This chart is really interesting because it is one of the few examples that displays national homelessness levels. I think that to show the geographical distribution of the homeless population the map and the use of a color scales is a very effective way to display the information. I think the color scale however is not used very well because the scale goes from white to gray to blue then back to gray so it makes it confusing to figure out towards which color it means the number of homeless people indicated on the map is increasing. I also think it was a really poor choice to make the pie charts that are on top of the graph the same color as the color scale, because it makes it seem as if they apply to the actual states on the map, whereas those percentages are calculated from the total homeless population. My last complaint is that they should have indicated what their definition of chronically homeless is. This definition actually varies from state to state and therefore how are they calculating this? The conditions are so vastly different from state to state that many individuals that one state considers chronically homeless are not chronically homeless in other states (MA for example has as one of its requirements that you have to have a disability, yet there are many non disabled people, or many who do not consider themselves as such, who experience chronic homelessness but are not counted as chronically homeless) It seems to me that the percentage of chronically homeless is very low because of this.
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