Evidence From the Past: New Insights to Improve Housing Systems for Homeless Youth

Could an AI decision aid improve housing systems that assist homeless youth? There are nearly 2 million homeless youth in the United States each year. Coordinated entry systems are being used to provide homeless youth with housing assistance across the nation. Despite these efforts, the number of homeless youth still living on the street remains very high. Motivated by this fact, we initiate a first study to create AI decision aids for improving the current housing systems for homeless youth. First, we determine whether the current rubric for prioritizing youth for housing assistance can be used to predict youth’s homelessness status after receiving housing assistance. We then consider building better AI decision aids and predictive models using other components of the rubric. We believe there is much potential for effective human-machine collaboration in the context of housing allocation. We plan to work with HUD and local communities to develop such systems in the future.