{"id":1172,"date":"2007-03-20T14:42:24","date_gmt":"2007-03-20T19:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/03\/20\/mapping-skid-rows-homeless\/"},"modified":"2007-03-20T14:42:24","modified_gmt":"2007-03-20T19:42:24","slug":"mapping-skid-rows-homeless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/20\/mapping-skid-rows-homeless\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Skid Row’s Homeless"},"content":{"rendered":"

Downtown Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance. (Partly because I live there, but I can’t claim all the credit.) Amidst the high-rises and cultural institutions, residential building is booming, bringing restaurants and nightlife along with it. But the vibrant core of Downtown is just a few blocks from the epicenter of homelessness in LA: Skid Row<\/a>. This compact area (official six square blocks) is a magnet for poverty and dispossession, and intentionally so: the city has concentrated services for the homeless<\/a> near Skid Row, in an attempt to provide relatively easy access for the city’s itinerant population. But the neighborhood is by no means a pretty sight: the vision of small tents and ratty cardboard boxes stretching along the streets is an indelible one. And reports continue of local hospitals and mental-health clinics simply giving up on their worst cases and dumping them<\/a> on Skid Row to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n

Ideally, you don’t want to contain homelessness in a tiny area, you want to eradicate it completely. (The condition, not the people who suffer from it.) One step toward that goal is a better understanding of actual conditions in the region: who the homeless are, how many of them are on the streets, how they live and move through the city. Eric Richardson, who writes the excellent blogdowntown<\/a> covering everything about Downtown LA, as part of his day job at Cartifact<\/a> has been working to map Skid Row’s homeless population<\/a>. (Cartifact is also responsible for an interesting interactive map<\/a> of Downtown.)<\/p>\n

Skid Row Homeless Map<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s an impressive project, described here<\/a>, and the most recent update<\/a> has just come out. The data come from regular counts undertaken by the LAPD; systematic uncertainties will, of course, be as much of an issue here as in any data-collecting process. By clicking on the lower left corner, you can see the maps change as a function of time, or run through an animation of all the maps for the last several months. The good news is that the most recent count is the lowest yet; this is much more likely to represent a seasonal fluctuation than a long-term trend, but it’s still heartening to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Downtown Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance. (Partly because I live there, but I can’t claim all the credit.) Amidst the high-rises and cultural institutions, residential building is booming, bringing restaurants and nightlife along with it. But the vibrant core of Downtown is just a few blocks from the epicenter of homelessness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}