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Washington News & Views
Tracking the Homeless: An Overview of HMIS
Nan Roman


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In Massachusetts a few years ago, data from homeless shelters revealed that a majority of residents had entered the system almost directly from foster care, prison or hospitals. As a result, then-governor Paul Cellucci committed to zero tolerance for discharge from government institutions into homelessness. In New York City, a recent assessment of a large, publicly-funded supportive housing initiative (New York/New York Agreement to House Homeless Mentally Ill Individuals) showed that the cost of permanent housing and services for disabled homeless people was only marginally more than the public cost of leaving them homeless. In this time of scarce resources (at least for those most needy), continuing affordable housing crisis and growing homeless numbers, we must demand more resources and make the best use of those that we have.

In 2001 Congress asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to take the lead in requiring communities to develop an unduplicated count of the homeless. It did this for two reasons. First, it was persuaded that cities with good data systems (Columbus, New York City and Philadelphia) did a better job of addressing the problem. Second, it was frustrated by the almost total lack of reliable national data about homelessness and the impact of federal spending on the problem. It wanted communities to have accurate data on homelessness and also use this information to evaluate patterns of program use and effectiveness. As good data emerged from communities, Congress asked HUD to use it to paint a more accurate picture of what was happening nationally.

To meet these goals, HUD required federally funded public and nonprofit organizations to implement a homeless tracking system – Homeless Management Information Systems, or HMIS. HUD provided technical assistance to HMIS and allowed for funding from the Supportive Housing Program (SHP). In July 2003 HUD released draft HMIS standards that laid out the information it expects agencies to gather through HMIS. Final standards are anticipated in early 2004, the deadline for agencies to implement HMIS.

Creating a useful tracking system is a formidable and challenging task. Issues of privacy, expense, participation and usage are just some of the concerns that must be addressed.

Confidentiality. While this is critical for all homeless people, special issues arise for victims of domestic violence and people with HIV and AIDS. Further, there are laws requiring protection of individual information (such as the federal Health Information Portability and Accountability Act). Confidentiality must be carefully maintained in information gathering, analysis protocols and data security.

Resources. The hardware, software, transmission, training and staff costs associated with implementing HMIS can be costly. Although HUD has allowed communities to apply for SHP funds to cover these costs, such requests compete with those for direct services and housing.

Analysis. One real benefit of HMIS is the information it can generate about the cost of homelessness, program outcomes and linkages with mainstream systems (government programs like foster care, employment training, health care and corrections that assist low-income people more broadly, or have custodial responsibilities). Obtaining such information requires resources and a sophisticated approach to both research design and data analysis. While few homeless assistance organizations possess these resources or skills, they can partner with agencies or communities that do.

Coverage. HMIS can contribute valuable information if they “cover” the maximum number of homeless people. Grantees of other federal programs (Health Care for the Homeless, PATH) and programs that do not receive government funding (missions, soup kitchens, clothing banks) should be included in order to gather the most complete set of data.

Use of Data. While HMIS data can tell us many things about the homeless, there are only certain kinds of information that HMIS should provide. Aggregating anonymous data to examine numbers and trends is relatively uncontroversial. More troublesome are possible uses of personal data, including sharing client files among programs. HUD has stipulated that it wants only aggregated, not client level, data.

These issues will have to be addressed at the community level. The real challenges of HMIS are not technical, they are civic. Communities must grapple with how they will handle information sharing, right to privacy and program evaluation. HUD should not tell communities how to deal with these matters, but should help with standards and protocols, best practices and technical assistance.

There are at least seven opportunities for well-run data systems to make a tremendous difference in the lives of homeless people and communities.

1. Plan to End Homelessness. Communities across the nation are developing plans to end homelessness. HMIS can help measure the success of their implementation.

2. Encourage Mainstream Participation. Data has shown that homelessness is extremely costly to public health care and other systems. Identifying the costs can convince those systems to more actively address homelessness.

3. Program Management. All homeless programs collect information for a number of reasons – to assess capacity, manage staff, allocate resources or prepare budgets and reports. HMIS can be used to manage and simplify these tasks.

4. Attract Resources. In a climate of intense competition for resources, homelessness organizations can use HMIS data to make a more compelling case for funding.

5. Assess Costs. Agencies can use HMIS to assess their costs and the cost effectiveness of their programs. States and localities can use HMIS to assess the cost effectiveness of various programs or interventions.

6. Prevention. HMIS can help identify where the homeless come from and who is most likely to become homeless.

7. Measure Outcomes. HMIS can be used to assess the impact of service and housing interventions on meeting immediate needs and the long-term goal of ending homelessness.

Creating good homeless management information systems is difficult work, with many and significant challenges, but making the best use of our existing resources, and building a strong case for new ones, will require more than a big heart and an apt anecdote. HMIS is not, of course, the solution to homelessness. It can, however, help us move past managing the problem, to ending it.

Copyright 2003

Nan Roman is president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness 1518 K St., NW, Suite 206, Washington, DC 20005. 202-638-1526. http://www.endhomelessness.org.

Resources

Homelessness Management Information Strategies



“New York/New York Agreement to House Homeless Mentally Ill Individuals.”
Corporation for Supportive Housing, 50 Broadway, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10004. 212-986-2966. information [at] csh.org. http://www.csh.org.

Read the Description and History of the New York/New York Agreement. (PDF)


government and other privacy invasions. (Sept 23)
Coalition Alerts Congress to Homeless Surveillance System.EPIC and a coalition of 24 privacy, civil liberties, and homeless advocacy organizations sent a letterto Congress today to warn Members of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's plans to create a homeless surveillance program. The program, known as Homeless Management Information Systems, collects detailed personal information on the homeless, and enables it to be shared regionally. The program raises risks of a national, centralized homeless tracking system, risks to domestic violence victims who are seeking shelter, and heightens the ability of law enforcement to gain access to personal data. The public can comment on the program until September 22, 2003. (Sept 9)
EPIC Alerts Public to Homeless Tracking System. Proposed guidelinesto create a homeless tracking database called "Homeless Management Information Systems" present serious risks to civil liberties. EPIC has released a new fact sheetdetailing the risks, and urging the public to send comments to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in opposition to HMIS. (Aug 19)
HUD Announces Homeless Tracking System.The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced guidelines(pdf) for " Homeless Management Information Systems" (HMIS). HMIS is a standard system for tracking homeless persons and the services rendered to them. Entities that provide services would collect their names, Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, race, gender, health status (including HIV, pregnancy, and domestic violence), veteran status, and income information. Although the plan does not call for a national, centralized database, the information collected could easily facilitate the creation of such a database in the future. Furthermore, law enforcement, Secret Service, and National Security access to the database would be nearly unlimited. The guidelines are open to public comment until September 22, 2003.

Introduction and Background

Poor people have less of everything--less autonomy, less social mobility, and less privacy. State interests in fraud prevention and the structure of privacy law itself have worked to the disadvantage of the poor. This page is gives an overview of these forces and their effects on electronic privacy.
Fraud Prevention: Welfare Surveillance and EBT

Professor John Gilliom of Ohio University provided an excellent summary of the changes in welfare surveillance in Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy. In that book, Gilliom explains that state interests in avoiding fraud motivated increasingly invasive investigations of benefits recipients. Historically, these methods were limited by technology and social norms. At one time, this included visits to recipients' homes to determine whether the residence was clean and orderly. But norms have changed, and we are less tolerant of fraud or inefficiency, and technology allows much more invasive surveillance techniques.

Electronic benefits systems and computer matching systems now are employed to determine whether fraud is taking place, and whether the recipient is entitled to the benefits. Such systems do serve important state interests in fraud prevention, however, the systems are highly privacy invasive. Over and over again, policymakers choose more invasive systems in the interests of fraud prevention to the detriment of individual autonomy.

With increased dependence on the Social Security Number (SSN), the government has been able to engage in pervasive tracking of aid recipients. Now, with the requirement that states implement Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) by October 2002, aid recipients are being issued benefits cards that facilitate government tracking of all purchases. Gilliom argues that this combined with personal interviews delving into matters such as romantic relationships, results in a comprehensive tracking system that subjects the poor "to forms and degrees of scrutiny matched only by the likes of patients, prisoners, and soldiers."

Strip away the bureaucratic language of fraud control, regulatory enforcement, consent forms, and the like, and we see a simple pattern in which a government agency is using broadly targeted and online surveillance in an effort to force a dependent population to live at an intolerable level of poverty.

Gilliom's book provides firsthand accounts of the humiliation brought to bear by individuals watched by the state. Gilliom argues that traditional notions of privacy do not adequately describe the total surveillance in which the poor exist. He argues that a new language is needed to describe surveillance systems: a language that explicitly recognizes it as a tool of social control. He suggests, as a solution to this humiliation, that aid recipients themselves have to be involved in defining the goals and framework of the welfare system.

John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (University of Chicago Press 2001).

Structure of Constitutional Privacy Law: Those Without Private Spaces Have Less Privacy

Constitutional privacy protections in the United States are conditioned upon the finding of a "reasonable expectation of privacy." To find such an expectation, a court examines whether society itself finds privacy in a certain context (objective test), and also whether the individual affected thinks that their actions are private (subjective test). Obviously, this two-pronged test does not provide privacy protections in areas that are public, the areas in which much of the poor exist as a result of not having homes, country clubs, or other establishments to engage in activities. It further does not protect those whose living spaces are exposed to public areas, for instance, homes or apartments without fences, heavy curtains, or well-insulated walls.

Professor Christopher Slobogin of the University of Florida has argued that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence contains an implicit "poverty exemption." That is, courts have interpreted the Constitution to the disadvantage of the poor. He notes that even when a poor person is within a home, state interests in fraud prevention can trump privacy interests. For instance, in Wyman v. James, the Supreme Court allowed welfare workers to conduct a warrantless search of a welfare recipient's home without a warrant citing interests in fraud prevention. In other cases, however, the Court has required a warrant to search a business for investigation of tax fraud.

Police interests in drug interdiction have also played a central role in the dissolution of privacy for those in poorer neighborhoods. Consistently, courts have expanded police search and seizure powers over those in public. There are numerous exceptions to the warrant requirement for police searches, and the so called "Terry Stop," which was first approved to protect officers from concealed weapons, now has become a pretense for searching subjects for any type of contraband.
HMIS -- Homeless Management Information Systems

The Department of Housing and Urban Development released proposed mandatory guidelines for HMIS, or "Homeless Management Information Systems," in July 2003. The proposed guidelines require extensive data collection on the homeless without adequate privacy safeguards. For instance, federally-funded entities that provide care must collect unique identifiers (SSNs, DOBs, full legal names) along with mental and physical health information. That information will be stored for at least seven years in a standard format that is easily exportable to other databases.

EPIC has called attention to a number of privacy risks posed by HMIS, and will submit comments to HUD on the system. Any member of the public can comment on HMIS by sending mail to HUD by September 22, 2003. Specific instructions are contained in the HMIS Guidelines linked below.

HMIS Proposed Guidelines(PDF), July 2003.
EPIC Fact Sheet on HMIS(PDF), August 2003.
Gov't Proposes Massive Homeless Tracking System, Slashdot, August 19, 2003.

News

Ripped Off, New ATM Card Screws Poor People, The Stranger, November 4, 1999.
Citigroup and the Privatization of Welfare, Citiaction.

Resources