OHCS' Housing Stabilization team focuses on housing retention and homeless services programs. Our dashboards highlight how our work benefits communities throughout the state. Below, you'll find the data limitations portion of our guide for the 2025-2027 Biennium Data Dashboard.
Race and Ethnicity
In order to broaden our understanding of persons who identify with more than one race and/or ethnicity, OHCS has adopted U.S. Census Approach 2 as described here. This approach is to highlight the most frequent multiple responses to race and ethnicity questions. OHCS included any population that had 200 or more members. All other multiple response categories were condensed into a single category labeled multiracial/multiethnic.
Data Limitations
County was chosen as the level of geographic granularity for this dashboard. The location is determined by the CoC region of the provider. Several CoCs serve multiple counties so when a client was located in one of those CoC regions, a client’s county was determined using the self-reported county of current residence.
Users will not be able to match the sum demographic or programmatic categories to calculate totals with the Total Served categories. This is due to the nature that clients can be served by multiple programs, clients may show in multiple counties due to migration, and/or clients self-identification changing between enrollments.
Populations not included
OHCS does not collect data on all homeless or at-risk populations. OHCS can collect data only from state- and federally funded programs that participate in a CoC's HMIS. People experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness who are served by a locally funded program run by a city, county, or other municipality are not captured in this dataset. In addition, the dataset used for the dashboard does not contain all data on the following groups: Victim Service Providers (VSP), Oregon’s recognized Tribal entities, and Culturally Responsive and Culturally Specific Organizations (CRO-CSO).
Data Suppression
In order to protect the privacy of individuals, any population less than 11 persons was suppressed. This is indicated by '*' on the dashboard. The threshold of 11 was chosen to align with HUD's 'Rule of Eleven'.
Victim Service Providers
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) contain strong, legally codified confidentiality provisions that limit victim service providers from sharing, disclosing or revealing victims’ personally identifying information, including entering information into shared databases like HMIS and must use a Comparable Database that collects client-level data over time and generates unduplicated aggregate reports based on that data. VSPs’ numbers are included on the dashboard, but only aggregated totals by program that are added manually. No other data, such as demographics, are present.
Oregon Tribal Entities
Tribal governments control their members' data, and OHCS recognizes their sovereignty and ownership of this data. The Tribes also run their own homelessness programs, and like city, county, and other local entities, OHCS can only access data from OHCS-funded projects and therefore cannot see populations served by programs run by Tribal Governments. However, OHCS does collect data on the By and for Initiative – Native American Tribes of Oregon Program (BAFI-NATO) as OHCS provides these funds specifically to the Tribes and has entered into contracts that allow OHCS to report on these data.
Culturally Responsive and Culturally Specific Agencies (CRO-CSO)
OHCS has set-aside funds to disburse toward organizations that provide services to specific cultural groups. Not all our CRO-CSO partners use HMIS, so our data is limited to what appears in our HMIS dataset. Thus, we lack total visibility in our dashboard on all CRO-CSO programmatic work.
Eviction Prevention Rapid Response (EPRR) Data
The EPRR program is administered by an external partner and does not input data into HMIS. Therefore, the data OHCS collects is limited to total count of participants. EPRR data is present on the EPRR dashboard page and in the Executive Order goal for rehousing.