Homeless shelters in Northern Virginia. This layer was created to represent a sector of critical infrastructure in Northern Virginia as a part of larger effort to map critical infrastructure for the region. This GIS layer was updated on 8/8/2023.

Data for the layer was acquired from NVRC's Department of Human Service's "Homeless Shelters in Suburban Virginia" list (https://www.novaregion.org/DocumentCenter/View/11750/Suburban-Virginia-Homeless-Shelters-Updated-January-3-2023-PDF?bidId=). This document is updated annually, and was last updated on January 3, 2023. The list includes the name, address, website, phone, and housing details for each shelter. A shelter was not included in the data layer if an address was not provided in the list or could not be found online,

Data was converted from its original PDF format to an Excel document using Adobe Pro. As the Excel document, addresses were separated by street, city, state, and zip to prepare for geocoding within ArcGIS Pro. The Excel document was then imported into ArcGIS pro and converted to a table. Addresses within the the table were then geocoded using the VGIN Composite Geocoding Service. Data points that did not match to their address where manually moved to the correct lat/long.