Findings

The map on the left side titled "Food bank and homeless services in downtown San Diego" contains two different symbols as markers: small red markers and larger blue markers. The small red markers represent the different food bank distribution centers in the area, and the larger blue markers represent the locations of low income and homeless service providing centers. 

The map on the right side titled "311 Homeless Encampment Report (2021)" contains red circular markers. These markers represent the locations of different homeless people and encampments that were reported via 311. These reports represented on the map are from 2021, and show the high density of homeless people and encampments in downtown. Since 2021, the count of homeless has increased significantly.

In 2021, the average number of homeless people counted was 961. This value was calculated using the month by month counts and averaging them for each year using data from downtownsandiego.org. 

So far in 2023 (as of April), the average number of homeless people counted is 1,856, nearly double what the average was for the entirety of 2021. 

One of the 12 questions asked during these semi-structured interviews is "How did you become homeless?". 44.45% of the interviewees responded that their reason for homelessness was due to something related to employment ("Lost job", "Lost job (pandemic)", and "Can't get job"). 

Although nearly 50% of the interviewees responded that their initial reason for homelessness was employment related, 100% of them stated that they had some sort of previous job experience. 

It is even more shocking to see that 77.78% of these interviewees that stated previous job experience and homelessness due to employment issues had at least some college experience.

"What is your perception of homeless shelters?" was one of the last questions covered during the interviews. To represent the different answers, a word cloud was created for easier visualization. The most commonly used words to describe homeless shelters were "unsafe", "privacy", and "restrictive". The word "privacy" was used when describing that they felt they had no privacy in the shelters.