We need to talk about Coordinated Entry

There are a lot of posts here about homelessness but I’ve seen very little conversation around the coordinated entry system. CE (coordinated entry) is the system king county uses to allocate housing to homeless people. I was advocating for a homeless youth I’ll call R for several months (not a social worker, just a friend) so I’ve had some interactions with this system and it seems.. goofy?

The way it is supposed to work is:

1. Someone becomes homeless
2. They go to a regional entry point (mostly homeless shelters(
3. A case worker does a CEA (coordinated entry assessment) to gather basic info and enters them into the system
4. Case workers and hosing providers work together to place people in housing

Sounds great, right? Well, in my experience it has some issues.

Right off the bat, I ran into issues getting the youth I was working with for enrolled in the system:

• Many social workers do not understand the system and do not get people signed up correctly even if they are at a shelter that is a regional access point
  • R was not informed about CEA and was not entered into the system for over a month until I started calling and emailing the shelter director
• The list of regional access points provided by the county is very out of date.
  • I called several and were told that they no longer do CEAs and had asked to be removed from the list but had not been removed.
• Many access points are only open M-F 9 to 5 which means that people with jobs will have to take time off to get into the system

Then, even when you get someone signed up to the system, there are issues actually getting referrals to housing:

• You are tied to the social worker who enters you into the system. . This is a problem if the social worker who signed you up is poorly informed.
  • R’s social worker wasted time referring her to housing she was not eligible for due to hard requirements like length of homelessness and failed to refer her to housing she was eligible for
  • As far as I could tell, switching was not possible
• The social workers join a daily zoom call to advocate for their clients. Since time is limited they pick and choose which people to attempt to place.
  • Less likeable clients or ones that the social workers judge as less severe (sometimes incorrectly) are not recommended for housing as often
  • R attempted suicide after 2 months in a shelter before any housing referrals had even been made

Overall, the system seems like a massive time sink for social workers who are already incredibly overloaded. It lacks transparency and seems very prone to bias.

My alternate proposal:

1. Housing database: Require all housing providers to enter vacancies into a database that shows requirements in a standard format (gender and age accepted, length of homelessness required, income requirements, veteran status etc)
2. Homeless Database: Homeless people will be entered into a database which will show housing relevant criteria like age, marital status, income, pets, preferred area etc.
   1. They can enter into this database online, over the phone, at any DHS office, with a social worker on the street, at a public library etc.
3. Automatic matching: The system automatically matches homeless people with all eligible housing vacancies daily using a best match algorithm. People who have been in the system longer will get first dibs
4. Homeless Approval: The system notifies social workers and the homeless person if there is a match. if there is they have 48 hours to accept or decline. If they decline, the system automatically notifies the the next best match until the opening is accepted

This isn’t AI and it isn’t rocket science. It makes no sense for dozens of social workers to spend hours sitting around in a zoom call for hours every week! We are a tech city. We can come up with a system that is more efferent, fair and transparent.