The homeless situation here in Portland, Oregon has been rated as the #1 challenge facing the city. Recently I was part of a group that pulled together data on the city’s homeless population and the resources available to them to analyse which neighborhoods have a higher homeless population and fewer resources to help them survive and get off the street.
In short, where could we be doing better?
Using data from the city’s Open Data Portal and information drawn from the 211info.org service we were able to determine which neighborhoods could see the most improvement, created an interactive map showing this information and published the code and data to Github.
On the technical side the work was performed mostly in Python and QGIS.
We are hoping to continue and expand this work. You can read more about it here.