An open-data portal to address homelessness
By: Julie Munro
In 2016, over 3,000 homeless people were living in Sonoma County. The City of Santa Rosa wanted to take a data-driven approach and make public services more discoverable. The challenge was aggregating a large volume of data across multiple departments and presenting it in a useable format for the public.
As a solution, the city worked with Socrata to launch its Citizen Connect platform. Citizen Connect makes 311 data more accessible, surfacing information around public services, community facilities, and citizen inquiries. The platform is built with our tools, making it easier for the public and agencies to visualize and manipulate 311 data on a map.
The map component of Citizen Connect uses our Mapbox Streets style as a base for data layers. Users can upload their own data or add open-source datasets accessible through the system like local parks, schools, and libraries. Data can then be filtered by properties and visualized using different techniques like a heatmap and choropleth view. The platform also relies on our geocoder to translate addresses into map coordinates.
So far, visualizing data in this way has made it easier for the city to see trends and drill down into their causes. For example, the Santa Rosa Police Department used the heatmap view to identify hotspots of service calls. They could determine exactly where the incidents were occurring, as well as at what time of day. This led to the discovery that most incidents were actually around a homeless shelter in the morning when the shelter was releasing guests into the public. This occurred when the volunteer’s shift ended, coincidently the same time as rush hour when crowds of people were walking to work.
By simply having the volunteer stay an extra hour, incidents were decreased and therefore police no longer needed to staff up at that time of day, saving many dollars in police FTE hours.
The city was also able to use the maps to locate areas with the highest concentration of homeless encampments and allocate resources efficiently. For example, they discovered there were close to 70 people under three highway overpasses that were resulting in a large percentage of service calls.
Responding to public sentiment with data is easier as well. An agency in Santa Rosa was providing services for at-risk children, and residents in the area claimed to observe an increase in police calls. However, the data of police and fire calls showed no pattern of increase for that area. The city had tangible evidence to quickly address a perceived negative impact of its public assistance programs.
Want to make smarter, data-driven decisions? Learn more about using our maps for data visualization or check out the work we’re doing with cities around the world. Reach out to our sales team with any questions.
Santa Rosa Citizen Connect was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.