Signal 3: StreetSmart: The App that Integrates Homelessness Data

While technology and data analysis are taking hold of many of the operations in city government, homeless services, which are vital to a city’s well-being, have lagged far behind other departments. Homelessness as an area of study is naturally averse to quantitative analysis: many of the problems are human-centered such as mental illness and domestic violence, the population of interest may not want to be identified through the research, and the existing data infrastructure is fragmented. But a new tool called StreetSmart (detail on how the app was built with human-centered design can be found here) could help solve that problem. The app allows social workers to contribute and pull data on homeless people to better understand how to serve them. Before, each social worker had physical copies of those files, which would be difficult to access by other workers and frequently overlap as well. This database and the ability to edit it is carefully recorded by the city so only social workers with permission can access it. Big improvements in data architecture and availability could prove to be a boon for future research on homelessness, which, in turn, would help local governments optimize their services for those afflicted populations.