I recently learned that HUD requires cities to count their homeless population—once every two years in January—in order to receive federal funding. Yet as Joel John Roberts, CEO of People Assisting the Homeless, recently wrote in Huffington Post, instead of adding up the number of homeless sleeping in a given city on a given night, we should …
Continue reading ‘Counting and housing the homeless: the great work of 100k homes’ »
Today I want to highlight a great project that showcases the potential for technology to change city life for the better. Random Hacks of Kindness (or RHoK) is as an initiative started in 2009 by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank that hosts app contests aimed at the more social-justice side of open data. (It was originally aimed …
Continue reading ‘Featured Website: Random Hacks of Kindness and Sheltr’ »
I recently used open data from HUD about public-housing inventory and Census population data to examine which states had the most Section 8 housing units per person in 2010. (Section 8 is a federally subsidized program for low-income renters.) Here’s the top 6 and bottom 6: I’m not surprised that DC is number one, since it …
Continue reading ‘Which states have the most Section 8 housing per person – Census Tuesday’ »