In January 2023, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released the results of its annual Point-in-Time count of people experiencing homelessness. The number was 653,100 — the highest since HUD began tracking in 2007. Forty-eight states saw homelessness increase from the prior year. The number represented a 12 percent jump from 2022.
The political response was swift and expensive. Los Angeles has been spending more than $1 billion annually on homelessness response. San Francisco’s homelessness budget has exceeded $600 million per year. New York City has spent more than $3 billion annually managing the largest homeless shelter system in the country. Across the country, cities and counties are allocating resources to homelessness at levels that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago.
And yet, in most of these communities, the public conversation about homelessness spending sounds like this: we are spending more money than ever and homelessness is getting worse. That conversation is generating enormous political pressure on local government leaders who are making real investments in a genuine crisis and struggling to demonstrate that those investments are producing measurable results.
The missing piece — in most communities — is the data and technology infrastructure that would allow the people running homelessness programs to know whether what they are doing is working, adjust when it is not, and communicate the results to the public and elected officials in a way that is credible and comprehensible. That infrastructure exists. It is not being invested in adequately. And the gap between the resources going into homelessness services and the resources going into understanding whether those services are working is one of the most consequential technology gaps in local government right now.
What the Federal Framework Requires — and Why Many Communities Fall Short
HUD has built a comprehensive data framework for homelessness programs. Every Continuum of Care — the regional planning bodies that coordinate homeless services across geographic areas — is required to maintain a Homeless Management Information System that tracks clients, services, and outcomes in a standardized format. HUD uses this data to evaluate CoC performance, make funding decisions, and report to Congress on the state of homelessness nationally.
The HMIS requirement is not optional. CoCs that cannot demonstrate HMIS data quality and compliance risk losing federal funding in the competitive grant cycles that determine which communities receive HUD homelessness assistance. The stakes are high, and the technical requirements are specific: data entered in a standardized format, outcomes tracked across the full service continuum, and performance metrics calculated according to HUD’s methodology.
In practice, HMIS data quality varies enormously across communities. Some CoCs operate mature, well-integrated HMIS systems with high data quality and staff who are trained to use them effectively. Others operate aging systems with poor data entry practices, significant gaps in service documentation, and limited ability to generate the performance metrics that HUD’s competitive grant process rewards.
The communities reducing homelessness are not necessarily the ones spending the most. They are the ones that know what they are spending it on and can prove it is working.
The technology gap is not primarily about the sophistication of the HMIS platform itself — though that matters. It is about the organizational investment in data quality, staff training, system integration, and outcome analytics that turns raw service data into actionable intelligence about what is working and what is not. That investment requires sustained attention from leadership and dedicated resources that many communities have not prioritized relative to the direct services they fund.
The Coordinated Entry Problem
One of the most important concepts in modern homelessness response is coordinated entry — the idea that people experiencing homelessness should be assessed for their level of need and connected to housing and services based on that assessment rather than based on who happens to show up at which agency first. Coordinated entry, when it works well, ensures that the people with the most acute needs access the most intensive services. It reduces duplication. It makes the service system more efficient and more equitable.
HUD has required all CoCs to implement coordinated entry systems as a condition of funding. Most CoCs have done so. But the quality of coordinated entry implementation varies as widely as HMIS data quality. A coordinated entry system that is poorly integrated with the service providers it is supposed to coordinate, that generates assessments that case managers do not trust or use, or that creates bureaucratic delays in connecting people to services is worse than no coordinated entry system — it adds administrative burden without improving outcomes.
The technology that supports high-functioning coordinated entry is not dramatically different from what most CoCs already have. It is the data quality, the system integration, the staff training, and the governance structure that determine whether a coordinated entry system delivers on its promise. College Data has documented a parallel governance challenge in micro-credential programs, where the technology to build effective credential programs exists but the organizational structure to make them work is the constraint. In both cases, the technology is not the hard part. The organizational investment in making the technology work is.
Why Housing Navigation Is the Central Purchasing Priority
Federal homelessness strategy has, over the last decade, converged on Housing First as the evidence-based approach with the strongest outcomes: get people into stable housing as quickly as possible, then address the other challenges in their lives. This approach works. The research is consistent. Communities that have implemented Housing First with adequate resources have reduced homelessness. Communities that have debated its merits while not implementing it adequately have not.
Housing First requires housing. That sounds obvious. But the practical challenge is significant: in most high-homelessness markets, the affordable housing supply is severely constrained, landlords have legitimate concerns about renting to people with histories of housing instability, and the administrative complexity of navigating the housing application process while also managing other life challenges is significant for people who have been unhoused for extended periods.
Housing navigation — the specific service function that helps people find housing, engage landlords, navigate applications, and maintain housing stability once housed — is the operational core of Housing First. And the technology that supports housing navigation is one of the most active purchasing categories in the homelessness services market: housing database tools that track available units and landlord willingness to rent to formerly homeless tenants, landlord engagement platforms that manage incentive programs and relationship tracking, application support tools that automate parts of the housing search process, and the case management systems that track client progress from enrollment through housing placement and beyond.
The landlord engagement dimension connects homelessness services technology to real estate and property management systems in ways that most government technology vendors have not mapped as a cross-market opportunity. The civic mailing lists and government contact databases that reach Homeless Services Directors also border on the property management market that Civic Data has documented in the context of property tax and municipal finance — in both cases, the intersection of government and real estate creates purchasing conversations that most vendors approach from only one side.
What Good Homelessness Data Infrastructure Actually Looks Like
The communities that have made measurable progress on homelessness share a specific set of data practices that are worth describing concretely, because they are not complicated — they just require sustained investment and organizational commitment.
First, real-time dashboards that give CoC leadership and local government officials visibility into system performance at the level of individual programs, housing types, and geographic areas. How many people entered the system this week? How many exited to permanent housing? How long are people waiting in emergency shelter before being connected to housing? Which programs are performing above average and which are not? This information, displayed clearly and updated regularly, is the foundation of data-driven homelessness system management. Most CoCs can generate it from their HMIS data if they invest in the reporting infrastructure to do so.
Second, individual-level outcome tracking that follows people beyond their exit from the homelessness service system. Did the person who was housed six months ago stay housed? Did they return to homelessness within two years? These return-to-homelessness metrics are the most important indicators of whether a Housing First program is delivering durable outcomes rather than temporary placements. They require maintaining contact with people after they exit the service system, which requires the client communication technology and case management follow-up protocols that most homelessness programs have not built.
Third, community-level data integration that connects homelessness outcomes to other social determinant indicators — school enrollment, employment, healthcare utilization, criminal justice contact. A person who exits homelessness and enters stable housing but then loses their housing six months later because they lost a job that did not pay enough to cover rent has not been successfully served by the homelessness system in any durable sense. Understanding why people return to homelessness requires data that spans systems — something that requires the kind of cross-agency data sharing infrastructure that K12 Data has documented in the context of student homeless identification under McKinney-Vento and that Physician Data has documented in the context of healthcare-to-homelessness service coordination at FQHCs. In all three cases — education, healthcare, and homelessness — the most important outcomes are determined by what happens at the intersections between service systems, and the technology that manages those intersections is the most valuable and least available.
The CoC Coordinator Is the Most Important Contact in This Market — and the Least Visible
For vendors and organizations serving the homelessness technology market, there is one contact that matters more than any other and that is most completely absent from standard civic mailing lists and government contact databases: the CoC Coordinator.
The CoC Coordinator is the administrative leader of the Continuum of Care — responsible for strategic planning, HMIS management, federal grant applications, performance monitoring across the service network, and the governance of the coordinated entry system. This person is the primary purchasing authority for the most important technology categories in the homelessness services market. They work for the lead agency of the CoC, which is often a nonprofit organization or a government agency, depending on how the CoC is structured. They receive federal funding and operate under federal compliance requirements. And most civic mailing lists do not include them as a distinct, searchable contact category.
The CoC directory that HUD maintains publicly — listing all CoCs, their lead agencies, and their geographic boundaries — is the starting point for building a government contact database that actually reaches the homelessness services purchasing market. Combined with HMIS platform information, grant funding data, and program performance records from HUD’s annual CoC competition, the CoC directory enables a level of targeting precision that most civic mailing lists and government email databases cannot currently provide.
What Cities and Counties Should Be Doing Differently
The communities spending the most on homelessness are not always the communities investing the most in the data and technology infrastructure that would tell them whether their spending is working. That gap is not primarily a technology problem. It is a leadership and prioritization problem.
Local government leaders who authorize $50 million for homelessness services without authorizing adequate investment in the HMIS infrastructure, coordinated entry technology, and outcome analytics that would track whether those services are producing results are, in effect, making a large investment without a measurement system. No private sector organization would operate this way. No federal grant program would fund programs without performance accountability requirements. But many local governments have done exactly this for years, and the political and public confidence consequences are now visible in the widespread skepticism about whether homelessness spending is working.
The answer is not to spend less. It is to invest a meaningful share of homelessness spending — something in the range of three to five percent — in the data and technology infrastructure that makes the rest of the spending accountable. That investment pays for itself in federal grant performance and in the public confidence that sustained political support for homelessness response requires.
The Bottom Line
The homelessness crisis in the United States is real, it is growing, and the communities responding to it are investing real resources. What most of them are not investing adequately in is the technology that would tell them whether their response is working and help them adjust when it is not.
That gap is a policy failure and a market opportunity simultaneously. The CoC Coordinators, Homeless Services Directors, Housing Navigation Program Managers, and city CFOs managing accountability for large homelessness budgets are buying the technology that closes this gap right now. They are buying it with federal funding that creates compliance timelines and urgency that most civic mailing lists are not configured to identify. And the vendors who reach them — with the right product, at the right moment in the grant cycle, through contact data that identifies these buyers as distinct high-priority contacts rather than undifferentiated government administrators — are entering a market with genuine urgency, genuine budget, and almost no competition from vendors who have not yet recognized it exists.
