The City of Los Angeles is facing a homelessness crisis and it’s estimated that every night there are about 36,000 people that make the streets of LA their home. Homeless encampments have become part of the City of Los Angeles landscape and present a challenge to City officials and the residents of Los Angeles. In order to address this issue, the City’s Department of Public Works, Bureau of Sanitation deploy clean up crews throughout the City to clean up homeless encampments.

The Bureau of Sanitation relies on the service requests submitted by the City of LA residents through the City’s 311 phone line, website or MyLA311 app in order to identify homeless encampments and to initiate the clean up process. Given the magnitude of the City’s homlessness crisis, we wanted to take a deep dive and explore how the City is doing in responding to the homeless encampment clean up requests submitted by the City of LA residents.

The insights gained through the data analysis of the City’s 311 and the homeless encampment data from 2016 to 2018, along with the application of machine learning techniques, are great tools for the City to better plan and allocate resources in their clean up efforts. This will enable the City to perform the homeless encampment clean ups more efficiently and reduce the number of days that it takes to complete a service request.