Thanks for feedback on Homeless Map
Hi Todd,

Thank you for your comments on the maps. We've had a lot of discussion inside that office about how best to represent the data. The problem that you mention has certainly come up, usually in the form of Tutfe getting quoted on not showing one dimensional change with a two dimensional representation. You're correct, the radial representation isn't the best solution. At the time we put out the maps, though, we felt that this view most accurately correlated the map against how the situation felt on the street.

Of course the physical space of the homeless doesn't follow a clean representation either. Whereas on the map we have dots representing population, in real life you would more accurately need something tube-shaped aligned on either the X or Y axis (depending on the orientation of the street) to show that this population is confined to the sidewalks.

For these and other reasons we've actually been working to move away from the current representation toward one the uses the scattered point data to generate a surface and represent more as a heat map. After lots of kicking around the script to produce the surface, I think we've got that process working pretty well now and we should be putting new maps up shortly.

Thanks again, Eric Richardson