  The Simplified Access Metric (SAM) is a new approach for characterizing
emergency shelter access patterns as a measure of shelter client vulnerability.
The goal of SAM is to provide shelter operators with an intuitive way to
understand access patterns that can be implemented by non-technical staff using
spreadsheet operations. Client data from a large North American shelter will be
used to demonstrate that SAM produces similar results to traditional
transitional, episodic and chronic client cluster analysis. Since SAM requires
less data than cluster analysis, it is also able to generate a real time
picture of how shelter access patterns are affected by external factors.
Timelines generated from nine years of shelter client data using SAM
demonstrate the impact of Housing First programming and the COVID-19 lockdown
on how people access shelter. Finally, SAM allows shelter staff to move beyond
assigning transitional, episodic and chronic labels and instead use the "soft"
output of SAM directly as a measure of vulnerability.
