Los Angeles is using AI to predict who might become homeless and help before they do
When a stranger called offering Dulce Volantin some financial help, she was skeptical.
"Sounds kind of shady," she recalls thinking.
At the time, Volantin and her partner, Valarie Zayas, were renting a bed at a place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. "Dormitory-style living," Zayas says. The women had met in prison a few years before, after each had been involved with gangs, and they were over-the-moon happy to have found love. But Volantin had suffered bad bouts of mental illness that required hospitalization. Zayas was hustling temp jobs to supplement Dulce's disability aid.
They'd slept in their car, then lost it. Stayed with family for too long. Then started donating plasma and selling some of their clothes to pay for motels. "By the seventh day, you don't have anything in your pocket no more," Volantin says.
Despite her doubts, she returned that phone call — and it turned out to be not only for real, but also life changing.
The call was from the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, part of a first-of-its-kind experiment to try and who exit homelessness every day, 227 others fall into it.
