When the data is essential to the process: addressing homelessness in Pierce County
In urban regions, it’s not uncommon for interventions to push unhoused people from one jurisdiction to another. Breaking this cycle requires innovative and collective action. That is why our team is proud to be supporting the leaders of Pierce County to create a unified regional approach to homelessness. It’s a monumental effort to get so many different jurisdictions to agree politically and logistically.
But as we began our process, a key challenge revealed itself right away: comprehensible data was not readily available, and there was debate about which local data was trustworthy. Our team worked to resolve these issues and produce 13 visualizations on homelessness, ahead of a meeting of elected leaders taking place next week.
Our team sourced data from the HMIS, the school district, and human services. We also did direct outreach to local governments and surveyed homeless service providers.
