The Spatial Relationship Between Campsites, Homelessness Services, and Drug Offenses by Portland, OR Neighborhoods between 2025-2025

Group 5 - Logan Rossell & Talia Walderman

The number of homeless individuals in Portland, OR has increased over time from 11,430 at the start of 2024 to 18,260 individuals, according to the Homeless Services Department. We sought to explore the spatial relationship between homelessness in a neighborhood, available services, and documented crime in an effort to understand where areas of Portland, OR are underserving its unsheltered residents.

Regression Section

Regression Analysis

# creating regression equation

linear_model <- lm(log_clean_sites_per_capita ~ 
     Vandalism_per_capita +
     Burglary_per_capita +
     `Weapon Law Violations_per_capita` +
     library_count_per_capita +
       `Drug/Narcotic Offenses_per_capita` +
       pov,
   data = model_data)

summary(linear_model)

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = log_clean_sites_per_capita ~ Vandalism_per_capita + 
##     Burglary_per_capita + `Weapon Law Violations_per_capita` + 
##     library_count_per_capita + `Drug/Narcotic Offenses_per_capita` + 
##     pov, data = model_data)
## 
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
## -1.53966 -0.44095  0.03316  0.47680  1.61861 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                                      Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)                           -5.2374     0.2491 -21.028   <2e-16 ***
## Vandalism_per_capita                  37.8860    15.8624   2.388   0.0206 *  
## Burglary_per_capita                   31.0769    14.2750   2.177   0.0340 *  
## `Weapon Law Violations_per_capita`   150.4173   164.7347   0.913   0.3654    
## library_count_per_capita            1109.4228  1411.4095   0.786   0.4354    
## `Drug/Narcotic Offenses_per_capita`   75.0184    69.3616   1.082   0.2844    
## pov                                   -0.8137     1.8312  -0.444   0.6586    
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.739 on 52 degrees of freedom
##   (63 observations deleted due to missingness)
## Multiple R-squared:  0.6186, Adjusted R-squared:  0.5746 
## F-statistic: 14.06 on 6 and 52 DF,  p-value: 1.975e-09

Checking linear model assumptions

Visualization Section

Choropleth Map - Homeless Campsites Cleaned by the IRP

What is the IRP?

“The Impact Reduction Program is designed to be a stopgap measure that addresses the issues of hygiene, waste management, and public access that arise as a result of unsheltered homelessness. The program treats the symptoms of the problem of homelessness, but is not designed to be a root cause solution to homelessness.” Source: https://www.portland.gov/homelessness-impact-reduction/overview