State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

This ‘City on a Cloud’ Finalist Merges Data and Analytics to Identify Its Chronically Homeless

Route Fifty: Four high utilizers of homeless services in Iowa City, Iowa, cost the local government $2.16 million as of 2014, and they were all still living under the same bridge.

Those were the findings of a study intended to identify high utilizers and their fiscal impact, ahead of developing a housing-first option for the chronically homeless.

Police officer David Schwindt, the downtown liaison officer in Iowa City’s Central Business District, was among the uniform patrol spending 40 to 60 hours manually entering information on the homeless he came across in an Excel spreadsheet. The list of homeless he compiled went through other city services: ambulances, hospitals and jails.

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