This repo contains a compilation of daily snapshots of San Francisco's shelter reservation wait-list, which I started collecting on March 12, 2020 – around the time when the city was taking action as a result of health and housing impacts from COVID-19.
The compiled data: data/wrangled/sf-shelter-waitlist.csv
Data comes from the city of San Francisco's data portal; the dataset is titled "HSH 90 day emergency shelter waitlist":
https://data.sfgov.org/Health-and-Social-Services/HSH-90-day-emergency-shelter-waitlist/w4sk-nq57
The blurb:
Provides the seniority list for entry into HSH 90 day emergency shelter waitlist. The list began on 2/24/14 and is updated at least daily.
For more information, see https://sf311.org/information/waitlist and http://hsh.sfgov.org/services/emergencyshelter/
Here's an official info brochure titled "How to Get on the 311 Shelter Reservation Waitlist": local copy / online URL
I run a local cron job that collects the data every day at 8:40PM (CST):
40 20 * * * source ~/.bash_profile && cd ~/a/sf-shelter-waitlist/ && ./scripts/collect.py > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
The raw daily snapshots can be found in data/collected
The script scripts/wrangle.py compiles the snapshots into a single file: data/wrangled/sf-shelter-waitlist.csv