The Brief

You’ve likely heard about AI powering driverless cars, writing term papers and creating unsettling deep fakes.

Can that same technology also prevent people from becoming homeless?

That’s what Los Angeles County is trying to find out. Officials there are using AI technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing — and then stepping in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more.

It’s still an experimental strategy. But the program has served more than 700 clients since 2021, and 86% have retained their housing. It comes at a time when more than 180,000 Californians have no place to call home, and people are ending up on the streets faster than government agencies and nonprofits can get them into housing. Officials all over the state are turning to methods aimed at preventing homelessness before it happens.

L.A. County’s algorithm analyzes data from residents’ emergency room visits, jail stays, use of food assistance and more, and has sparked interest from Silicon Valley to San Diego. Final data on the program — which has roughly $26 million in federal COVID funds and is expected to end in 2026 — aren’t yet out. If it’s successful, it could have major implications for helping cities and counties spend their limited resources more efficiently.

“If we know who people are who unfortunately are going to have that experience, and they’re already county clients, it’s a real opportunity to do something early on in their lives to prevent that from happening,” said Dana Vanderford, associate director of homelessness prevention for L.A. County’s Department of Health Services.

Dana Vanderford, Associate Director of Homelessness Prevention at Housing for Health at Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, in Los Angeles on Feb. 29, 2024.

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Jules Hotz for CalMatters

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How does artificial intelligence predict homelessness?

The idea started in 2019, when UCLA’s California Policy Lab began experimenting to see if it could use machine learning, combined with L.A. County data, to predict homelessness. Then, the county paired that with money to intervene before people ended up on the street – the program is predominantly funded with $26 million in COVID-era funds from the federal American Rescue Plan.

The UCLA researchers start with a list of 90,000 people who recently used services from the county’s Health Services or Mental Health departments. Using 580 factors, the computer ranks those people from 1 to 90,000 based on their risk of becoming homeless. The people deemed to be highest-risk tend to show up in emergency rooms and jails at high rates, and have high usage of services such as CalFresh food benefits. But the model takes many more data points into consideration.

For example, if people receive services in many different geographic areas, it could mean they’re couch surfing — bouncing from one precarious living situation to the next.

“You sort of let the computer learn what it finds to be predictive over time,” said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA.

To train the algorithm, the researchers showed it a list of people who became homeless along with the services they used prior to losing their housing. Then, they had the algorithm practice “predicting” homelessness using old data, and checked to see if it was accurate. When they were satisfied, they started using it for real predictions.

How well does it work? Among the 90,000 people the researchers started with, 7% became homeless in 18 months. Among the 10,000 people the algorithm deemed to be highest risk, 24% became homeless.

If they were targeting fewer people (say 1,000 instead of 10,000), it would be even more accurate, Rountree said. But social workers aren’t able to get in touch with many of the people on the list, and others don’t agree to participate in the aid program, so they have to cast a broader net.

Is a computer really better at guessing who will become homeless than human social workers trained in this work? Rountree says yes — 3.5 times better, to be exact.

The problem with humans, she said, is that they’re biased toward the people they know.

“It’s just human nature to want to help the people that you’re in contact with,” she said. “They all seem housing-unstable and at high risk. You want to help those individuals or those families in front of you. But not all of them are going to become homeless and be on the street or use shelter if they don’t get assistance.”

Caseworkers also often prioritize people with lower needs, Rountree said. Someone who recently lost their job but otherwise is stable gets preference over someone facing ongoing struggles with their mental health or addiction, because the stable person is easier to help. But the stable person may not be the one who needs the help the most.

There’s also a belief that people with higher needs won’t spend the money they’re given wisely, Rountree said. But AI doesn’t have that bias, so it ensures the money goes to who needs it most.

The results are apparent. People the algorithm targets are much more likely to have been incarcerated, sought substance use treatment, had mental health issues or been hospitalized than the people who seek aid through L.A. County’s other homelessness prevention programs, Rountee said. In that way, this program fills a hole in LA County’s net of services, she said.

L.A. County’s other, more traditional programs geared to prevent homelessness rely on people reaching out to request help or on case workers referring clients.

Interestingly, they aren’t duplicating efforts. There’s almost no overlap between the people targeted by the AI algorithm and those served by traditional prevention programs, Vanderford said.

“We know there’s a significant population of folks who if somebody doesn’t reach out to them to offer assistance, they might lose their housing right out from under them without reaching out for assistance themselves,” she said.

Then, a human steps in

Four times a year, the Policy Lab researchers send L.A. County a list of residents the AI program has deemed most likely to become homeless. The county then mails those people letters, telling them they’ve been selected to participate in the program. After that, a social worker cold-calls them to tell them the good news.

Frequently, the person at the other end of the line is convinced it’s a scam. After all, how often does someone legitimate call out of the blue offering free money?

When that happens, case worker Genice Brown usually will ask if she can email them — a move she hopes lends a bit more credence to her pitch. Once she convinces them the program is real, nine out of 10 people agree to sign up, she said.

Genice Brown, a medical case worker with the Housing Stabilization and Homelessness Prevention Unit, in Los Angeles on Feb. 29, 2024.

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Jules Hotz for CalMatters

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Individuals enrolled in the program receive a base sum of either $4,000 or $6,000 (the amount is randomly assigned so researchers can assess the impacts of different amounts of money). Families start at $6,000 or $8,000, with larger families receiving more.

Brown can use that money for whatever her clients need most. Usually rent comes first, but it also can cover other bills. In addition, she helps connect her clients to doctors, dentists and mental health services. If they’re looking for work, Brown gets them gift cards for interview outfits, helps them with their resumes and role-plays interview questions.

She works with each client for three or four months.

‘I just really needed the help’

For 38-year-old Sandricka Henderson, help came just in time.

Diagnosed with lupus at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Henderson could no longer work her physically-demanding warehouse job. Disability benefits gave her barely more than $1,000 a month — just a quarter of what she made while she was working. With an 8-year-old son to support, Henderson found she was at least $400 behind on her bills every month.

Just before Christmas last year, Henderson received a call from a woman offering free money. Henderson was sure it was a scam, and braced for the woman to ask for her Social Security number.

But the social worker (who turned out to be Genice Brown) didn’t, and Henderson eventually realized the program was real. The first thing Brown gave her was a $100 giftcard to a local grocery store — a blessing, Henderson said, because she had nothing in her refrigerator.

Shortly after, Henderson’s landlord sent her a letter warning she had 10 days to pay her rent or be evicted. About a week later, Brown sent the rent money and helped Henderson avoid catastrophe. She also helped Henderson catch up on her car payment.

Now, Henderson no longer feels like she’s teetering on the edge of homelessness. She has some money in her savings account, and her rent is prepaid for several months.

“I just really needed the help,” Henderson said. Because she’s used to working hard and taking care of herself, she added, she never would have reached out and asked for it.

“It really did change my whole circumstances,” she said. “My son had a Christmas that I didn’t think I was going to be able to give him.”

The future of AI in homelessness services

Throughout California, new people are becoming homeless faster than aid workers can find existing homeless residents housing. In Santa Clara County, for example, for every one homeless household that moved into housing last year, another 1.7 became newly homeless, according to Destination: Home, a Santa Clara County-based organization focused on ending homelessness.

The L.A. County team has met with government agencies from all over the country who are interested in its AI model, including Santa Clara and San Diego counties, Vanderford said.

San Diego County is working on a plan for homelessness prevention, Tim McClain, spokesman for the county’s Health and Human Services Agency, said in an email to CalMatters. He wouldn’t provide any additional updates.

Santa Clara County met with the California Policy Lab earlier this year, and hopes to schedule another informational meeting soon, said Consuelo Hernandez, director of the county’s Office of Supportive Housing. The county has its own homelessness prevention program, which relies on humans triaging clients. If artificial intelligence can do that work more efficiently, it’s worth exploring, Hernandez said.

But at the end of the day, what they really want is more money to help the people that already fill their queues.

“Without having additional resources,” Hernandez said, “what is the true benefit of knowing there are more people out there who are in need?”

L.A. County CEO Fesia Davenport, who has been on medical leave for the last five months, has announced she’ll be stepping down in mid-April, citing health concerns. While on leave, she has faced scrutiny from the public and county employees — as well as a lawsuit — over a secretive $2 million payout she received last August.

Davenport gave notice on Wednesday to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors — her bosses — that she plans to step down effective April 16, according to a spokesperson for her office.

Davenport remains on medical leave and her second-in-command, Joseph Nicchitta, continues to serve as acting CEO, according to a statement from the CEO’s office.

“We appreciate Fesia's nearly three decades of service to Los Angeles County and all that she has accomplished on behalf of its residents and communities,” the statement added.

Davenport said in a LinkedIn post she was stepping down “to focus on my health and wellness.” She also emailed CEO office staff to say she’s learned she has a predisposition for the same type of health problem that killed her brother Raymond in 2018 and that two of her sisters experienced last year. One of her sisters will require 24-hour care for the rest of her life, Davenport wrote.

“The County CEO role requires an extraordinary amount of time and energy to meet the demands of the job, and although I originally assumed that I would be able to return in early 2026, I now know that I would be unable to continue to do the job as it deserves to be done while also prioritizing my health,” she added.

The $2 million taxpayer payout from the county was in response to her claiming she was harmed by a voter-approved measure that will change her job almost two years after her employment contract expires. The settlement was marked “confidential” and not made public until it was brought to light by LAist.

A lawsuit filed last month claims the payout is illegal because Davenport did not have a valid legal dispute with the county. Under the state Constitution, local government settlement payouts are illegal gifts of public funds if they’re in response to allegations that completely lack legal merit or exceed the agency’s “maximum exposure,” according to court rulings.

On Tuesday, county supervisors ordered new transparency measures in response to LAist revealing the secretive payout to Davenport. The county will now create a public dashboard of settlements between the county and its executives, and make sure all such settlements are reported to the public on meeting agendas after they’re finalized.

In her message to staff, Davenport said she was proud of their work together. She pointed to balancing the county’s budget, developing a plan to compensate victims in the largest sexual assault settlement in U.S. history and protecting the county's credit rating when other agencies were being downgraded.

As word of the damning sexual abuse accusations against César Chávez spread this week, California’s farmworking communities struggled to process and reconcile the disturbing details with the image of a labor icon and civil rights fighter many considered a hero.

Reached by phone, people described feeling stunned and disjointed after learning the news from a neighbor’s call, conversations with relatives, work meetings or social media.

“It’s almost too difficult to believe what is happening,” Maria García Hernández, a farmworker for more than 30 years, said in Spanish on Wednesday afternoon. The 52-year-old, who lives in Tulare County, said she and her parents benefited from Chávez's advocacy to include undocumented farmworkers in the last major comprehensive immigration reform in the 1980s.

“I still can’t quite believe it — that such a courageous person who fought for all of us to ensure we had shade, water, clean restrooms, better working conditions, that such a person, so dedicated to the people … could do that,” said García, who seeds and harvests plants in a job represented by the United Farm Workers, the union that Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded.

Huerta, now 95, revealed for the first time publicly that Chávez manipulated her into sex and raped her in the 1960s, telling The New York Times that the two encounters each left her pregnant. The Times’ multi-year investigation, published Wednesday, also detailed accusations by two women, daughters of union organizers, who said Chávez sexually abused them when they were children in the 1970s.

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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Gina Castro

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KQED

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When Rolando Hernandez first heard about the allegations from coworkers during a job training meeting, the former agricultural worker was confused. He thought the discussion must be about someone else.

“Excuse me, but which César Chávez are you talking about?” Hernandez, 33, asked at the gathering. “Because I only know of one César Chávez who fought for farmworkers’ rights so that there’d be better wages and not so much injustice in the fields.”

“That’s the one,” came the response, leaving Hernandez speechless.

“It landed really heavy,” said Hernandez, an outreach educator for a Fresno-based farmworker nonprofit who began harvesting chile fields as a 14-year-old in Arizona before working with grapes and oranges in California.

The fallout from the revelations was almost immediate. California lawmakers announced they plan to rename the state holiday named after Chavez as Farmworkers Day. Cities, states and organizations, including the UFW, moved to postpone or cancel celebrations planned for March 31 in honor of the Mexican American labor leader’s birthday. Officials are considering renaming streets, parks, libraries, schools and other buildings named after Chávez.

For decades, Chávez and Huerta’s collaboration to advance farmworker rights has been celebrated in children’s textbooks, biographies, movies and parades. Now, mothers like García are troubled that more was not done sooner to prevent and respond to the alleged attacks.

“I feel for them; it really pains me in the bottom of my soul what happened to them,” García said. “But if what happened is true, why wasn’t it spoken of a long time ago? Why now?”

Chávez died in 1993. Huerta said she stayed silent for 60 years because she feared hurting the reputation of a man who became the face of the Mexican American civil rights movement, known for national boycotts, marches and strikes that achieved significant gains for thousands of farmworkers.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta said in a statement after the Times investigation was published. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Luz Gallegos, whose childhood experiences accompanying her parents to UFW pickets and marches inspired her to become a farmworker advocate, said she felt shattered by the revelations. Now the director of TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant and farmworker nonprofit in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley, Gallegos praised the courage of Huerta and the other victims who carried their pain before choosing to speak up.

“We stand with our compañera Dolores Huerta and the survivors. What has been revealed is very painful and deeply disturbing,” said Gallegos, her voice cracking. “We know firsthand that silence has never protected our farmworker communities, and no movement or justice can ask people to stay silent about abuse — not then and not now.”

She, like others who spoke with KQED hours after hearing the news, said they want this moment of reckoning to help prevent similar abuses in the future. They hope the allegations against Chávez don’t undercut gains by the farmworker movement as a whole, built by many laborers and their families over decades.

“Right now, we are holding grief. I am holding so much pain in my chest, in my mind, in my heart,” Gallegos said. “At the same time, it’s a reflection that we cannot stay silent, we cannot let our movement end … reassuring our community that their voice matters and that no one should endure any type of abuse.”

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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Gina Castro

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KQED

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García, who started accompanying her parents to work in agriculture at the age of 10, said sexual harassment by farm labor contractors and supervisors was rampant. She was fired from jobs, she said, as retaliation for not agreeing to men’s advances. But joining the UFW helped improve her job conditions and feel supported to complain if there were problems, she said.

García said that if union insiders or others knew of the allegations against Chávez but failed to investigate or willingly ignored the underage victims, there should be consequences.

“If those people are still around — if they are still alive — then they must be held accountable,” she said.

Outside a courtroom in Fresno, where the UFW is fighting a Trump administration plan to make it cheaper to hire temporary farm labor, union president Teresa Romero asked the public to respect the privacy of victims who came forward, according to CalMatters.

“We do not condone the actions of César Chávez,” Romero said. “It’s wrong.”

Three candidates for Long Beach City Council have joined forces in their bid to unseat the incumbents they’re challenging in the primary election this June.

Deb Kahookele, running for District 1; Tara Riggi, running for District 5; and Sequoia Neff, running for District 9, announced their combined ticket in a video published on social media earlier this month.

At a joint campaign event in front of around 100 people in Bixby Knolls on Wednesday, they reiterated their goal of “breaking up the 9-0 votes” they say are all too common on the mostly closely aligned Long Beach City Council, where it’s rare to see a narrowly-split vote.

All three are political newcomers, coming from careers in real estate.

They’ve claimed the grassroots lane this election, winning backing from resident groups like the Long Beach Reform Coalition that views itself as a check on City Hall power, occasionally suing — and winning — on tax issues.

Kahookele, Riggi and Neff say they feel disenfranchised from the current city government, something they emphasize in their slogan: people over politics.

They’re taking on three well-established incumbents: Mary Zendejas in the downtown area’s District 1, Joni Ricks-Oddie in North Long Beach’s District 9 and Megan Kerr in District 5 that extends east and west from Long Beach Airport. The three have already raised tens of thousands of dollars each for their reelection races and won endorsements from the mayor, other local politicians, labor and business groups.

Tara Riggi, center, and Sequoia Neff, left, talk with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on March 19, 2026. Riggi is running for the District 5 seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Riggi said she decided to run for office after moving to the Cal Heights neighborhood and becoming president of the neighborhood association.

“My allegiance is to my community,” Riggi said at the event. “We are a truly grassroots campaign.”

Kahookele, who moved around a lot at an early age because her father was in the Army, said she found Long Beach home after moving to the city in 2010 and has since risen to prominent roles in several local organizations, including the Promenade Area Residents Association, Long Beach Pride and Long Beach Rotary.

“My votes aren’t going to be bought,” she said.

Deb Kahookele speaks with voters at a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. She is running for the District 1 City Council seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Neff, a Poly High School grad and mother of six who founded a local youth basketball league and track club, owns a brokerage firm that operates in multiple states. Early this year, she held a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking in her district.

“North Long Beach has been unheard and overlooked for too long,” Neff said. “And it’s time we’re a part of the conversation, and I just want to step up and do that.”

At Wednesday’s campaign event, they repeatedly hit on the theme that current representatives aren’t doing enough to represent their constituents, and they vowed to dig into the city’s spending to remedy a looming $80 million deficit. They pledged to vote against the possibility of any new tax measures.

Sequoia Neff speaks with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. Neff is a candidate for the District 9 seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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North Long Beach resident James Murray said he showed up Wednesday to hear more from Neff after she attended a recent Starr King Neighborhood Association meeting, and he came away convinced.

“I think it’s time for a change,” he said.

Dan Pressburg, a longtime neighborhood organizer in the DeForest Park neighborhood, said the three candidates joining together was the right move: He wants people outside the current political structure to have a chance to rise to power.

You can see a full list of candidates who will appear on the June ballot here. The Long Beach Post will have continuing coverage, including a full voter guide to be published in the coming months.