Painting the ‘big picture’: Why and how LAist tracked Mayor Bass’ big promise on homelessness

You have to get beyond an orientation toward “headline-worthy” developments to truly track progress.

On her first day in office, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness. And she announced a bold, very specific goal: she would house 17,000 Angelenos during her first year in office. Solutions to the homelessness crisis are costly, and the city allocated $1.3 billion for this budget year alone to deal with a problem that has only gotten worse in recent years.

When Bass made this vow, LAist had just launched a three-month, 17-question citywide survey to learn what Angelenos wanted their new mayor to prioritize during her first year in office. Our goal was to gain insight into where Angelenos wanted us as a newsroom to focus our attention.

The 4,339 responses overwhelmingly pointed to homelessness, making clear that the credibility of the mayor and her administration rested on making progress on this humanitarian crisis. The themes “Keep your promises” and “Listen to us” also came up again and again in response to a question we asked about advice for Bass. Angelenos’ responses made it clear that we needed to find a way to hold Bass accountable to her promises on homelessness.

The survey gave us clarity on issues that were top of mind. We also wanted to use it as a jumping off point for a few other things we were trying to accomplish:

• Identify unique angles on a story that every newsroom in L.A. was covering
• Use data visualization more frequently and intentionally, perhaps even making it the main focus of a project
• Move (in a non-election year) from covering politics and voting to covering governance on our civics and democracy beat

We found inspiration in THE CITY’s COVID tracker, which helped New Yorkers understand and contextualize New York City’s recovery from the pandemic. At any moment in time, readers could look at the tracker and get a snapshot of how the city’s recovery was going.

That’s how we landed on the Promise Tracker: an effort to boil progress on Mayor Bass’ promise to house 17,000 Angelenos down to a few key metrics that we could visualize and track throughout the year. We would seek to answer a few key questions:

• Are people being moved out of encampments and into housing?
• Are people staying housed once they move off the streets?
• Is the mayor adequately expediting the bureaucracy to move people into existing housing and make new housing available?

These are questions that many Angelenos are asking, but few news stories regularly answer unless there’s a headline-worthy development. Tracking progress on this big promise for the first year kept us, and our readers, focused on the big picture — Bass’ overall progress addressing homelessness.

“With news coverage, it can be easy to focus on what’s new, major programs, and whatever the very active civic discussion is at City Hall. But what the public expects, rightly so, is answers about the big picture and what’s happening on the streets overall. And the Promise Tracker has helped us keep our eye on that,” said Nick Gerda, LAist’s unhoused communities reporter and one of two people on the Promise Tracker project.

How we did it

Nick and Brianna Lee, our civics and democracy engagement producer, started by looking at all the different kinds of homelessness data out there. When they began working on the Promise Tracker in April 2023, Nick was already hearing from sources at City Hall that there were real issues with the data: how it was being collected, how accurate it was, and how hard it was to get it.

“Right away I was interested [in the tracker] on a number of levels,” Nick reflected. “One: It’s an accountability measure to hold probably the most impactful elected official in our region [accountable]. Two: It also opened up transparency on something the public really cares about and wants to see action on. Three: It brought it into a tangible form. … It took us out of the micro and into the macro, into the big picture: how is the mayor doing on her campaign promise, which is also the №1 issue for many voters.”

Brianna and Nick winnowed their list to six metrics tracking a variety of homelessness responses that served as key indicators of whether progress was being made and where it was lagging. To visualize the data we used Flourish. Flourish’s ease of use meant that after the initial setup, we could easily update the graphics without needing to request support from our product team. It also allows for annotations within the graphics, which helps us explain complex data to readers.

“It’s not just that the charts made progress easier to visualize and digest. They also explained how our city works to address homelessness. When you mention homelessness in L.A., most people tend to think of one aspect of it: street encampments. They are much less versed in what it takes to reduce those encampments, or how city leaders are trying to address it,” Brianna reflected.

“Using charts to showcase not just overall progress, but several different methods of achieving that progress — temporary housing, permanent housing, voucher programs — helps clue people in to how multifaceted this problem really is.”

We launched the Promise Tracker on May 30, 2023, with the first data that Bass made available. We timed the launch to coincide with Mayor Bass’ monthly appearance on AirTalk, our call-in public affairs radio show. In that AirTalk appearance, host Larry Mantle pressed her on gaps in the data we had found when working on the Promise Tracker.

Between May 30, 2023, and Jan. 5, 2024, we:

• Updated the Promise Tracker five times
• Asked Bass questions stemming from the Promise Tracker in almost all her monthly AirTalk appearances
• Published at least five stories connected to the Promise Tracker, many of them stories that originated with something we saw in the data we collected or in the process of collecting the data
• Nick and Brianna joined LAist’s daily podcast How to LA twice to catch Angelenos up on Bass’ progress and talk about what they were learning (here’s the latest)
• Used the attention the Promise Tracker was getting to teach people how the homelessness response in L.A. works and how the data is tracked, such as this post explaining why permanent housing, not temporary housing, is the thing to pay attention to long term

“Seeking the data, and having the mayor on for live unscripted interviews, and the web publishing… It’s a tremendous trifecta of accountability and transparency,” Nick reflected.

We heard that in the feedback we got from readers.

“No question, just wanted to let you all know that I really appreciated this work. It’s absolutely stellar and transparent and neutral, and that’s in short supply these days. Thank you so much for doing all of this. You already know this work is important, but I hope you know that others see this on a personal level, too.”

“I simply wanted to thank you for being an Angeleno who is part of making our city better by holding Mayor Bass to her word. I’m rooting for her, for our sake, & this is a great way to see how she’s performing.”

“Amazing work! This is freaking important!”

“Thank you for all of this, it is explanatory at its finest.”

Neither Brianna nor Nick working on their own could have pulled this off, at least not as well as they did together. Brianna has spent years honing her ability to explain complex civic issues in an accessible way that invites Anglenos into the civic process and experimenting with new story formats.

Nick’s beat expertise was necessary for wrapping our head around the project in the first place. And his rigorous reporting before the project and during it ensured that we got the answers we needed (when they were available) and allowed us to report discrepancies and concerning trends in the data.

They’re not our newsroom’s first engagement-reporter duo but it’s the first time we’ve done a pop-up pairing like this on an accountability project — and we’ll be doing more of that in the future.

What we learned about homelessness data in the process

When we started this work, we knew that the data might be in challenging formats and that it would be spread across a lot of different sources. None of us expected collecting the data to be easy.

What we didn’t know was that some of the data necessary to track progress didn’t exist anywhere and that some of it would be too unreliable to use.

Brianna and Nick found the data was rife with inaccuracies and duplicates. The Bass administration knew that some of the data to track their progress didn’t exist. Still, they launched their effort to house 17,000 people before they shored up an inadequate data infrastructure they’d inherited, reasoning that the emergency was so severe that they couldn’t afford to wait.

They might be right. But it did mean, as Brianna and Nick wrote, that “for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.”

In the course of his reporting for the Promise Tracker, Nick also learned that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. They had put $50 million towards the program with requirements for the data, but months later still weren’t receiving these reports. The Bass administration later said they didn’t trust the numbers enough to circulate them, but the council pressed for more transparency after we started writing about the issue.

Later, around the first anniversary of Bass taking office, Brianna and Nick published an essay alongside their final Year 1 tracker update titled, “Why it’s so hard to know how many unhoused people Bass has housed.” In it, they dived deep into what gaps we had in our data and why — and challenged the Bass administration to measure homelessness progress differently moving forward.

If we were covering homelessness without the Promise Tracker, the data discrepancies would have surfaced in stories regularly. But the Promise Tracker positioned us to make issues with the data — and therefore the public’s ability to hold the Bass administration accountable to its promise to make measurable progress — a major issue that her administration had to address.

“I was left with the impression that the mayor’s team didn’t anticipate their campaign promises to be tracked so closely in the press, but in many ways they welcomed the transparency we were providing,” Nick said.

What we learned more broadly

Tracking progress requires metrics that don’t always exist. We found no system that follows a person over time, meaning it’s impossible to answer with certainty those big picture questions: How many people overall are being moved off the streets? How many of those people are still off the streets a few months later? Instead, progress on homelessness in L.A. is tracked largely by program, and one person might go through multiple programs. On one of her AirTalk appearances Bass described it as the difference between process-oriented metrics and outcome-oriented metrics.

We knew this even before embarking on the Promise Tracker. But now we deeply understand the difference between the two types of metrics. We’re looking at data differently and asking different, deeper questions: Is the way the mayor set out her campaign promise actually the best way to measure progress on this issue? Is the city capable of measuring progress on this issue?

Sometimes there’s value in publishing incomplete data. There was never a moment in the course of the Promise Tracker where the data was ironclad. It was marred right from the start because of the way it was collected across various homelessness programs. Because our goal was to track progress, find new stories in the course of tracking progress, and provide transparency to Angelenos, it made sense to update the Promise Tracker even if we couldn’t update all of our metrics or we could only look at the data program by program, not overall.

As we got deeper into the reporting, we decided making these data challenges clear should be part of the project. Our intent in this choice: put pressure on government to improve data collection, help Angelenos understand the problem at a systemic level, and to work out in the open so that we weren’t expecting people to just trust our analysis. They could check our work. Graham Media Group’s Dustin Block summed up the opportunity well in a comment on my share of the Promise Tracker: “Let’s build journalism tools that let people discover the truth on their own.”

Doing our own visualization can point us to new story ideas. Visualizing Bass’ progress in charts also revealed things that might not have stood out if we were just reading them in a report. Nick was then able to follow up on this with his reporting. Brianna called our attention to two cases where this was especially true:

• Inside Safe, Mayor Bass’ signature homelessness program: Bass promised to house 1,000 people by her 100th day in office. The chart shows that they started off slow and rushed to hit the 100-day goal, then slowed again until they approached their year-end goal. For better or worse, this showed the influence that publicly communicated milestones had on progress.

• The gap between the number of people in temporary housing vs permanent housing: For L.A. to make lasting progress on homelessness, people need to not just go into housing, but stay in housing. Visualizing how few of the people being housed have found a long term solution adds an important footnote to Bass’ progress.

What we’ll do differently going forward

Our biggest challenge was effectively promoting the work and making it easily findable. Newsrooms and people’s attention are both oriented toward what’s new — and that makes it hard to effectively promote an update to something you first launched months ago.

As a newsroom, we’re still figuring out how we create workflows to continually promote our work over many months. We know we could have talked about it on air, in our newsletters, and on social media more than we did. Maybe we could have increased the reach of the work by offering our charts up for republishing by other local media outlets. We could have done more stories based on the updates to the Promise Tracker. We could have experimented more with posting the progress charts directly to social media. We struggled to distill the scope of the tracker into pithy, attention-grabbing summaries for social media.

That said, staying on a project for close to a year, giving it consistent attention over that whole time period, and bringing it to a close intentionally is a big win. As a local newsroom, when we go hard on something like this only we’re making a conscious choice not to go hard on something else. As we build this muscle, we’ll have more bandwidth to work on all those promotional challenges.

Follow through matters, so in early January, Brianna sent an email to all 4,339 people who responded to the survey to let them know how their responses had shaped our journalism and to share the Promise Tracker (we did something similar when we launched the tracker). The subject line she wrote was: “Mayor Bass’ progress on homelessness in six charts.”

I did an immediate facepalm because that would have been the perfect headline for the Promise Tracker all year — and somehow none of us thought of it until then. Now, finally, it is the headline.

If you have experience or suggestions for how we can approach this promotion and distribution challenge in Year 2, we’d love to hear more. Shoot us a note at engagement@scpr.org.

What comes next

The initial Promise Tracker is no longer being updated; that’s because it was designed around Bass’ goal to house 17,000 people during her first year in office. But we’re not done tracking her progress out in the open for anyone to follow.

Nick and Brianna are figuring out which metrics it makes sense for us to track from now through the end of her term, and we hope to be up and running on that tracking by late spring. At least 18,000 of the 21,000 people Bass housed in her first year were put in temporary housing, and Brianna and Nick know that in Year 2 they need to try to answer a new question: How many of those 18,000 people are still housed at the end of 2024?

About two months into the Promise Tracker, LAist launched a news experimentation team, of which I’m the director. Brianna’s on the team, too, due in large part to her track record of working with different digital formats to deliver information in new and more effective ways. Experimentation with new story formats to offer greater utility with our journalism is one of our key focuses, so Brianna and I will be looking at how we can apply this approach on other beats or topics.

“For an average resident, being able to assess an elected official’s performance in office is a really difficult thing. News stories can help give you an idea of individual successes or failures, but what about the overall picture? When it comes time to vote on whether to keep them in office or choose a new direction, most people are doing it based on feelings, less so on concrete data,” Brianna noted.

“Our work on the Promise Tracker opened up our thinking about how to set up an entirely new framework for accountability. What would it look like if we had a Promise Tracker for every City Councilmember in the city of L.A.? Could it give residents a better idea of what their government is or isn’t doing for them? And would they be able to make more informed choices in the next election? These are questions we’ll be chewing on in the coming months as we try to expand this approach.”

Explore the project:

• Mayor Bass’ Progress On Homelessness, In 6 Charts
• Why It’s So Hard To Know How Many Unhoused People Mayor Bass Has Housed

A special thanks to Senior Editor Mary Plummer and Visual Designer Erin Hauer for helping to shepherd this work.

(Budi yanto/iStock)