Interview - Saba Mwine-Chang
Saba Mwine-Chang
Noé Montes
If we can start with your name, the organization that you work with currently, and your position at this organization.
Saba Mwine-Chang
Great, happily. My name is Saba Mwine-Chang. I serve as the inaugural Deputy Chief Equity Officer here at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). And my role here is to support the equity department team in all of the initiatives that we've been working on internally, but also to work cross departmentally, across LAHSA, given that equity is one of our CEO's essential pillars of our work. That's sort of the internal-facing aspect of what I do, but then externally, I'm here to work in close partnership with our Continuum of Care, so those are all the organizations that are under our house, under our umbrella, under our family, that are doing direct services work with community who have experiences of homelessness. And then, of course, to partner with several other stakeholder groups: the city, and the county, as well as the research community. Because we do need a multi-sectoral, holding hands [approach], including the public, to really address this deep-seated issue of homelessness, and particularly from the intersection of equity, which has largely been unattended across the board in homelessness work ever since we started doing this work as a government.
Noé Montes
You mentioned that part of your work is internally to work across different departments. What are those departments?
Saba Mwine-Chang
Well, there are a lot of them, there's seventeen departments. One of the projects, for example, that I'm working on is around streamlining how equity shows up in our contracts with CoC (Continuum of Care) members. That's with our contracts team, which is also connected to finance as well. So that's really essential work. Also doing things like reviewing our RFPs (Requests for Proposals) with an equity focus.
Noé Montes
So at every step, or as many steps as you can, using that lens and trying to have that be effective.
Saba Mwine-Chang
Absolutely.
Noé Montes
This is a recent position, very recent in fact.
Saba Mwine-Chang
I started July 1.
Noé Montes
But you've been working in this area, in addressing homelessness, for many years. Can you describe a little bit [of that experience]?
Saba Mwine-Chang
Sure, I can share. I come to this work, personally I'd say, from my own marginalized identity as a Black woman and as a Black immigrant, and actually started working as an artist, and then realized, "Okay, there's a lot of things going wrong in this world that I want to contribute to, and that I can't just see happening without making some kind of an impact." And so out of college, I went into the nonprofit sector. But then I didn't get into housing justice [right away]; it took me a little bit, but not long. Now it's been twenty years that I've been working in housing justice.
Initially, it was around measuring access to housing based on race and other protected classes under the Fair Housing Act. I took a job posing as someone interested in buying a home. I went in and asked about terms of the loan and things like that. That's how we investigate how the real estate industry is doing their due diligence to respond to this Fair Housing Act, which was a gift from our forefather Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked to have this Fair Housing Act in place. That's how I got into the work. I soon ended up managing projects across LA.
And then I got to work under the Obama administration with the housing discrimination study that happens, should happen, every ten years. I got to work across many urban centers in the US to measure access to housing based on race. But then there were several other studies that the Obama administration wanted to do, so I got to work on wheelchair and lesbian, gay, and trans access to housing. In terms of data, I had my hands on qualitative and quantitative data that indicated that overall, people of color have a consistently difficult time gaining access to housing, compared to White folks. It changes slightly here and there, but consistently, it's a problem that we still have in the United States.
Noé Montes
Do you know when those studies started to take place? When we started gathering that data?
Saba Mwine-Chang
Well, it came to be right after the Fair Housing Act came into place in 1968. So those studies are longitudinal in that every ten years, they're meant to occur. And I think the last one indicated that there was some improvement. But to me, it was very clear that much more needed to be done in that area of work. But then at the same time, living in Los Angeles, I was seeing the rise of homelessness in our neighborhoods, and I thought, "Maybe it's time for me to turn my focus to that issue, which is clearly growing." And when I came into the homelessness space, another problem [I saw], which I think is a function of racism and White supremacy, is that we're often very siloed in our work. We're structured in such a way that we have to be very intentional in creating partnerships in this work. The silo between homelessness and fair housing [is an area] where I'm actually working to make connections around because I came into the homelessness space and found that very few people were talking about race as a driver of homelessness. Even though consistently, in every state of our country actually, Black people and American Indian and Alaskan Native people are overrepresented in homelessness populations. So myself, and a handful of people, took it upon ourselves to really educate around this intersection and to build alliances and to really bring it to the forefront. And our CEO, Dr. Adams Kellum [CEO of LAHSA], this was when I was based in Los Angeles at the Corporation for Supportive Housing, was one of those people that I was locking arms with to get out this understanding so that we can normalize this as a driver.
Noé Montes
If you can talk a little bit about data, about the importance of data, the function of data in this work. I'm talking more specifically about how data is used to shape both services and policy, but especially policy. For someone who doesn't know that much about the process or someone who may not even think about that correlation, I want to learn about that and I want other people learn about that as well.
Saba Mwine-Chang
Yeah, I think that's terrific. Thank you so much for that question. I mean, really, data tells the stories of what the problem at hand is. I mentioned that disproportionate representation of people of color. So that means that compared to the percentage of Black people, per se, that we have in our community, we are highly overrepresented in the homelessness population. I think now, it's seven percent Black folks in LA County, and we're somewhere around thirty-one percent represented in the homelessness population. So you look at that and you see clearly, there's a story here. Why is it that even though we have so few Black people in our community, we see so many of them having these experiences?
And similarly with the Latino community. Although our data from that community is likely underrepresented because among the racial categories of folks that we're looking at, of course race is a social construct, it's not based on anything real but it has a real effect on us. Latinos have the least amount of interaction with homelessness services. We know that we're not capturing their number, while we also know that a lot of immigrant populations, which often are Latino in our community, don't feel as safe gaining services and are often experiencing homelessness by doubling up. Where you have several people in a housing space that wasn't meant for that. The definition that we're working with under the HUD, Housing and Urban Development Department [federal government], does not include doubling up.
That's just an example of how data can really inform how we might actually address the problem meaningfully. How we might say, for example, build more wealth opportunities for Black people in our community, understanding that they are disproportionately represented in homelessness. Which means all of these housing policies that we've had, have disproportionately harmed that community. So now we have to think about, since wealth building really comes from homeownership in this society, how are we going to meaningfully address the needs of those community members? And for us in the homelessness response system, that means a lot of different things.
Noé Montes
What would be an example of how you get from the results of the data, what the data is telling us, to create more opportunities for homeownership or economic development in the African American community?
Saba Mwine-Chang
That's a great question. The other thing I wanted to say is that the other sort of instrumental aspect of data is that you need data in order to do research. So that's where innovation lies. Understanding the problem through how the data presents itself, but then working, hopefully, ideally, in community to develop research that can respond to such things. I think the example that I gave you was a broad example of the need at the very top. But there are so many elements to this work because we have an emergency that we need to respond to. But then we also know, from research and data, that the other main causes of homelessness are extreme housing shortage, across all incomes actually, as well as the high cost of rent. And then the third one, what I would say, is systemic racism. Understanding that all of our historical policies, redlining, even going back to segregation and enslavement, and land and labor theft, all of that, has dealt with people's ability to have a place to be, and are connected to housing issues. There are many ways that we can work together to use data to develop research to address the specific aspects of this need that has been growing for decades upon decades.
Noé Montes
You mentioned innovation in research. It sounds like some of that might be in what the actual questions that are being asked are. Because they haven't been asked before, or this issue hasn't been approached in a more nuanced way. Race, for example. Is that part of what you're thinking of?
Saba Mwine-Chang
I'd say so, yeah. I can give you an example, if you'd like, of some groundbreaking work that we've done at LAHSA to develop recommendations within community. The Ad Hoc Report on Black People Experiencing Homelessness was a community-engaged process to connect with Black people in our community who have these experiences and draw up comprehensive recommendations as to how LAHSA, the city, the county, and nonprofits working in this space can work together to address the issue broadly and specifically. That report is really groundbreaking for us as a system, but also across the nation. That kind of community-engaged research is really vital.
Noé Montes
Was the new aspect of this how the data was collected?
Saba Mwine-Chang
I think the new aspect was responding to the data in a community-engaged approach and developing recommendations specific to the Black community, or any community of color, honestly. Because like I said, when I came into this space in 2017, we were not really responding to the data that I mentioned. We knew, especially service providers knew, that, "Okay most of the people I serve are people of color, and the majority of people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles are people of color." But we hadn't had a concerted collective effort to that scale. In great part, it has to do with what I mentioned earlier about government but didn't qualify. That when we started, as a nation, addressing homelessness as we know it, with the McKinney-Vento Act at the federal level, that's what I meant when I said government, the advocacy for that work, or for that eventual funding by the federal government, was done in a colorblind way and wasn't connected to "Okay, this is homelessness, that must mean something to do with housing and by extension racism." So all the dollars that went out to all the cities and states didn't have that grounding. Now we have to be really conscious, and we have to collectively understand that this is an issue of systemic racism that we haven't addressed, in the same way as we have other aspects of the problem of housing shortage and affordability.
Noé Montes
That's interesting. So the data was known about the demographics of who was experiencing homelessness?
Saba Mwine-Chang
I'm not sure if they were collecting racial demographics. I don't know when that first happened exactly.
Noé Montes
But you're saying for at least some time, it wasn't a part of implementation [of policy to address homelessness].
Saba Mwine-Chang
Well, actually, initially I think homelessness was primarily a different definition of homelessness than we know it now. It was coming out of veterans coming home and experiencing PTSD. I remember reading that it was overwhelmingly White men. But then, as we got into the Reagan administration and his policies that were very racialized. And then going into the Clinton administration, particularly the one policy around incarceration. So at a certain point, I think around the ‘80s, early ‘90s, the population began to be consistently more Black and Brown because the safety nets were increasingly pulled and pulled apart, particularly with all the cuts to funding that HUD experienced under the Reagan administration. And even all the political racialized tropes, and of course we can't forget about what I think is vastly under-recognized, the crack cocaine epidemic and how much that stigmatized and maintained Black folks, in particular, in poverty. All of those policies really work together to create this disproportionality. In our region, we have the disproportionality, but we also have the majority of folks experiencing homelessness are people of color. So I do harken back to the original land and labor extraction that Black and Brown folks experienced at the beginning of this nation, because those are themes that have definitely been maintained.
Noé Montes
You see it as all connected. It makes sense. It's been a constant. It was initially a dispossession of land and an extraction of labor from communities of color. And then an intentional continued oppression and under-resourcing of these communities. It's led to so many of the social conditions that we have now, including homelessness.
Saba Mwine-Chang
Yeah, and housing is so deeply connected to homelessness. That's really the main way to build wealth in this society. We also think about the GI Bill, and how there was a lot of investment in White families over time. That one is really an important one because it allowed people to buy homes and allowed people to get education, and then pass their homes down to their children and build that intergenerational wealth. Black and Brown folks didn't get access to those funds and were not allowed [to buy homes]. In some regions, there weren't even institutions that a Black GI could take that benefit to. They didn't even have access because everything was segregated. So now we're seeing, for example, those [White] families were able to pass those homes down, and how they build equity in their homes, and then their children get educated. Now who can buy houses here? It's so difficult. I think that's a central issue. That's how we build wealth in our nation.
If we could find another way, for example, I went to Vienna last year as part of a group that went to study their social housing model and it was great. The majority of people in Vienna live in social housing. They have all of their other income that they're able to spend doing other things. They don't own their homes, but because the majority of the electorate live in that social housing, it's the norm. And they've had that housing stock like 100 years. So that's how they're doing their city. Meeting people that were living in these places, they were like, "Yeah, it's great, I have freedom and I have this basic right taken care of. This basic need taken care of." [Here] it's a basic human need that is also tied to money and wealth, so it keeps you stuck. Whereas, if you have that basic need met, you don't have to sweat and save just to keep yourself alive.
Noé Montes
Homeownership is such a big part of the American myth that we all still are striving for, but it's less and less attainable. The people in power in local governments, from what I've learned, have done quite a bit to maintain that power and to keep others, through discriminatory practices, from having it. So now we're here. We have this crisis here in LA County. Seventy-five thousand [homeless] people this year and last year. That's huge. You talked a little bit about the approach of everybody trying to work together to break down silos to address the problem because it's so complex. Is this a newer approach to this work?
Saba Mwine-Chang
I think relatively, Yeah, I know, for example, the Home for Good funders collaborative is a public-private table that came together around measures H and HHH. That was seen as a very new and innovative approach to have public funders as well as private. That was a model that they took to San Diego because they saw it as effective. I think in other ways, for example, the Homelessness Policy Research Institute that I just came from, and I'm still a member of that collaborative, is researchers, policymakers, service providers, and people with lived experience. In that circle, we're really understanding new research from all of those perspectives. So that we can ensure that research is effective, or driving, or supporting policy. And then it's also understood through the lens of practice. Because, you know, things on paper are different in practice. That's a really transformational space because we can look at all the dimensions of how we can work together. And how practice informs research and vice versa, and how policy can be involved in understanding the wealth of research that we have on homelessness, so that they're well informed in developing policies.
Noé Montes
It sounds like some of the innovation and some of the new work, or new ideas in this work, are around the questions that are being asked, the lens that this issue is being looked through. A race and equity lens. So now, both the questions to gather the data, as well as the implementation of that data, have this lens on it.
Saba Mwine-Chang
Yeah, hopefully. Absolutely.
Noé Montes
So, just to wrap. What does data tell us about the future state of homelessness? I know that sometimes data is used for projections. Is there anything that can be gleaned from the data in terms of that? I saw some information about how, nationally, homelessness is actually growing as well.
Saba Mwine-Chang
There are so many things I can say. Well, okay, I'll say two things. At LAHSA, one of the ways that we're working with our data and in community is around those recommendations which I mentioned. The Ad Hoc Report on Black People Experiencing Homelessness recommendations. But we also have worked with American Indian and Alaskan Native people to develop recommendations specific to their needs. In October, we will have had a year in working and developing, with the county, a Latinx People Experiencing Homelessness Taskforce, and they are about to finalize their recommendations in October in a report. At LAHSA, what we've already begun to do is to translate those recommendations to inform our key performance indicators. So that we're taking what they've given us and working to use that as our project work that we can then measure through these key performance indicators. That's one way that you can use that qualitative data that we got from those recommendations.
Then there's a lot of innovation in the research field that I think would be really interesting to explore in the future. For example, in healthcare, they're able to use data to do, like you said, simulations and projections of how a policy might affect the groups that they're serving. That I think is really cutting edge. If you have the data to inform all the different aspects of how people's experience might be shaped, then you're able to see that and try different things [with] this data modeling. There's also something that our partners at California Policy Lab are doing called predictive analytics, where based on data from county and city and people's interactions with those different agencies, they're able to make an estimation on who might be vulnerable to experiencing homelessness and reach out to those individuals to support them in a preventative way. Then in terms of another innovation, which is quite simple, of course it can come from data too, but I just wanted to mention guaranteed income as a really important intervention that was named in the California Reparations Report. Give people money and trust them to do as they will with their money. The fact that people haven't trusted us as communities of color is a reflection of the issue of systemic racism that we're trying to solve. Some of these solutions are also simpler than we might think.
Noé Montes
And not specifically related to homelessness, obviously. It's intersectional.
Saba Mwine-Chang
It's intersectional, exactly. I like to think of it as people who are experiencing homelessness have experienced the failure of so many systems across generations. I always brace myself for the homeless count. This year there was, for the first time, a reduction in unsheltered homelessness; that's huge. And that is a testament to the work that LAHSA has been doing over the last year and the leadership of our CEO and our mayor who's been very involved. We can do things. We can make an impact. But we just need all of us to be in and understand the issue in more depth. Even just as community members, which is part of the work that I did at HPRI. To just be a resource for a community that now knows more about homelessness, because we've been having this experience and people are deepening their knowledge. One of the things that excites me is now people are connecting homelessness to a housing issue, where that wasn't the case for the longest time.
Noé Montes
And in retrospect it's like, "Of course!"
Saba Mwine-Chang
Exactly, exactly, but it really wasn't. It was a radical thing to say. People would be like, "Wow, that can't be!" but now people [see the connection] so that that gives me hope too.
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Transcript has been edited for clarity.