mapping homelessness in Los Angeles

Downtown Los Angeles, California
Wash U Urban Design II
Spring 2016
Design Critic: Linda Samuels

This mapping is a layered drawing of various social forces related to experiencing homelessness. This part of downtown is an important historic and civic gateway in LA, but it is also the site of some of its most extreme inequalities, with many residents who need access to housing, employment, and opportunities after incarceration.

The mapping layers shown here reveal spatial “clusters” in terms of segregating the homeless/have-nots from the rest of the city. With vast amount of vacancy scattered across the site (map 3) and a large region of underutilized space east of Alameda (light gray), there is opportunity for these social clusters to be broken and integrated into a more diverse urban environment. The current homeless encampment sites (map 2) show there are some homeless camps that broke from skid row and moved along the 101. This reveals that not all homeless want to be associated with Skid Row and they shouldn't have to be.

This research was a pre-design exercise related to an urban design intervention.