Open Source GIS Tools for Housing Activists and Advocates
Presentation Time: Fri, 12/06/2024 - 11:30
Keywords: GIS, Housing, Open Source, Activism, Advocacy
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that over 650,000 people were unhoused in 2023. The U.S. has an affordable housing crisis and advocates and activists are struggling to fix the causes and catalysts for this issue across the country. Prevention, being preferable to correction, highlights the importance of keeping people housed as the most desirable intervention. The difficulty with being proactive is in achieving the ability to see the when and where of potential problems before they arise. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow problems that are strongly spatially bound, such as this one, to be investigated in a variety of ways. These systems, however, need training and expertise to utilize successfully. This project aims to help address the typical GIS complexities by providing three ready-made map-based products along with the tools and simple instructions for gathering up-to-date data in an open source project that can be run with QGIS. Specifically, the project has maps and data toolsets that look at predicting gentrification, seeing levels of unoccupied housing in a region, and showing correlations between industries and housing locations for their workers. The project needs minimal technical skills to run the scripts that automatically gather the data and then to navigate and interpret the maps that get created as a result.
