Using AI to Identify Encampments
And other dystopian temptations
Friends! I’m in Atlanta this week, and loving it! I just wrapped up presenting at and attending the Housing First Partners Conference. This is one of two conferences I make a point in attending as much as possible because of their dedication to holding and spreading best practices for ending homelessness. I got to hear so many presenters share their experiences and brilliances in implementing so many of the things I talk about here.
There was a word that I heard a lot this week, and that I often hear at conference like this: innovation. I won’t lie… I even used it in my presentation title. It’s catchy and exciting. It invokes a tantalizing newness—that perhaps, finally, human ingenuity will get us out of the mess we’ve made.
My framing of this word is telegraphing where I’m headed… I am suspicious of innovation. There is a lot of it in my field, and I certainly want us to keep striving and experimenting and discovering. We are fighting from behind on so much when it comes to homelessness and housing, and we need all the edge we can get. One big reason is that innovation tends to be one-sided.
I saw an article this week that highlights what I mean. The City of San Jose is currently utilizing AI to detect encampments via cameras mounted to municipal vehicles. It extends even to identifying vehicles that are being lived in. The cameras were originally intended to help identify potholes, trash, and cars parked in bus lanes, before this use was conceived. I wonder if anyone in the room stopped to interrogate the direct connection their minds made between potholes, trash, and people experiencing homelessness. Technology itself may be morally neutral, but it inherits our intolerance when we plant it in its programming.
This of course echoes the larger conversation around AI, and why companies are so determined to aim it at creative efforts like art and writing—replacing distinctly human creative work—rather than at making labor more efficient. The answer, of course, is that there’s money to be made. Human creativity and artistic expression is one of the hardest things to leverage and maximize for profit, so we train AI to reverse engineer it. We train machines to be more human so that we can treat humans more like machines.
The potential for AI in homelessness policy is immense. What if we used AI to predict households on the cusp of falling into homelessness, and target them with services to keep them housed? What if we used it to generate paperwork and even simplify processes like Section 8, Social Security, or Disability? What if cameras on city vehicles were trained to detect vacant housing units instead?
But we don’t do that—because innovation isn’t a tool for progress, it’s a tool for profit.
And so I’m suspicious. When a new article pops up with an innovative response to the housing crisis, there’s usually a fairly obvious ulterior motive. Tiny home villages are an example—while I’ve seen this done really well and thoughtfully, most often they are a way of cheaply and inoffensively (to the housed public) getting people out of tents, sometimes under threat. Even when they are done thoughtfully, they still feel like a concession—a surrender to the truth that those who lives in houses or apartments have rejected people fully from those spaces, and so we need a new, segregated thing for these people.
Because the things that work aren’t really innovative. They’re the same things that always worked: care, selflessness, equity, compassion. Things like Housing First and harm reduction only feel innovative in a backwards world. Imagine thinking that giving people houses who don’t have houses is “crazy,” or that treating a crisis like addiction, which uniquely and especially plagues those who are hurting, by trying to minimize their hurt is “novel.” And yet that’s the world we live in. Housing First, in its truest sense, isn’t an innovation. It’s an acquiescence to the truest things about us; an affirmation that love can actually solve our biggest crises.
Or, as someone once so eloquently said, that Grace can lead us home ; )
These posts will always be free.
But the rest of my work—traveling to speak and lead workshops, creating content, advocacy and direct aid—is enabled and expanded by your support. Consider becoming a Paid subscriber to enhance my reach.
“It’s an acquiescence to the truest things about us; an affirmation that love can actually solve our biggest crises” 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭