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 on how to use the dashboards.
Determination of Persons Served
A person is considered to be served if they have an enrollment with a program, an exit from a program, or moved into housing within the 23-25 biennium. To ensure we captured persons who may have been enrolled in a program before the 23-25 biennium but still received services during the biennium, we additionally captured enrollments up to two years prior to the start of the biennium (July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2025). The two-year lookback was chosen because some program services last up to two years.
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:
Presentation of Data on Race and Ethnicity. 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
OHCS chose the county level as the geographic granularity for this dashboard. However, the data fields used to determine this are based on a data field that remains static once a client is entered into HMIS. This field may not be updated regularly and, therefore, may not accurately capture the current county where a client is residing. To mitigate this, we determined the county based on the location where services were received when there was ambiguity about the recorded county listed as a client's current location.
Data Suppression
In order to protect the privacy of individuals, any population of fewer 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.'
Populations not included
OHCS does not collect data on all homeless or at-risk populations. OHCS only collects data from programs receiving state and/or federal funding passed through the state of Oregon. People experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness that are served by a program funded by entities other than the state of Oregon are not represented on the dashboard.
Victim Service Providers (VSPs)
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. VSP numbers are included on the dashboard, but these aggregate total counts by program. These data can be accessed from the main page of the dashboard by clicking the VSP, CRO, and Tenant Services Data button.
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 access data only 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 (BAFI-NATO) Program, as OHCS provides these funds specifically to the Tribes and has entered into contracts that allow OHCS to report on this data.
Culturally Responsive and Culturally Specific Agencies
OHCS has set-aside funds to disburse toward organizations that provide services to cultural groups. Since these funds are used to help marginalized communities, demographic data will not be shown on the dashboard to ensure the privacy and security of these communities. The dashboard does display aggregated total counts of people served by these CROs by project type. Again, these numbers are tracked in a separate process and are not displayed on the main page of the dashboard. These data can be accessed on the dashboard main page by clicking the VSP, CRO, and Tenant Services Data buttons.
Tenant Services
OHCS provides funding to regional entities Springfield Eugene Tenant Association (SETA) and the Community Alliance of Tenants (CATENTS) to maintain a phone hotline directing people to specific programs and services to address a variety of tenant concerns. These services include rental assistance, utility assistance, discrimination, evictions, security deposits, tenant rights, and repairs, among others. Additionally, these organizations hold educational workshops, training classes, and outreach events to connect renters with appropriate knowledge and opportunities to address issues facing at-risk tenants. The dashboard displays total counts of at-risk tenants, disaggregated by the type of service need collected from tenant services hotlines, as well as the total counts of educational and outreach opportunities supplied by CATENTS. However, because the data is collected in a way that makes it difficult to report on the demographics of these individuals, the data is removed from the dashboard. Information on Tenant Services can be found by clicking on the VSP, CRO, and Tenant Services Data button.