This data project collects a variety of datasets related to homelessness in San Diego, Los Angeles and the US. The main work of the project is to collet and package data. The source packages are in the Github repo for this project and the built datasets are in the San Diego Regional Data Library’s data repository, in the Homelessness collection.

Additional datasets that are important for analyzing homeless issues are in the Urban Planning collection.

For beginning analysts, we recommend doing analysis in Google Colab, a hosted version of Jupyter Notebook. See this Colab notebook for the San Diego 2018 PITC for an example of how to get started. Google Colab is particularly valuable for shareing and commenting on notebooks.

An important related project is digitizing maps from monthly counts of Downtown San Diego homeless.

Joining a Project

If you’d like to formally join this project you can:

• Create an share your own analysis of the data in the repository
• Help with adding new datasets to the repository
• Work on the programs – a web application and image recognition – for digitzing homelessness maps.

If you’d like to join the project, please follow these instructions for joining a project.

Resources

Important resource for this project include:

• Github repo for this project
• Homelessness collection.
• Urban Planning collection.
• Homeless map digitization project
• Tutorial Jupyter Notebook
• PITC And Planning Geodatabase A Geodatabase file, with an embedded QGIS project, with select homelessness files and the San Diego planning database.

Tools

We recommend these tools, all of which are free, open source, or both:

• Jupyter Notebook, either via Anaconda, or Google Colaboratory
• Tableau Public
• QGIS for Geographic files

Research

• A Research Agenda for Ending Homelessness
• National Homeless Information Project
• San Diego Regional Taskforce for the Homeless
• Economic Roudtable