Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

The coordinated entry system in Los Angeles is “touted as the Match.com of homeless services” (84). However, Eubanks argues that this infrastructural system poses a dangerous erosion of privacy because it “collects, stores, and shares some astonishingly intimate information about unhoused people. It catalogs, classifies, and ranks their traumas, coping mechanisms, feelings, and fears” (85).

First Eubanks goes over the long and difficult history of the poorhouse in downtown Los Angeles. In the early 1920s, Skid Row was incredibly diverse, but after WWII, as white Los Angeles residents protested public housing initiatives, available housing on Skid Row was decimated. During 1980s deindustrialization, many Black residents who lost their jobs moved to Skid Row. South LA has experienced higher rates of homelessness and crowded housing since. For a while, social segregation preserved the neighborhood, but in the past decade, younger and wealthier workers have gentrified the area. The slow decline of housing for the poor has never stopped: “Since 1950, more than 13,000 units of low-income housing have been removed from Skid Row” (90)—enough to house all those currently without a home who live there. Eubanks provides this history in order to draw a connection between poorhouses and the modern equivalent—what used to be flophouses and tenements are now tent cities.

The coordinated entry system was set up to funnel eligible individuals into modest housing without having to navigate complicated waitlists and programs. The two major principles of the new coordinated entry system were: prioritization based on need and “housing first,” an approach that acknowledges that stable housing is a prerequisite to addressing other issues like addiction, self-sustenance, and mental health. “Housing first” updates the previous model, “housing readiness,” which set unfair behavioral standards—employment, sobriety, and overall compliance—that needed to be met before housing was supplied. The coordinated entry system also differentiates between “chronically homeless” and “crisis homeless.” The former have been without a home for extended stretches, whereas the latter are without a home due to a sudden adverse event like unemployment or debilitating illness.

To enroll in the LA coordinated entry system, a social worker approaches an unhoused person with a survey called the Vulnerability Index—Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (VI-SPDAT), which is meant to assess need level. This data is stored in the Los Angeles Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), from where it is “shared with 168 different organizations, including city governments, rescue missions, nonprofit housing developers, health-care providers, hospitals, religious organizations, addiction recovery centers, the University of California Los Angeles, and the LAPD” (94). An automated ranking algorithm ranks each client based on need. Those who do not qualify for crisis housing or rapid re-housing are left to fend for themselves. For instance, Gary Boatwright, whose homelessness would be labeled “chronic,” has never received housing assistance despite taking the VI-SPDAT three separate times.

Eubanks argues that the catalyst for government action on the housing crisis “was the spreading of tent cities” (112), and not modern data analysis. Ironically, although there is a surfeit of data on each individual, there is a lack of data about the program’s long-term effects: Without collecting information about housing retention rates, for example, it is impossible to say whether LA’s rapid re-housing strategy has solved individuals’ housing issues.

The coordinated entry system is a lottery at best and a preliminary criminal check at worst. It is unclear whether the data kept on the unhoused in HMIS can ever be expunged even by explicit request. “Further integrating programs aimed at providing economic security and those focused on crime control threatens to turn routine survival strategies of those living in extreme poverty into crimes” (119). Because of this shortcut for police investigations, unhoused individuals must monitor every aspect of their lives, far more than housed people, to be successful in their housing applications.