The following Makeover Monday project asked us to review the following blog post which evaluates and visualises data associated with San Francisco area evictions. The specific task was to evaluate the line chart below and look at ways the visualisation could be improved. This is my attempt
The Report:
The original visualisation (What's Good vs What's Not):
The use of a line chart is useful to see the trend of eviction over time however this particular chart is somewhat busy which makes it difficult to easily see insights from it. The aggregation of the 'Other' Category results in meaningful insights being buried in mess of lines near the bottom of the chart and it takes visual focus from the reader. In this case the adage 'less is more' is probably appropriate to ensure the reader can surmise insight from the chart.
The Make Over:
I wanted to try and keep this to one visualisation but found that this was not achievable with just one chart. Hence I created the report page which comprises of the following;
Ribbon Chart: This shows the trend of evictions over time as well as how the reasons for eviction changed over time. I focused on only the top 2 reasons 'Owner Move In' (Orange) and 'Breach' (Black) and grayed out the rest. The reason for this was that they accounted for the top reason in 1997 (Owner Move In) and 2019 (Breach) respectively.
Horizontal Bar Charts: Used for both the reasons given for the eviction as well as a count of eviction by neighborhood. In both cases I use conditional formatting to ID those categories that account for 80% of the evictions (in Black).
Heat Map: Simple heat map to show geo-spatially what neighborhoods were impacted by reason and over time (additionally I use the neighborhood horizontal chart to be able to ID the same on the Map
The Analysis:
'Breach' is the number one reason for people being evicted in 2019 to date and has been the number one reason since 2007.
What is interesting is that the Lakeshore area seems to have a disproportional high number of these types of evictions. At this stage a better understanding on what 'Breach' means and when it can be used to evict tenants needs to be understood. I would have assumed that 'Non Payment', 'Roommate Same Unit', 'Nuisance' are all conditions for breach of contract so we would need to better understand how the data has been categorised as 'Breach' before additional insights can be derived.
Comments