Recent iir_cpl_reports items

Solid Ground Year One Process Evaluation

Mon, 4 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On any given night, nearly 60,000 people experience homelessness in Los Angeles County.1 Although the County has successfully navigated homeless individuals into available housing and other services in recent years, inflows have outpaced exits to permanent housing. Between 2018 and 2019, despite the influx of Measure H-funded2 services, the homeless population in Los Angeles County grew by 12%.3 Although Van Nuys contains a relatively small portion of the overall population experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, Van Nuys has also experienced an increase in homelessness in recent years. In 2017, 589 people in Van Nuys experienced homelessness.4 In 2019, that number increased by nearly 30% to 765 people.2 In addition, compared to Los Angeles County as a whole, Van Nuys has a higher percentage of rent-burdened individuals. In 2017, 66.8% of individuals in Van Nuys were rent burdened (i.e., spent more than 30% of their monthly income on rent and utilities). In Los Angeles...

Expirations of Pandemic Jobless Programs Caused an Unprecedented Drop in Access to UI

Mon, 4 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At the start of the pandemic, Congress temporarily expanded Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs through the federal CARES Act In this report, we mainly focus on Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which expanded the weeks of UI eligibility This and other emergency provisions were set to expire on September 4, 2021, which is commonly referred to as a “benefts clif ” However, policymakers in some states chose to end these programs before that date This policy report evaluates the impact the expansion and expiration of these programs had on the US labor market using data from the U S Department of Labor, the Current Population Survey, and California’s Employment Development Department Using national data, we fnd the benefts clif caused a dramatic drop in the proportion of unemployed workers that are covered by UI, which was three times as large as a similar clif at the end of the Great Recession To measure coverage, we focus on the UI recipiency rate, which is...

Solid Ground Year Three A Process Evaluation of Solid Ground, a Family Homelessness Prevention Program Piloted by New Economics for Women in Van Nuys, California 91405

Mon, 4 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Solid Ground homelessness prevention pilot was started in 2018, with a goal of serving families in Van Nuys, California (zip code 91405) who may be at risk of homelessness but who do not qualify for the homelessness prevention services provided by the Los Angeles County homelessness services sector.1 The pilot is administered by New Economics for Women (NEW), a nonprofit that administers a FamilySource Center. FamilySource Centers are located in high-need areas and are designed to assist low to moderate-income families with a continuum of services, including financial counseling and referrals to community resources. While Solid Ground was originally conceived as a twoyear pilot, it was extended and NEW continues to operate it. The Solid Ground Program, which was previously administered by the Housing Department, now falls under the purview of The Community Investment for Families Department (CIFD) and since 2021, they have created seven additional Solid Ground homelessness...

Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in San Francisco

Mon, 4 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Pretrial electronic monitoring (pretrial EM) is a digital surveillance program that tracks the location and movements of people released to the community while they await the resolution of their criminal case. A locked plastic bracelet is attached to the person’s ankle, which includes a GPS tracking device that notifies the Sheriff’s Office if the person is not complying with the terms of their release. This report covers the characteristics and outcomes of people released by the courts to pretrial EM in San Francisco between 2018 and 2021. During this period, two significant events impacted pretrial detention. First, the In Re Humphrey decision required judges in San Francisco to consider ability to pay when setting bail and to select the least restrictive non-monetary release condition. Second, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers issued public health directives limiting the jail population in San Francisco. This report is not an evaluation or causal analysis...

Solid Ground Year Two: A Process Evaluation of Solid Ground, a Family Homelessness Prevention Program Piloted by New Economics for Women in Van Nuys, California 91405

Mon, 4 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Solid Ground is a two-year homelessness prevention pilot administered by New Economics for Women (NEW) that aims to serve families in the 91405 zip code (Van Nuys, California) whose less severe housing issues make them ineligible for traditional prevention services. A family may be eligible for Brief Solid Ground or Full Solid Ground, depending on the family’s score on the Prevention Targeting Tool. Brief Solid Ground consists of one day of services that may include: brief case management services; mediation and/or landlord dispute resolution services; referrals to mainstream benefits and/or other community resources; referral and linkage to legal services; and limited financial assistance (transportation and grocery cards). Full Solid Ground includes six months of all of the services available to Brief Solid Ground participants, in addition to direct financial assistance such as rental assistance (though not all Full Solid Ground participants receive financial assistance)....

Disparities in Access to Unemployment Insurance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from US and California Claims Data

Thu, 1 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits provided a lifeline to workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic. However, access to these benefits has been uneven across communities and states (Edwards, 2020). Identifying and documenting these disparities is an important step to addressing them and to rendering the UI system more equitable. Utilizing a conceptual framework of unemployment claims, we developed three metrics to measure access to UI benefits across the claim lifecycle. We then analyzed these measures to provide insight into differential access to UI benefits across U.S. states and across counties within California.

The first measure of access is the First Payment Rate and corresponds to the earliest part of the claim lifecycle. It measures the share of people who file their first claim and who subsequently receive a UI payment. After the First Payment Rate, the primary measure of access in the report is the Recipiency Rate. The recipiency rate measures...

Increasing Equity and Improving Measurement in the U.S. Unemployment System: 10 Key Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Thu, 1 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic had an immense impact on the labor market in California and the U.S., with unemployment reaching highs not seen since the Great Depression. The regular Unemployment Insurance (UI) system, as well as federal legislation that created supplemental UI programs and benefit extensions, played a fundamental role in the country’s economic and public health response. Individual-level data on who applied for and received UI benefits can provide crucial insights into understanding how the crisis evolved, how well the government’s response worked, and what the implications are for future crises. The pandemic also brought to the forefront more fundamental issues with our nation’s UI system, such as pervasive inequities in which workers actually receive benefits and large differences in benefit amounts and durations. While some of these issues have persisted for decades, a lack of access to individual-level UI data has prevented a deeper understanding of the extent...

CAAL-Skills: Study of Workforce Training Programs in California

Thu, 1 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Every year, over a million Californians receive workforce support and training from state and federally funded programs. In an effort to learn about the benefits of these programs, an inter-agency partnership led by the California Workforce Development Board (CWDB) created Cross-System Analytics and Assessment for Learning and Skills Attainment (CAAL-Skills). The CAAL-Skills partnership facilitates data-sharing across seven California state agencies that deliver thirteen workforce programs. Bringing this data together significantly improves the state’s ability to observe who is enrolled in these programs and makes it possible, for the first time, to measure the impacts these programs have on participants’ employment and earnings.

This report highlights findings from the first causal study to estimate the impacts of ten California workforce training programs that share data with CAAL-Skills. The causal impact measures the effect of receiving training on participants’ employment...

Three Strikes in California

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Criminal sentences resulting in admission to a California state prison are determined by both the nature of the criminal incident as well as the criminal history of the person convicted of the offense. Cases with convictions for multiple offenses may lead to multiple sentences that are either served concurrently or consecutively. Characteristics of the offense (such as the use of a f irearm) or aspects of the person’s criminal history (such as a prior conviction for a serious or violent offense) may add to the length of the base sentence through what are commonly referred to as offense or case enhancements, respectively. California’s Three-Strikes law presents a unique form of sentence enhancement that lengthens sentences based on an individual’s criminal history. Consider an individual with one prior serious or violent felony conviction (one “strike”) who is subsequently convicted of another felony. Under Three Strikes, the sentence for the subsequent felony will be double...

How the Expanded Child Tax Credit Helped California Families

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This report uses state tax and safety-net enrollment data from tax year (TY) 2019 to simulate the impact of the 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC), expanded under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), on children enrolled in safety-net programs in California. We find the number of children eligible for the CTC in the safetynet caseload rose 67% under the ARPA. Put differently: we estimate that one quarter of all children enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in California (about 610,000 children) became newly eligible for the CTC under the ARPA. As a result, children enrolled in safety-net programs in California became eligible for $3.6 billion in credit payments through the ARPA, over and above the credit payments they were eligible for under 2020 — and current — law. Overall, we find that 76% of eligible California children (about 1.2 million) who were enrolled in SNAP or TANF have likely received the 2021...

Signals of Distress: High Utilization of Criminal Legal and Urgent and Emergent Health Services in San Francisco

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

People with multiple, complex health and housing needs frequently receive fragmented care because the providing systems operate independently. Typically, individuals who come into frequent contact with the emergency medical system (e.g., emergency departments; emergency medical services) also interact with other health services and public systems such as psychiatric facilities, substance use treatment centers, shelters, and jails. Cross-sector care coordination is limited, in part, because data systems are not linked across physical health, behavioral health (mental health and substance use), housing, and criminal legal systems. To help San Francisco better serve this high need population, the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley and the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative worked with our partners in San Francisco’s public health and criminal legal systems to link together ten years of data from the physical health, behavioral health, housing, and criminal legal...

A Rising Tide: Dual Enrollment is Growing Among California High School Students