Current Living Situation and Improvement Ideas

THIS PAGE PROVIDES RESOURCES AND GUIDANCE AROUND BY NAME LIST SCORECARD QUESTION 18

18.) Does your community’s By-name list track “current living situation” in real-time, including the date each status was last changed and the previous status? In other words, can your BNL track in real time when a young person’s status changes between:*

1. Homeless, in shelter

2. Homeless, unsheltered

3. Homeless, couchsurfing/doubled up

4. Inactive

5. No longer meets population criteria

6. Permanently Housed

What is “Current Living Situation”?

Current Living Situation (CLS) is a real-time account of what type of homelessness each young person on your By-Name List is experiencing. It is tracked in your Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) through assessments in certain projects.

HUD Data Standards 2022

Current Living Situation updates in HMIS ensure that your BNL is always up to date with the most accurate information about the young people in your community to conduct case conferencing.

How does it show up in your logic flow?

In addition to reporting what type of homelessness a young person is experiencing, Current Living Situation also plays an integral role in determining an active status. Your BNL logic flow depends on this data field in their respective HMIS projects to make this determination.

The purpose of a CLS update in your logic flow is to alleviate data quality issues such as long, open enrollments of young people who should otherwise be outflow to inactive. Projects with a CLS update entry field are projects that typically see lengthy enrollments and inaccurate counts of active. 

If a client meets CoC requirements for an automatic exit, in accordance with HUD Data Standards, their Project Exit Date would be backdated to their most recent contact date, according to their Current Living Situation record. This means that if an active client’s CLS is not updated, they can be prematurely exited. You will need to check if your community implements such an auto-exit feature in your HMIS projects.

If you do not have an auto-exit feature in HMIS, you will still rely on CLS updates to determine when the last point of contact between a provider and a young person was. This will allow providers to track, in real-time, how long a young person has been inactive and exit them when they’ve reached the number of days without contact specified in your community’s  inactivity policy.

CLS Best Practices

• Understand what program requirements for Current Living Situation data collection are outlined in the HUD HMIS Data Standard Manual.  (4.12 Current Living Situation can be found on p. 147)

• Providers should be updating CLS, according to the HMIS standards, regularly and within a given reporting period.

• Reasonable efforts are being made to contact young people on your BNL to keep their homelessness status up to date and reliable.

Troubleshooting CLS Data Quality Issues

How do you know if your Current Living Situation field is quality across your community? 

1. Know what projects in your community require CLS tracking and updates. (See image above)

2. Pull a raw monthly data report in an Excel spreadsheet

3. Filter either “project type” or “program name” down to only those that require CLS project updates 

4. Review the most recent CLS update date for the young people on your list. Has it been updated within the last month? If not, ensure that the last CLS update is reflective of the last point of contact and not a data quality issue

Actions to consider:

• Check with providers to see if they understand what the HMIS requirements are for  CLS updates within their respective HMIS projects.

• Establish a plan for regular check-ins between providers and young people to maintain up to date information.

• Create a data entry guidance document that outlines how to complete a CLS update in HMIS and a process for providers to complete this at least once a month for their clients.

• Regularly review your CLS field data in your community data team meetings