1. Coordinated Entry – Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) and Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) prioritization and referral
   
2. CoC-funded PSH eligibility

LOCATING LENGTH OF TIME HOMELESSNESS ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS

1. For Emergency Shelter (ES) or Street Outreach (SO) providers:

1. The listed assessment questions will automatically appear on the entry assessment, regardless of a client’s prior living situation.
   
2. As per HUD definitions. clients being served by an Emergency Shelter or Street Outreach program, will be automatically considered as literally homeless by the system upon enrollment.

2. For non-Emergency Shelter(ES) or Street Outreach (SO) providers:

1. The response entered as the client’s Prior Living Situation will determine whether the subsequent questions need to be answered through conditional logic.
   
2. Clients served by these programs are not assumed to be literally homeless, and the use of conditional logic limits the amount of data collection to only information required to determine chronic homelessness status.
   
3. Additional assessment questions appear based on the response to the previous question.
   

ANSWERING LENGTH OF TIME HOMELESSNESS

Record the type of living situation the head of household and each adult household member was residing in the night immediately before their project entry. All household members under the age of 18 should have their Prior Living Situation match the response provided by the Head of Household. Options for Prior Living Situation are available in a drop-down box and have been divided into four different situations: Homeless Situations; Institutional Situations; Temporary Housing Situations; and Permanent Housing Situations.

This question must be asked of every client to determine the following:

1. Program eligibility for RRH and PSH, and/or
   
2. Possible diversion from homelessness (for all project types).
   

Depending on the category of the client’s response, additional assessment questions may appear.

Record the length of time that the client was continuously residing in their previous place of stay, recorded as the Prior Living Situation. If the client moved between multiple living situations, the Length of Stay would be based on the time that they started staying at that location for this current episode.

Record the approximate date that this episode of literal homelessness began. Per HUD definitions, literal homelessness is defined as someone who is living in:

1. A place not meant for habitation (on the streets, in a car, the park, an abandoned building, an alleyway, etc.);
   
2. An emergency shelter, including a hotel or motel paid for with an emergency voucher;
   
3. A safe haven (NOTE: There are no safe havens in the state of Delaware, so this option should not be used in CMIS);
   
4. Transitional housing for those who were formerly homeless; or
   
5. Any other living situation, but are actively fleeing domestic violence.
   

This question is NOT asking:

1. The date that a client first experienced homelessness.
   
2. Clients to define their homelessness as not having a permanent housing situation of their own.

Housing Alliance Delaware understands that this assessment question can be interpreted in multiple ways by both the data collector and the client, and to use the following considerations (based on HUD’s definition of literal homelessness) to get a more accurate answer.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR DETERMINING APPROXIMATE DATE HOMELESSNESS STARTED:

1. Ask the client to reflect on the last time the client had a place to sleep that was not an Emergency Shelter (including a hotel or motel provided through an emergency voucher) or a place not meant for habitation.
2. There may be breaks in their stay in place(s) not meant for habitation or ES. These breaks are only allowed to be included in the period for calculation if:
   
1. The client moved continuously between places not meant for habitation or ES.
   
2. If the break in their time in places not meant for habitation or ES was less than seven (7) nights. These breaks can occur while staying with friends or family, or paying for a hotel or motel out-of-pocket.
3. If the client states that they were never homeless but are entering an ES or Street Outreach project, put the project Entry Date as the Approximate Date Homelessness Started.

1. Specific circumstances of where client moved from:
   
1. Institutional Settings
   
1. Includes, but is not limited to, jail, hospital, substance abuse or mental health treatment facility.
   
2. If the client’s length of stay was less than 90 days, the Approximate Date Homelessness Started would include that institutional stay.
   
3. If the client's length of stay was more than 90 days, put the project Entry Date as the Approximate Date Homelessness Started.
2. Temporary or Permanent Situations
   
1. Includes, but is not limited to, staying with friends or family, paying for motel out-of-pocket, staying in a host home, or paying rent for an apartment.
   
2. If the client’s length of stay exceeded seven (7) days. put the project Entry Date as the Approximate Date Homelessness Started.
3. This should be done with the assumption that diversion practices were completed to ensure that the service type is the client’s best fit.
   

Record the number of separate episodes of homelessness a client has experienced in the last three (3) years. Multiple episodes of homelessness should be separated by a break of homelessness (defined above).

If this is the first time the client has been homeless in the past three years, the response is “One time”.

Record the total number of months homeless across all episodes in the last three (3) years. This time period does not include temporary living situations if client stayed there for over seven (7) nights in a row per episode, nor does it include institutional stays for over ninety (90) days per episode.

Clients whose response is “One month (this time is the first month)” are stating that this is the first month during this period that they have resided in a place not meant for habitation or Emergency Shelter.

Clients whose response is “More than 12 months” are stating that they have lived in places not meant for habitation and/or Emergency Shelters for over a year (consecutively or non-consecutively) over the last 36 months.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

1. Although documentation is required by some funders (i.e., the Delaware Continuum of Care) for programs targeting chronically homeless individuals, completing data fields in CMIS does not require documentation.

1. CoC-funded program eligibility has additional data and non-data related requirements that should be considered when entering LOT data:
   
1. Information in CMIS relating to length of time do not qualify as formal documentation for confirming Permanent Supportive Housing eligibility. CMIS data, entered through Entry/Exits by Emergency Shelter providers, as well as letters confirming months/years of homelessness, must also be present in a client’s profile.
   
2. Chronic Homeless status calculation can be viewed after running a CoC APR, an ESG CAPER, or some Advanced Reports. Disability information also needs to be entered in the client’s Entry/Exit for this status determination to be calculated.
   
3. CH also pulls Entry/Exit dates from other homeless programs (ES, Street Outreach) as well as Exit Destinations (for permanent destinations) to calculate full LOT in system.
   
4. LOT Documentation will not pull into reports that calculate CH status, so be mindful of that when clients use documentation to supplement times that they are not homeless but the client's data does not show so.
   
5. PSH eligibility rules still state that documentation for a client’s disability, obtained from a medical professional, is required to be uploaded for all clients in CMIS. Contact HAD’s CoC team for more information, or CMIS team for guidance on uploading documentation.

1. The only data cleanup that will be completed by the Housing Alliance Delaware CMIS team will be using the Current Living Situation sub-assessment (completed by Centralized Intake, PATH-funded programs, and/or Street Outreach programs) or other providers’ Entry/Exit data, to ensure that we are getting as close to correct LOT data as possible for clients in the system.
   
1. This data cleanup will include the clearing-out (but not deleting) of outdated LOT assessment questions, as determined by HAD staff.
   

APPENDIX A: CENTRALIZED INTAKE RAPID-REHOUSING PROCESS

1. Coordinated Entry (CE)
   
2. Emergency Shelter (ES)
   
3. Street Outreach (SO)
   
4. Transitional Housing (TH)
   

1. Place not meant for habitation,
   
2. Emergency shelter, incl. hotel/motel paid for w/ ES voucher, or RHY-funded Host Home shelter,
   
3. Safe Haven, and
   
4. Transitional housing for homeless persons (including homeless youth).
   
1. While transitional housing is not considered a literally homeless living situation, clients are referred to several TH projects around the state after being determined literally homeless.
   

1. Direct answers:
   
1. MULTIPLE EPISODES – “Regardless of where they stayed last night –number of times the client has been on the streets or in ES in the past three years, including today"
2. Calculations for the following: 
   
1. ES/TH STAYS - Total count of ES or TH entries found in the Entry/Exit tab of the client’s profile
   
2. CH - Whether a client’s experiencing Chronic Homelessness based on responses to their Length of Time
   
3. CURRENT LOS (DAYS) – Number of days between a client’s project Start Date and when the report was run
   
4. LOS BEFORE ENTRY (MONTHS) – Number of months between a client’s Approximate Date Homelessness Started and project Start Date
   

APPENDIX B: DEFINITION OF CHRONIC HOMELESSNESS

(1) A “homeless individual with a disability,” as defined in section 401(9) of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 11360(9)), who:

(i) Lives in a place not meant for human habitation, a safe haven, or in an emergency shelter; and

(ii) Has been homeless and living as described in paragraph (1)(i) of this definition continuously for at least 12 months or on at least 4 separate occasions in the last 3 years, as long as the combined occasions equal at least 12 months and each break in homelessness separating the occasions included at least 7 consecutive nights of not living as described in paragraph (1)(i).

Stays in institutional care facilities for fewer than 90 days will not constitute as a break in homelessness, but rather such stays are included in the 12-month total, as long as the individual was living or residing in a place not meant for human habitation, a safe haven, or an emergency shelter immediately before entering the institutional care facility;

(2) An individual who has been residing in an institutional care facility, including a jail, substance abuse or mental health treatment facility, hospital, or other similar facility, for fewer than 90 days and met all of the criteria in paragraph (1) of this definition, before entering that facility; or

(3) A family with an adult head of household (or if there is no adult in the family, a minor head of household) who meets all of the criteria in paragraph (1) or (2) of this definition, including a family whose composition has fluctuated while the head of household has been homeless.

APPENDIX C: DE-CMIS GUIDANCE SUMMARY PAGE

1. This section must be reviewed for each project entry, especially when old answers appear.
   
2. ES and SO clients will always have all five (5) questions, while any other project type (PSH, RRH, TH) are designed with conditional logic.
   
3. If the response to Prior Living Situation is not considered by HUD as literally homeless, the last three (3) questions will not appear.
   
4. Leaving these blank or selecting “Client doesn’t know/Client refused/Data not collected” will be flagged as errors.