Using Maps to Identify Homeless Population in Milwaukee (Case Study)

December 09, 2014
4 min read


 
Over 100 million people around the world have no shelter whatsoever. With the turbulence in the global economy, homelessness is becoming an increasing problem all over the world. The growing rate of the homeless population especially concerns American society. One of the ways to begin resolving this problem is to create a specifically designed population study.
 
That exactly was the idea of Milwaukee Continuum of Care (CoC) and the State of Wisconsin. The City of Milwaukee, the largest city in the State of Wisconsin, is the 31st most populous city in the United States. On any given day there are more than 1,500 homeless men, women, and families in the Milwaukee area. Because of that, they decided to measure progress toward ending homelessness and identifying unmet needs of the homeless through the bi-annual Point in Time Count. This survey would capture the number of individuals who are homeless and living in emergency shelters, safe havens, and transitional housing as well as persons on the street or another place unfit for human habitation.

 

How could we help?

GIS Cloud provided a mapping tool which would serve as an enhanced counting mechanism for identifying the homeless population in Milwaukee City/County. It needed to be an application which would, among other things, help to track locations in the given period, track the number of people who took the survey, the ones who refused, or who stated they were not homeless, and finally, to use the data gathered for further data tracking.
 
So, within the options which would enable to optimize workflow (for example, to be able to communicate about the locations other outreach teams have already visited), project managers from Milwaukee asked for a solution which would help with the data collection, data manipulation and also with map creation.

 

What were the main challenges to be resolved?

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