City-funded prevention programs expand predictive outreach to avert evictions, presenters tell committee

Members of the Cincinnati Climate, Environment and Infrastructure Committee heard a presentation Friday on two city-funded homelessness-prevention efforts that use targeted outreach and third‑party research to keep families housed.

Kevin Finn, president of Strategies to End Homelessness, and Fran Gallagher, assistant director of project development at the Lab for Economic Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame, described the shelter diversion program and the Housing Stability Collaborative (the Impact Award), which uses predictive analytics to identify households at early risk of eviction.

The programs are aimed at reducing the number of people who enter emergency shelters and lowering costs to the system. Finn said shelter diversion “is 95 percent successful in keeping people out of homelessness” under the program’s definition and that the average cost per person in shelter diversion is a little over $1,600 compared with about $4,700 per person when assistance is provided after someone becomes literally homeless.

Gallagher described LEO’s role in designing impact evaluations and said the lab partners with service providers to “build evidence about what really works.” She said LEO provides research support at no cost to partners and that producing evidence can help attract public and private funding.

Committee members and presenters outlined the scope and early results of the Impact Award project, which uses a predictive model built by Dr. Gary Painter at the University of Cincinnati. Presenters said the data process initially identified roughly 50,000 households as potentially at risk; narrowing to households with at least one child reduced that set to just under 21,000. The model flagged 577 households at highest immediate risk; of those, staff were able to contact 268, and 94 households enrolled. Presenters said 54 households were still active in services and 40 had completed the assistance described by the program. Finn said the average length of enrollment to date is about 89 days.

Presenters named partner organizations that provide direct services or data for the projects: Bethany House, Free Store Food Bank (FreeStore), Lighthouse, FoundHouse, Saint Vincent de Paul, Legal Aid, Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (Dr. Carly Riley), and the University of Cincinnati. Gallagher and Finn said the projects are primarily serving families that live in the city of Cincinnati under the current Impact Award parameters.

Committee members pressed presenters on contact rates, uptake barriers and capacity. Finn and Gallagher said contact rates have improved as partners supplied fresher contact information — FreeStore data, Tenant Guard voluntary submissions and monthly lists from the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority — and that some households flagged by the model could not be enrolled because they had already received an eviction notice or had vacated the referenced housing. Presenters also said roughly one-third of enrolled families required emergency rental assistance handled by Saint Vincent de Paul.

Council Member Mark Jeffries, Council Member Seth Walsh and Council Member Albee asked about scaling, outcomes beyond housing stability and cost-effectiveness. Gallagher cited a Santa Clara County example where evaluation of prevention work convinced local government to expand public funding for prevention programs; she said that kind of evidence-based expansion is an objective for Cincinnati’s projects.

The committee filed the presentation at the meeting’s conclusion.

Questions remain about long-term outcomes and whether federal funding rules (particularly those tied to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocations) can be adapted to allow a portion of homelessness funding to be used proactively for prevention rather than exclusively for people already in the shelter system. Presenters said one of their aims is to use research results to persuade funders and policymakers to permit prevention investments at scale.

The committee did not vote on additional funding or policy changes during the meeting; presenters said the studies are ongoing and expected to launch full research designs and program expansions in 2025.