What barriers do administrators face whilst upgrading their data assemblage?

Built for Zero (BFZ) is a data-driven methodology that some US homeless systems are using to allocate housing assistance. The ‘by-name data’ that BFZ needs is produced by actors within a ‘data assemblage’: a socio-technical system that people re/create to produce, analyse, and use data. Although BFZ is diffusing across the Global North, little research has examined the barriers that local administrators face whilst upgrading their systems’ data assemblage with this methodology.

This paper advances housing scholarship by using interview data from 28 US homeless systems to answer the question: what barriers do administrators face whilst upgrading their data assemblage with BFZ? I delineate four barriers that fray the network ties that local administrators need to produce by-name data: disinterest, fragmentation, noncompliance, and incapacity.

My analysis shows how data assemblage theory can be used to understand homeless governance, delineates several factors that prevent or complicate data sharing within homeless systems, and identifies new directions for research on homeless datafication.