Unsheltered Seattle

I built a little website to help wrap my head around the state of unsheltered homelessness in Seattle.

The site uses Seattle’s public customer service request dataset, which aggregates data from the Find It, Fix It App and city web portal to show recent (and, if you like, historical) reports of encampments, abandoned vehicles, and related issues:

Through the magic of GitHub actions, the website’s data is updated daily. I’ve learned that the location of encampments can change rapidly, sometimes as a natural consequence of people moving around, and sometimes due to aggressive sweeps by the city. The site shows timelines for major encampments so you can get a sense of how they’ve evolved.

The visualization also introduces the idea of “safe zones”: areas in the city that fall within roughly a block of public parks, schools, libraries, and child care centers. These closely match the zones that Portland has established as part of Mayor Wilson’s homelessness strategy. (Seattle has not established such zones and I’m not an advocate, but I think it’s worth understanding how they work.) For instance, you can use Unsheltered Seattle to filter down to highly reported abandoned vehicles parked near schools.

It’s worth noting that report counts, while directionally useful, don’t precisely indicate the number of tents or unsheltered individuals. Seattleites have to be motivated to submit reports. Different neighborhoods have different levels of engagement with the Find It, Fix It app, and some encampments are more visible or in more pedestrian-heavy areas than others. Just one tent in a prominent location along the Burke-Gilman trail is likely to gather more reports than twenty tents in a secluded slope at the back of the Queen Anne Greenbelt. The data also shows clear seasonal and short-term weather related patterns.

The site is open source, so if you’re curious about how it works, you can check out the GitHub repository. It’s a complete mess at the moment since I extracted it from a larger previous project. Hopefully I’ll have time to clean it up a bit in the future.