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A Los Angeles County program that seeks out people at high risk of homelessness and tries to help them stay off the streets and out of shelters is showing early signs of success, according to a study published Thursday.

Launched in 2021, the county’s Homelessness Prevention Unit uses artificial intelligence to comb through vast troves of government data, looking for signs that someone is likely to fall into homelessness. Some of the risk factors include frequent hospitalizations, psychiatric holds, welfare program enrollment and past incarceration.

Once the program has a list of high-risk people, outreach workers try to contact them and offer assistance with staying housed. Participants can get help paying overdue rent, signing up for mental health treatment or fixing a car they need to get to work.

The study compared 335 enrollees with 1,285 others who could have enrolled, but were not reachable or were not successfully signed up for help. The average amount of aid enrollees received was about $6,500.

Results from the program’s pilot phase are now published. They show that people who enrolled in the prevention program were 71% less likely to end up in homeless shelters or to be found on the streets by outreach teams, compared with those who did not enroll.

“That’s a fairly promising early evaluation result,” said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA and co-author of the study.

Pinpointing those on the edge of homelessness

The study found that 2% of enrollees ended up in shelters or on the streets, compared with 6% of those who did not enroll. The difference may sound small, Rountree said, but it proves this program targets people much more likely to fall into homelessness than Angelenos as a whole.

“Frankly, there are no prevention programs nationally that are enrolling people who are this high risk,” Rountree said. “We were really trying to find those individuals who were months away from entering street outreach services or the shelter. When you do that, you can expect some percentage of those people to end up in those environments, even if they’re getting help.”

Prevention enrollees were also less likely to have a mental health crisis or end up in jail. However, researchers said it’s not clear that the program caused those differences, because people who were more likely to enroll were already less likely to experience psychiatric or criminal justice problems than those who were more difficult to enroll.

To get a better understanding of whether the prevention program is actually causing a reduction in overall homelessness, the researchers are in the middle of conducting a randomized control trial that is scheduled to wrap up in 2027.

Outside experts see reasons for hope

Margot Kushel, director of the UC San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was not involved in the study. She said the program’s effectiveness won’t be fully known until those trial results are released.

For now, she said, this study shows some “incredible” progress.

“They’ve cracked the code — they’ve found really high risk people,” Kushel said. “That has never really been done before using administrative data.”

Kushel said she was impressed by the program’s ability to enroll more people over time. At the beginning, only 1 in 5 single adults and 1 in 4 families contacted by the prevention unit were successfully enrolled in the program. A few years later, the success rate increased to 40% for single adults and 49% for families.

People at high risk of homelessness can be hard to reach for many reasons, Kushel said. They are often preoccupied with health or eviction crises. They may not be able to maintain their phone and internet service. Sometimes, they may think the assistance being offered is a scam.

Kushel said enrolling nearly half of the people on the program’s high-risk list was a major accomplishment.

“I would not have guessed they could do that,” she said.

Why the results matter

The L.A. region’s response to the growing number of people living on the streets, in cars and in shelters in recent years has mainly focused on sheltering and housing those who are already homeless. But policy experts say the region will not meaningfully reduce its homelessness numbers until it can also prevent people from losing their housing in the first place.

So far, local homelessness prevention programs have been limited in scope, and they are frequently at risk of losing their funding.

Rountree said this study is not the final word on the effectiveness of the county’s prevention efforts, but it does highlight why efforts like this should continue.

Kushel agreed.

“We won’t know if this works for a couple more years,” she said. “But if I were a betting woman, I would say it will.”