive outreach language was significantly more effective than negative language. For instance, using language such as stating that we were contacting them to “promote housing stability” was well received, while contacting households using language such as “at-risk of homelessness” or “at-risk of eviction” was not positively received as such language triggered a negative response from those contacted.
The TenantGuard.org Website allows households to self-identify that their housing is at risk and provide us with updated contact information.
Through the website we can identify additional at-risk households, gain an understanding of the issues such households are facing, obtain updated contact information for households to improve our enrollment rate, and secure consent for data sharing.
Read more about how the TenantGuard.org website was created: Using Data for Good – Strategies to End Homelessness.
We will continue to provide quarterly updates on the Housing Stability Collaborative.
