Visualizing the Impacts of COVID on Housing in Colorado
About the Denver Data Storytellers Dataviz Contest
Earlier this fall, Denver Data Storytellers hosted our first data visualization challenge. Denver Data Storytellers is an informal and guru-free community of individuals passionate about telling stories effectively with data. Most participants are based in Colorado, though with COVID pushing everything virtually, we’ve been able to open up our membership to professionals around the country.
Our starting point was the visualization below, which Colorado Public Radio journalist Andy Kenney created data on evictions obtained from the City and County of Denver.
Our aim with this challenge was to help us all understand more about housing and identify ways that we, as data professionals, can use our skills to make a positive impact on an important Colorado issue. While many of our members have participated in data visualization challenges, we had never hosted our own so weren’t sure if our network would be excited to participate in something like this.
Andy helped us kick things off by sharing several of his source files, obtained from the state and city government. We launched this contest with an introductory webinar on Wednesday 9/16/2020, and teams of up to four individuals had the following week to reimagine the visualization above. Submissions were judged on three criteria: analysis, design, and storytelling. Our esteemed panel of judges included:
- David Napoli, consultant and faculty member at General Assembly and the University of Colorado,
- Melissa Kovacs, Ph.D., statistician and founder of FirstEval
- Steve Heiss, data & analytics solution principal at Slalom Consulting
- Meagan Longoria, consultant with Dennis Cherry & Associates
There were over 40 individuals interested in the contest, and ultimately, we received 12 submissions from individuals or small teams.
Highlighted below are the three winning submissions.
The first submission comes from Clare Sims, a Senior Data Visualization Designer at Boulder Valley School District. See below for a preview and click here to check out the full visualization.
Clare’s dashboard stands out for its analysis — she provided a brief summary of some important drivers of evictions (e.g., lack of affordable housing, an influx of people to urban areas). In addition, she integrated meaningful comparisons to prior year data for Denver and for the rest of Colorado. Also, importantly, she linked out to Andy Kenney’s original reporting and visualization on this topic, as well as resources for individuals facing eviction.
The second winning visualization was presented by Paul Buffa, a freelance web developer based in Boulder. Again, see below for a preview and click here to play with this interactive visualization (highly recommended).
Paul’s visualization, built using Javascript’s D3 library, excels for its interactivity. As you advance through the visualization, Paul layers on moving averages and explains why these are important to understanding housing and eviction trends. Paul also provides some meaningful analysis of the underlying drivers of these trends, by linking to reporting from Denverite and other local news outlets.
Finally, the visualization that received the highest scores from our judges was submitted by Katie Bridges, a Senior Data Analyst at the City of Boulder. Click here to view the full report.
Katie’s submission is exemplary for her empathetic messaging and direct focus on the potential outcomes for those individuals who may be facing eviction due to the pandemic. She pulled in data on relevant protective policies and renters that deferred rent, which helps show the scale of the population at risk should protective measures end. She also leveraged a natural experiment in our eviction dataset by showing the five weeks before and after the Colorado eviction ban ended.
In addition to the visualizations showcased here, we are grateful for all of our other contest participants: Team K Spatial (Steve Fenn, Abbie Amiotte, Matthew Krusemark), Patrick Hottovy, Ding Lang, Greg Chase, Team Data Diggerz (Breece Justice and Nate Bukowski), Stephanie Sevich, Sandra Marlene Amarao, Anita Gaikwad, Lara N. Southard, Ph.D., and Alex Effering. And, we couldn’t have pulled off this contest without the help of the Slalom Consulting Analytics team, including Melissa Kostin, Steve Heiss, and Gerard Barile. Their partnership and willingness to sponsor prizes for these winners were crucial to our success!
Visit Eviction Lab to learn more about housing and issues related to evictions nationally. For more information on this issue in Colorado, visit Andy Kenney’s reporting. To find out more about Denver Data Storytellers or to get in touch about how we conducted this contest, visit our website.
Paul Collier is the founder of Coeffect, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits establish the fundamentals for collecting data and communicating their impact. Find out more about his work here.
