CINCINNATI — Could artificial intelligence be helpful for preventing homelessness in Cincinnati?
It’s a question nine teams, community leaders and city leaders heard answers to Friday afternoon at a “Housing Stabilization Hackathon” that was organized by social enterprise hub Flywheel and Strategies to End Homelessness.
Each team was tasked with figuring out how data could help predict when someone is at risk for housing loss, so they can be connected with resources.
Kevin Finn, president and CEO of Strategies to End Homelessness, said that outcomes tend to be better when an individual receives assistance prior to losing their home. It’s also less expensive.
“I’m a social worker by training, I run a non-profit,” Finn said. “I don’t know anything about data analytics.”
Which is why, he said, he needed to look beyond the non-profit sector, resulting in the week’s hackathon.
The day’s first-place winner, TenantGuard, used predictive data analytics to identify the key indicators that predict when someone was at risk of an eviction.
“We pitched a machine learning model that would improve itself over time,” Nick Ramos, a team member said. “A lot of that data isn't necessarily in a state that's usable. So a lot of what we have to do to build a solution is get the data to a usable state."
“The other thing that we were kind of pitching with TenantGuard is a solution that collects clean data from the start,” he said.
Data is how city council wants to address homelessness.
The organizers of the hackathon were awarded funding from the city last year through an Impact Award. The money was awarded to reduce evictions using predictive analytics. Some of the same ideas from the hackathon will be implemented when the project launches in July, Finn said.
“People had ideas for different ways of using data then we had thought about before. So those will also be interesting things to follow up on,” he said.
One of the judges was council member Meeka Owens, who pointed to hackathons as an innovative way to solve the problem.
“We can unblock that red tape by allocating resources in the right way,” she said. “Thinking about what impact looks like, while making sure we’re doing that with our parents.”
