.png)
Invisible Populations
PROJECT
"An estimated 650,000 individuals across the U.S. are homeless on any given night and 3.5 million Americans in any given year experience homelessness."
One problem with providing aid to these individuals is that quantifying and tracking their numbers in a given area is difficult, due to their frequent movement and sporadic contact with traditional tracking techniques like census data. Our project uses data from metrics related to houselessness from each US county to accurately estimate the relative number of houseless people in an area. This data will serve nonprofits and other agencies by pinpointing areas with little aid being provided but a higher population of houseless people.
Data Sets
Our modeling tool has state- and county- level data that creates an index for the estimated relative houselessness rates based on factors such as population density, cost-of-living components, and unemployment data. This model is related with distributed aid and grant money based on the COC (continuum of care planning body) and ESG (federal emergency grant money) databases.