To help those experiencing homelessness, Notre Dame researchers fight stigma with data
In 2020, Jack Vest was sitting on the side of the road across from a gas station in downtown South Bend, not far from where he spent each night sleeping hidden behind a fence, when a social services worker asked if he wanted a place to live.
He appreciated the choice, remembering when he was at LaSalle High School and the military showed up one day and also asked for him by name. That time, he was drafted into the US Marines and served several years in Saigon. The person asking for him this time was offering safety and privacy through a temporary housing program called Motels4Now.
Vest had spent about two decades living on the streets, and the 69-year-old veteran knew he couldn’t last much longer. He said people in South Bend either treated him poorly or acted as if he was invisible.
“It’s not easy to live out on the street,” he said in September 2024. “You don’t know if you’re going to be dead one minute or alive the next. I can’t do it no more.”
Finally in his own motel room, Vest visited the Street Medicine Clinic, where Beacon family medicine doctors discovered he was having serious cardiac symptoms and were able to arrange bypass surgery that saved his life. Within a few months, he became stable enough to take the next step—enrolling in an Our Lady of the Road program that helped him use his Social Security income to pay for an affordable long-term apartment.
“Look where I was at and look where I am now,” said Vest of his apartment building, just a few blocks from where he used to sleep behind a fence. “I’m happy. I’ve got a place.”
One of the leading drivers behind these two housing programs is Margaret Pfeil, a theology professor with a joint appointment in Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns. Now she is working with technology experts Georgina Curto Rex and Matthew Hauenstein to harness the power of AI (artificial intelligence) to measure and change the biases that the local public hold toward people experiencing homelessness. The group recently won a nearly $200,000 grant for its two-year project.
More than an economic challenge
Pfeil said people who were homeless need at least a few weeks, once they’re in a motel, to clear the fog of living in survival mode.
“There’s no vision for the future if you’re just wondering how you’re going to sleep safely tonight,” Pfeil said. “When people come in from the street, first of all, they just have to rest. It’s so exhausting to never really be able to get good sleep, and then to feel safe, to have your own room key and access to your own bathroom.”
Only then can people like Vest tell their story—the circumstances that spiraled out of their control until they became what some consider a public nuisance, or more charitably, an economic challenge. Pfeil considers them as people. For Vest, his challenge was a lack of health insurance. But his own heart issues were more a result than a cause.
After he left the military, he built his own trucking business, amassing five semis at one point. He was married and had a home and children. But then his mother got sick, and he said he spent everything he had on her care and funeral and experienced a quick downward spiral.
“You’re rich one time, then all of a sudden you’re broken,” Vest said. “Next after that I went homeless.”
Pfeil, an expert in Catholic social teaching, said there is a long tradition of religious communities providing others with the basic necessities of life because all people are created in God’s image. But the dominant culture in the United States teaches personal responsibility, implying that people without a home must not have tried hard enough.
“What does it do to a person when they bear not only the trauma of being without a home, but then the additional trauma of being told, on top of that, it’s your fault?” Pfeil said. “People who are unhoused face a lot of bias and discrimination based on very superficial judgments that people make about how they’re dressed or how they look or what they’re carrying. And this does tremendous damage, I think, on many levels, but not least to their dignity as human beings.
“As a society, we really need to transform cultural attitudes and biases toward those dealing with houselessness.”
How AI can help transform stereotypes
To that end, Pfeil began working with Curto and Hauenstein to harness the power of artificial intelligence to measure and change the biases that the public holds toward homeless people.
Pfeil said the project was conceived on campus in March at an interdisciplinary conference about homelessness. She gave a talk about the Motels4Now program that Our Lady of the Road developed during the pandemic. Afterward, Curto approached Pfeil about using AI to track bias toward people without homes—the type of research that Curto, who works at the intersection of AI and human development, has been conducting internationally for years.
Curto said her expertise is “using AI for social good.” She said AI can provide evidence regarding opinions about a population by using natural language processing techniques and large language models to analyze what’s being said on social media and local news.
“Having this information is like getting the diagnosis when you go to the doctor,” Curto said. “Once we examine this, we can also work on counteracting it with the local community.”
The researchers are building a model based on a larger analysis Curto uses and adapting it for local use. The two-year pilot project, for which the group won a Strategic Framework Grant, is a partnership with the city of South Bend and the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, where Curto and Hauenstein are faculty members.
“It is more difficult for local governments to find solutions on the complex topic of homelessness if the social community shares stereotypes, generalizing that people without a home are on drugs, lazy, or even dangerous,” Curto said. “In previous studies, we have identified a shared social fear and different levels of negative behaviors against the persons in a situation of poverty and homelessness—a phenomenon also known as aporophobia. Identifying, measuring, and reporting aporophobia contributes to better understanding how to mitigate poverty by acting on discrimination.”
Carl Hetler, the homelessness coordinator for the city of South Bend, agreed that learning more about local stigmas and misunderstandings of the homeless population can help city efforts. A former pastor, he was led to his current position by participating in his congregation’s ministry to homeless people for about five years.
“What I’ve seen as a pastor and in this role is that it’s important to get to know people and their situation,” Hetler said. “The public raises concerns about safety and property values, but we have a good record of keeping everyone safe. We have data to show the vast majority of the homeless are local. They are neighbors, classmates, family. We need to hear their stories to help them connect to the services they need.”
Vest’s story seemed to embody Hetler’s message. Vest said he felt “invisible” living on the streets, but he has made real progress with the help of dedicated social workers from the city and local nonprofits. In a separate Lucy Family Institute study, preliminary findings show a 60 percent drop in emergency room visits for people like Vest who took advantage of the motels and street medicine programs.
Hetler said he is excited about the opportunity the AI pilot program offers. “This is one of many examples of the city and Notre Dame working together to bring the research at Notre Dame to real-world problems,” he said.
Offering dignity
Pfeil’s long history of working with homeless people built the trust and connections necessary for this collaboration of the University with local nonprofits and the city.
A triple Domer, Pfeil said she was formed by her undergrad work at the Center for Social Concerns (now the Institute for Social Concerns) and two years as a Holy Cross lay associate in Chile. Returning to campus to study theology, she co-founded in 2003 the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker, two community houses of lay men and women that welcome guests off the street to live with them.
Three years later, responding to witnessed needs, St. Peter Claver opened Our Lady of the Road, a day center where anyone can take showers, do laundry, and have breakfast Fridays through Sundays. When the pandemic hit, a huge tent encampment went up in downtown South Bend, and the people there lacked access to water and sanitation. Our Lady of the Road donors raised money to move the tent dwellers into empty motels, an effort that became Motels4Now.
These efforts have moved more than 230 people like Vest into permanent housing in the last four years. The city helped the group buy a motel location and is now contributing $500,000 to operating costs, as well as helping secure more than $5 million in state grants for a new facility with a medical clinic.
Pfeil is president of the board of Our Lady of the Road and the planned New Day Intake Center. A fundraising campaign has raised more than half the nearly $19 million needed to build and operate the facility for its first two years.
Steve Camilleri, executive director of the Center for the Homeless in South Bend, said the new facility will serve a different population with more chronic needs. He said the “housing continuum of care” requires service providers to work in complementary ways.
“It’s met an otherwise unmet need in our community—that of a low-barrier place for people experiencing homelessness to stay and turn their life around,” Camilleri said. “Our team at CFH is so excited to continue our collaboration with the New Day Intake Center ensuring that every person that comes to them is housed and treated with compassion, love, respect, and dignity while they are at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives.”
Pfeil said her efforts derive directly from her understanding of her Catholic faith and Notre Dame’s mission. The theology expert pointed to Jesus’s example of providing for the least of our brothers, St. Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of the common destination of created goods, and Pope Francis’s teachings about all creation being interconnected.
“This is about the dignity of each human being created in the image of God,” she said. “Housing is clearly a human right and duty that serves the common good. Housing is foundational for human flourishing.
“One of my hopes for this research project and the larger effort is that we can focus the enormous research capacity of the University on the critical need for low-income and permanent supportive housing in South Bend, and I think that we could actually house everybody here if we put our minds to it.”
Story originally published here: https://www.nd.edu/stories/using-artificial-intelligence-to-change-minds/
