Baltimore City government has been unable to “efficiently and effectively” serve the nearly 12,000 homeless individuals who live in the city, according to an audit report by the comptroller’s office.
The audit found the median time for the Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services (MOHS) to move a homeless client from application to permanent housing is 158 days – more than 5 times longer than the National Alliance to End Homelessness’s goal of 30 days.
Lack of adequate and available housing, delays in obtaining personal documentation, and lack of monitoring of those processes all contribute to the delay in getting homeless applicants into permanent housing, according to the report.
Baltimore City accounts for more than one-third of Maryland’s approximately 30,000 homeless individuals. The city also serves five times the number of clients as the jurisdiction with the next largest homeless population, Montgomery County, despite Montgomery County’s total population exceeding the city’s by more than 400,000 people.
The audit found that 66% of Single-Residency Occupancy (SRO) housing units and 27% of non-SRO housing units were declined by homeless clients who were offered them.
The auditor recommends that MOHS develop an inventory of permanent housing and analyze the performance of housing projects.
They also recommend that MOHS improve its processes for validating clients’ information and obtaining documentation, including suggestions to implement an automated process and schedule meetings with clients and representatives from the Social Security Administration and the Maryland Department of Health.
MOHS Director Irene Augustin and Deputy Director William Wells began leading the city’s homeless services office in June 2021.
Due to that change in leadership in the past year, the city is still working to develop and implement new procedures and recommendations from the previous performance audit report from fiscal years 2018 and 2017.
The audit also found a “data security concern,” but the comptroller’s officer omitted the specifics of that concern from its report to protect confidential and sensitive information.
