# Housing Affordability Pitch

### What is housing?
Housing is shelter and it can be found at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of basic needs.


### What is affordable housing?
Housing is considered affordable to for families or groups of people who have a combined household income at or below the median. Often times it is recognized alongside a *housing affordability index*. Percent of rent to income should be around 30% to be considered affordable.

There are different forms of affordable housing:
- Homeless shelters
- Transitional Housing (temporary)
- Social/Subsidized/Non-Market Housing

This is an economic and political problem. People have opinions on the issue and discuss it on the internet.

**[A video example on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk)**

### Homelessness
Why is shelter so important? The impacts of prolonged homelessness can be devastating on a person. There are different stages of homelessness.
- **Hidden**: floating around couch surfing. This is the least reported kind and the least visible.
- **Transitional**: The most common type. Usually the result of a catastrophic event or sudden life change.
- **Episodic**: People who are currently homeless and have experienced it a few times in the past year. Could be substance abuse, mental illness, other medical problems.
- **Chronic**: People who have been continuously homeless for a long time.

I believe a good way to tackle the homelessness problem is to look at the root, hidden homelessness. This is where we see the effect of affordable housing. It is very surprising how many people are actually on the brink of hidden homelessness, so many people in North America live paycheck to paycheck.

Some countries that have very low homeless population such as Finland, have various affordable housing solutions for each stage.

### Why talk about this?
Well it is important to understand our topic so that we know what kind of data we can pull about it. Our job isn't to solve the issue or to give our opinions on it. Our job is to deliver objective data surrounding the topic in a clear and concise manner.

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## Visualization

### Idea 1: Homelessness
How to measure homelessness?
- If people are talking about homelessness in their area, ex San Francisco.

Geographic heatmap
http://www.understandhomelessness.com/explore/

### Idea 2: Housing Affordability Index
How to measure housing affordability?
Create our own index or get the real one
- looking at social media marketplace rent numbers
- average income in an area
- average rent in the same area
- compare the two
- see if we can pull actual government housing affordability index from somewhere

Geographic heatmap of the index, high vs low. This might be based on state or province.

### Idea 3: Homelessness vs Housing Affordability
I believe an interesting visualization could be taking the above two ideas and comparing them directly. Target the World or North America or just Canada. Is the index correlated in any way to the level of homelessness?

### Idea 4
Affordable Housing Sentiment analysis. See if we can determine the public sentiment towards this political issue.


### Idea 5
Dynamic word cloud, using TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency). Basically a way to cut out generic words such as; the, to, and, etc. Let's see what people are saying alongside "Affordable Housing".