(AmericanProsperity.com) – The Homelessness Prevention Unit, located within the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, has been helping to prevent and alleviate the issues of homelessness since it was put into effect.
California has seen a drastic increase in the number of homeless people, with the numbers last year reaching almost two hundred thousand people. With the program in place, it’s helped over eight hundred families and individuals to avoid eviction.
The associate director of homelessness prevention at the county’s Department of Health Services, Dana Vanderford, explained how this program helps individuals and their families. Vanderford said that individuals who are struggling with homelessness can get aid from four thousand dollars to eight thousand dollars. She also says that the American Rescue Plan Act is where the majority of the funding is coming from.
Vanderford expressed how crucial the services were, saying, “We often meet our clients within days of a loss of housing, or days after they’ve had a medical emergency. The timing with which we meet people feels critical.”
She continued, “Our ability to appear out of nowhere, cold-call a person, provide them with resources, and prevent that imminent loss of housing for 86 percent of the people that we’ve worked with feels remarkable.”
The AI model was developed by the California Policy Lab at UCLA for a few years and they used information that was gathered by Los Angeles County’s Chief Information Office. The information that is being gathered would help, over time, to predict who would be at the most risk for homelessness.
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