Last year, in mid-October, a U.S. military veteran joined a program for homeless residents in Southern California.
It wasn’t the first time he’d asked for help. The man, who is disabled, had once participated in several initiatives without finding permanent housing.
Yet after two-plus months with Volunteers of America, he was connected with both a home and rental assistance.
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That level of detail about one person’s path, as well as information about more than 195,000 others who were recently aided in the same area, is publicly available because they were in Los Angeles.
The same data is not as accessible in San Diego.
The differing level of access partially reflects how counties have created very different bureaucracies to oversee homeless services. But it also invites more fundamental questions about how leaders balance the need for transparency — especially when it comes to the vast sums spent on homelessness — with concerns that the privacy of vulnerable people could be violated.
The public wants to know that taxpayer dollars are being spent on programs that work. Homeless residents need to be able to trust the organizations offering help.
Can both happen simultaneously?
A contract vs. an email
The issue surfaced recently amid a public dispute between a local government watchdog and the organization overseeing San Diego’s Homeless Management Information System, known as HMIS, which tracks how thousands of people participate in a range of programs.
Several years ago, the San Diego County Taxpayers Association asked the Regional Task Force on Homelessness for HMIS data. Anyone who wants access must fill out a form that asks, among other things, what the records will be used for and can come with a $500 an hour fee.
That cost isn’t just for researchers: When San Diego officials want certain HMIS data, the city also has to pay $500 an hour, according to spokesperson Matt Hoffman.
The task force did initially agree to share anonymized records with the taxpayers association, meaning names would be deleted, and the resulting “Data Transfer and Use Agreement” came with strict parameters. The records shouldn’t be shared, any published analysis needed to be pre-approved by the task force and the exchange could be ended “without cause” at any time.
When board members later voted to end the agreement, the association had to delete what they had.
Los Angeles operates differently.
In late March, The San Diego Union-Tribune emailed the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which manages their HMIS data, to ask for roughly the same records the taxpayers association wanted in San Diego. That included a year’s worth of demographic information about individual homeless people (like gender, race and veteran status), what programs each person had joined and whether they’d made it to permanent housing.
About seven weeks later, the agency, known by the acronym LAHSA, sent the requested data for free. There were no signed agreements and no limits on how the records could be used.
There is one obvious reason for the divergent responses. LAHSA is a government agency while San Diego’s task force is a nonprofit.
“The California Public Records Act only applies to public agencies,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. While the task force was created decades ago by a San Diego mayor and remains a key part of the system distributing taxpayer dollars for homelessness, it earned tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the mid-2000s.
Those organizations can be exempt from laws mandating public access to records. “This is a problem of privatizing public functions,” Loy added.
‘Sensitive information’
The task force has shared HMIS data with other researchers, including Jennifer Nations, managing director of the Homelessness Hub at UC San Diego, and Patricia Leslie, social work professor emeritus at Point Loma Nazarene University.
“The information that’s in the system is really important to the community — and I think that the task force has guarded it well,” Leslie said.
A top concern of hers was that individual homeless people might be identified if records were more accessible.
Say the data included only two Indigenous women. If anyone could check whether they had disabilities or served in the military, it might be possible to figure out their names. Furthermore, if you could see that one woman participated in a program known for treating alcoholics, could that later affect her job prospects? Or the ability to find housing?
“In general, it’s hard to truly anonymize data,” said Gary Blasi, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA who’s long researched homelessness.
At the same time, Blasi wasn’t aware of any cases where Los Angeles’ HMIS data had been used to publicly identify individuals. The same went for a spokesperson for the LA Alliance for Human Rights, which has sued the city and county of Los Angeles over their homelessness responses. Representatives of two service organizations in the area — Union Station Homeless Services and Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System — did not immediately provide examples of HMIS records being abused.
However, there have been debates in Los Angeles about who could see all the data, including names.
In 2022, the Los Angeles City Council considered a proposal to give government staffers broad access to HMIS records. The nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless, which employs outreach workers around the region, spoke in opposition.
“When people choose to share their personal information with us — including their medical histories, personal traumas, and service needs — they do so with the understanding that sensitive information will only go to service providers,” Zeke Sandoval, a PATH representative, wrote to council members. Giving others direct access to the data could cause homeless individuals to withhold “key information if they fear political interference or a Public Records Act disclosure.”
A PATH spokesperson said a compromise was later reached that gave LAHSA, which manages Los Angeles’ data, more control over sharing records.
A representative for LAHSA wrote in an email that anyone who misuses HMIS data loses access. “In the limited cases where this has happened, we have determined that no sensitive client information has been compromised,” said Ahmad Chapman.
Proponents of San Diego’s approach also raise concerns about how data could be misinterpreted.
Homelessness is so complex that experienced researchers are needed to analyze what efforts are actually working, said Omar Passons, Deputy City Manager for the City of San José and the previous director of San Diego County’s homeless solutions department.
But, he added, “there’s always room for more availability.”
Transparency and privacy
Many officials across California agree more transparency is needed.
A recent state audit slammed how homelessness spending has so far been monitored. Gov. Gavin Newsom said cities that don’t document their finances won’t get state grants and San Diego County officials are undergoing a sweeping review of all their contracts.
Amid this shifting landscape, the taxpayers association has been publicly calling on San Diego’s task force, or RTFH, to release more data.
“I think it’s time we start to push RTFH to do what the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority does,” Haney Hong, the association’s president and CEO, wrote in a recent message to mayors and city managers. “Think of what your agency could do in terms of evaluating your programs.”
The task force does use HMIS data to produce a number of public reports available online.
You can track how outreach workers housed smaller shares of people from 2020 to 2022. One report concluded that Black residents were 3.9 times more likely to lack shelter. It’s only because of the nonprofit that we know homelessness has grown for 25 straight months.
But task force leaders have balked at widely distributing the raw data behind those numbers.
“People experiencing homelessness deserve the same privacy protections as everyone else,” Tamera Kohler, the task force’s CEO, has said.
Spokesperson Jordan Beane wrote in an email that Los Angeles’ public data included enough detail to identify at least some people.
Regarding what the task force charged to release records in San Diego, Beane said not everyone had to pay $500 an hour. The fee is “in no way related to staff size nor is it a set price,” he said. “Everything is managed on a case-by-case basis.”
If San Diego ever did change course, the data could shine a brighter light on organizations running local shelters.
Leaders of Alpha Project, People Assisting the Homeless and Father Joe’s Villages all said the release of more records wouldn’t affect their work.
Hanan Scrapper, head of PATH’s San Diego office, added that the task force had dramatically improved HMIS data in recent years, making it easier for service providers to track clients.
She was skeptical that broader access would lead to a more efficient system.
Deacon Jim Vargas, president and CEO of Father Joe’s, further cautioned against judging programs by just a few data points.
Helping people who’ve long lived outside is complicated, he said. Sometimes it took months to develop a relationship. While housing was the goal, “there’s so much that goes into the whole equation.”
