Snip from blogdowntown, a blog about life in downtown Los Angeles:
Back on December 5th Cartifact launched the Downtown Homeless Map and I got to write about the process here. The project takes LAPD Central Division’s bi-weekly homeless counts and turns the data into a map, visually telling the story of changes in Downtown’s street population.
Today we’ve put online a new version of the maps, using a radically different methodology for showing the data. Instead of the dots of the old maps, this version takes the data and turns it into a “heat map” that shows the density of the population in different areas.
Link (Thanks, Sean Bonner)
Reader commment: Chris Arkenberg says,
Your post today on rendering homeless density as heat maps got me thinking… Wouldn’t it be helpful if the homeless had access to maps of actual street-level heat distribution? Subway vents, exposed heating ducts, dry cleaner exhausts, etc… Might make for a kinder winter.
Lex says,
This is the website for NYC’s street survey of the homeless where team of volunteers go through certain blocks and count all of the homeless people they can see.
I found an ad on CL where Columbia University pays you to act as a decoy homeless person the night of the count. My brother and I will be posing as homeless people the night of Janurary 29th from midnight to four in the morning. After that, we report if were counted and waht happened if we were not. Then the professor in charge gives this information to the city who uses the sucess rate at counting the known decoys to increase their homeless count by the same percentage.
It’s a great idea to increase the success of this count and I think it will be an interesting night. If anyone in the NYC area would like to participate, they can email shadowcount2007@gmail.com.
By the way, thanks for a great site. I check this site for updates more than I check anything else, including the news. Keep up the good work.