San Francisco Emergencies
Exploring Poverty and Fire Rescue Responses with Open Data
Each city has a defining characteristic that makes it attractive to visitors and new arrivals. While Los Angeles derives part of its identity from its notorious congestion and idiosyncratic arterial freeways, San Francisco is the dense metropolis that supplies Silicon Valley with much of its wealth and venture capital.
However, there was a time before San Francisco became the tech-oriented urban center we know and lampoon today, and not all of the city is gilded with such VC money. The city has an underlying emergency, and so we looked at some public data to bring it to light.
Given the city’s growing reputation for tech, you’d assume that its fire and paramedic crews would respond timely during an emergency call. Here’s how San Francisco tracks its fire department’s responses to emergencies.
Where There’s Smoke…
In writing this project, we looked at emergency management datasets from multiple cities to see if they had anything particularly noteworthy or profound to show us about their cities. We decided to settle on San Francisco for one primary reason: the City of San Francisco has the most comprehensive recording of data for responses by its fire department. In particular, we appreciated that the city inputs time stamps for each step of its emergency response in addition to the specific units dispatched and exact location for each call.
Thanks to this well-curated data, we created a granular picture of how fire department responses varied by the economic clout of the neighborhood.
Fire Incidents and Poverty
Using the latest update for CARTO software, we mapped out the relationship between fire incidents from 2016 in San Francisco and income distribution by households as recorded by U.S. Census tracts of the city.
Notice that the distribution of incidents and impoverished families vary across portions of the city. Most Census tracts had between 474 and 13 thousand emergency dispatches in 2016 while few had more 15% of its families living below the poverty line. Regardless of the latter observation, there were areas with notably high concentrations of poverty shaded throughout the map.
Where You’ll Find the Emergency
Unsurprisingly, the distribution of emergencies in the densest city on the west coast cluster around the city’s most crowded neighborhoods. In a city as compact as San Francisco, the close proximity of emergency dispatch calls mirror another well-known fact about the city. Contrast areas with highest number of emergencies from the interactive map above to the one copied below.
Inequality City
That’s right. San Francisco has one of the highest wealth disparities in the nation and the highest in the state of California. As you may notice, the areas on the map with the greatest number of emergency dispatches also overlap with the poorest neighborhoods of the city. That inequality is the real emergency and underlying characteristic that defines the city.
To elaborate, we isolated two examples to highlight the extremes of income inequality and the distribution of reported emergency incidents.
Bayview-Hunters Point
Tenderloin and The Mission
The two cases above serve as evidence of how poverty and inequality impacts life in cities. Low-income families lack access to safer or newer buildings. They also live in areas with higher rates of drug abuse and negative health outcomes, all of which contribute to more 9–1–1 calls.
Given the city’s history and founding myth as a place that bucks prevailing trends and one that embraces differences, the truth could hardly seem true with the current economic portrait of San Francisco and the emergency of its ongoing shortage of affordable housing.
Reference
Shout out to Kevin Nguyen 🔥 for making the map and for inspiring this article.
I invite you to browse the data for yourself to find your own observations about emergency dispatches in San Francisco.
