What is the Housing Inventory Count (HIC)?

Whether you're new to this field or you've been around a while, when you hear someone mention the Housing Inventory Count (HIC), you may respond “The what?!” If you've ever heard things like "all of the emergency shelters and available housing is full", or you've witnessed the reality of that yourself, read on to learn more about the HIC and why it is so important for every organization in HMIS to participate in it.

Over the course of each year, homeless response systems across the country must report to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in a number of ways. The full list:

Longitudinal Systems Analysis (LSA) - Looks at HMIS data by household
System Performance Measures (SPMs) - Looks at HMIS data by person
Point in Time Count (PIT) - Looks at the number of people experiencing homelessness on a specific night in January each year
Housing Inventory Count (HIC) - Looks at the bed counts (aka inventory) of all shelters and transitional/permanent housing projects in the community and how many of those beds are in use.

What is the HIC?

The HIC is basically a giant spreadsheet that shows us all the homeless-specific programs in a community along with how many people they can serve vs how many people they are serving (on the same night as the PIT count). There is also a bunch of additional info about funding sources and target populations. This is not looking at Services Only or Prevention Programs, rather it is solely focused on:

Emergency Shelter (ES)
Safe Haven (SH) - none in MN at this time
Transitional Housing (TH)
Permanent Housing (PH S, PSH D, RRH - lots of acronyms in this category but basically programs that house people)

Why is the HIC important?

You've probably heard statements like "all our shelters are full" or "there isn't enough housing". If you work directly in the community, these statements may reflect your real experience on the ground. Perhaps you've been in the hard position of turning someone away from a shelter. Or you've supported someone with a housing search and struggled for months to find an available housing unit.

But when communities seek more funding to address these problems, funders want to see the numbers (HUD, for example, asks this every year). It may be possible that one shelter is at capacity every night while another shelter across town is barely half full. One housing program may have a fully housed roster of clients while another has a lot of clients but very few leased up. The experience (and reasons behind that) from one program to the next can vary considerably. And before infusing a community with additional funding, it makes sense to get a better picture of the whole region. This kind of data can help explore questions like:

Are shelter beds too geographically concentrated?
Why might some programs be getting people housed faster or slower than others?
Is there a shortage of shelter beds in the community?
Are there enough housing program openings in the community?
Are there enough program openings but not enough unit vacancies?
Is a program under-utilized because it's not meeting the community's need in some way? What could be learned from programs that are operating at peak capacity?

What is my role in this, as an agency serving people experiencing homelessness?

Action #1: Make sure ICA knows if there have been changes to your programs, closures, or new programs!
Projects fluctuate year to year - number of people they can serve, their funding sources, populations, etc. While we collect this info when we set up a new project in HMIS, we do still need to verify it year to year. So we need each agency to participate in the HIC review process - to respond within the timeline given to any emails from ICA or CoC Coordinators asking for review of this information. If you get this email and you're not the right person in your organization to respond, help loop in your colleagues who can do this!

Action #2: Make sure your HMIS client data is up to date and accurately reflecting how many clients you were serving on the PIT night each January.

Communities need to be able to reliably turn to their HMIS data to know how many clients are enrolled (and housed, if applicable) on any given night of the year. The HIC specifically includes the January PIT night client enrollment number, so all programs will be asked to engage in client-level data quality review around counts for that specific night. If a program knows there were 12 people actively housed in their program on the PIT night, but the HMIS data suggests there were only 10, we need to figure that out. The program needs to look at its HMIS data and figure out what is causing that discrepancy. Did they forget to enroll a couple people? Did they make a mistake when recording Housing Move In Date? Did they enroll the parent/head of household but not the kids? While one program being off by a couple clients may not seem like a big deal, this can really add up across all the programs in a community - and it may paint an inaccurate picture (like showing there are plenty of open housing slots in a community when the reality is they are all at capacity - not good!)

My program doesn't even use HMIS. Do I need to do anything?

YES!!! The HIC records all homeless-specific shelter and housing programs in a community, not just the ones that use HMIS. If you don't use HMIS, then you of course won't be updating your client-level data there. But your participation in the HIC is still incredibly important to painting that real picture of the resources landscape in the community. Organizations that don't utilize HMIS will be given a separate way to share this information. We just ask that you reply when you get that prompt and invite dialogue if things seem unclear.

When does all this happen each year?

CoC Coordinators may begin preliminary outreach as soon as early November - starting the work of determining if any projects have closed or new ones are added, and encouraging organizations to notify ICA with any big changes of that nature.

In mid-January, ICA and CoC Coordinators will jointly send out links to an interactive spreadsheet, which enables each agency to do a deep review of their programs' rows on the HIC and automatically submit updates, as needed. For many programs, this review can go very fast, as there are may not be any changes year to year (and perhaps you already notified your coordinator and ICA of your changes and your rows are already up to date). Other programs have to do a little deeper digging, particularly if capacity tends to fluctuate year to year. Ideally, programs will have completed this review by mid-to-late February.

In February, programs should review their client counts in HMIS for accuracy. ICA provides instructions on how to do this data quality review. This client-level data quality clean up must be done by the end of February.

In Summary

The HIC is incredibly important! It's a critical part of understanding the resource needs in every region. And we need the real numbers to tell the story. HMIS is where those numbers need to be. When the call or email comes, please respond and know this action is so valuable and appreciated.

Do you love this stuff and want to go really into the weeds? Click here to access HUD's Housing Inventory Count materials.