Nation’s capitol taps data, tech to better serve homeless population
A homeless encampment in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 14, 2020. GummyBone via Getty Images
In Washington, D.C., a modernization push is helping homeless shelters and other stakeholders link individuals to emergency shelters more efficiently.
Washington, D.C., is one of just a few U.S. jurisdictions that operates under a right-to-shelter mandate to help unhoused individuals access temporary housing services. The system assists vulnerable people with finding a safe place to sleep during the city’s coldest months, and a recent modernization initiative has helped the city improve the system, one data official said.
The district’s right to shelter mandate is particularly critical during hypothermia season, when daytime temperatures reach 32 degrees or below and when overnight temperatures hit 40 degrees with a chance of precipitation or reach 32 degrees. Hypothermia season runs from November through March, during which the city and its nonprofit partner, The Community Partnership, increase their efforts to expand shelter capacity and transportation services.
During the hypothermia season, officials will issue weather alerts or emergency notifications to the community to make them aware of incoming hypothermic conditions. Unhoused individuals can then wait at designated pick-up and drop-off locations for drivers to transport them to a shelter, or they can call the city’s shelter hotline for on-demand transportation. The city partners with the nonprofit United Planning Organization to offer transportation services.
“Regardless of what time it is, where you are … we are going to provide shelter for you,” said Adam Gerstenfeld, a data scientist for the Washington, D.C., Department of Human Services, in an interview with Route Fifty at Esri’s annual Federal GIS Conference this week. “So it’s really important that our drivers are aware of which shelters are available and which are open at the moment.”
Until last year, once a UPO driver picked up a person in need of shelter, they would have to call the city’s hypothermia season shelters about their bed availability. There can be about a dozen shelters in operation around the city each year, so calling each one “is a fairly time consuming process,” Gerstenfeld said.
Shelters would also count their beds by hand throughout the night to keep drivers updated, he said. “Nothing was technology based. The most technology we were using was thumbs,” he explained.
Officials soon determined “we can definitely use tech to better assist” the city’s homelessness management approach, Gerstenfeld said.
In 2023, the city worked with The Community Partnership to develop a shelter intake survey using Esri’s ArcGIS Survey123 solution. The survey tool helps shelter staff track how many unoccupied beds are available every hour on the hour, and that data populates a dashboard that drivers can access on their own devices while they’re in the field.
Using the dashboard, drivers can see information like how many beds are available at men- or women-only shelters or how many top or bottom bunks are vacant to better match people with the type of shelter they need, Gerstenfeld said. The dashboard also helps create a daily Excel report using ArcGIS API for Python.
After shelter employees and UPO drivers were trained how to use the technology, the city launched the solution in March 2024. The tech has “massively improved efficiency on the back end … and we were able to track the number of calls that went down in the first couple of months,” Gerstenfeld said.
From March to October, the city saw a 20% reduction, or a decline of about 18,000, in calls to the shelter hotline. And from late 2024 to this year so far, officials have seen a 55% decrease in call volume.
Call dispatchers are not “as stressed anymore … [and] we’ve actually been able to add additional roles to their places, which are really important,” said Lindsay Curtin, senior policy advisor for the district’s Department of Human Services, during a conference session. With fewer calls to field, for example, staff can dedicate more time to higher priority tasks, such as linking unhoused individuals to more permanent shelter if they’re able to contact the person’s friends or family,
“By those measures of success, we’re really proud of what we’ve done,” Gerstenfeld told Route Fifty. The city has also developed a hypothermia shelter predictive model based on bed availability data over the last decade, which aims to help authorities project resource allocations for future hypothermia seasons.
Gerstenfeld added that the department hopes to expand its survey and dashboard tool to be used outside of hypothermia season and to include more shelters, such as those serving unhoused youths.