IRYNA HUMENYUK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, Master of Science in Journalism COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, Lede Data Journalism Certificate UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO, Bachelor of Architectural Studies, Honours Co-op
IS WEST SOMA A CRIME-C
CONTAINMENT ZONE? https://missionlocal.org/2026/04/san-francisco-western-soma-crime-containment-zone/
In one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods, residents and business owners say West SoMa has become a “containment zone” — a few blocks where the city’s hardest street problems concentrate and law enforcement feels absent. Police data from December 2025 to March 2026 backs the perception. SFPD reaches the most urgent Priority A calls in SoMa slightly faster than the citywide median. But Priority B calls — potential harm, a suspect nearby — take about 55 percent longer, a median of nearly 40 minutes. Priority C calls take 53 percent longer: nearly two hours. District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey says residents are right, pointing to severe understaffing at Southern Station, which runs roughly 66 officers short with no foot or bike beats. SFPD rejects the “containment zone” label and says 11 officers are headed to the station. For this story I built and rendered the heat graph along 6th Street corridor using Rhino 8, and then illustrated it in teal using Adobe Illustrator. I built the graphs using Datawrapper.
Clockwise from left: A. Number of calls for service per intersection in SoMa, Dec. 28, 2025-Mar. 28, 2026. Built and rendered using Rhino 8, illustrated using Illustrator, published using ai2html; B. Count of patrol officers vs. SFPD-recommended levels by station as of 2024. Built in Datawrapper; C. Total “calls for service” hours by police station; Built in Datawrapper.
CAN WE DESIGN TROUBL ST BART PLAZAS?
LE OUT OF THE 16TH https://missionlocal.org/2026/04/bart-plazas-redesign-16th-mission-sf/
For the first time in over two decades, BART is redesigning the plazas at 16th and Mission, with renderings due in April and public meetings and fundraising to follow. The plazas have been contested since before they opened: Mission residents killed a sweeping 1966 redevelopment plan but couldn’t stop BART, which in 1973 dropped “four holes in the ground” into the neighborhood. A 2002 redesign added benches and palm trees but foundered on poor maintenance, and later fixes fared no better. Restless for the official plan, the reporters asked urbanists what might work. Gehl’s Anna Muessig and others suggest treating it as the bus plaza it really is and reviving “active edges” — storefronts that have only thinned since 2018. Ridership never hit the 28,000-a-day the design assumed, yet the space still feels crowded, pointing to a deeper need: more public space, not just a prettier plaza. I drew an active edges map using Rhino 8 and Adobe Illustrator, and published using ai2html.
Right: Storefronts facing the 16th and Mission BART plazas, classified by whether pedestrians can see inside. Drawn in Rhino 8 and illustrated in Adobe Illustrator, published using ai2html.
clear windows covered windows blank wall or vacant lot
S.F. BUDGET CUTS ARE C GUIDE TO THE CITY’S $16
https://missionlocal.org/2026/05/explore-san-francisco-2025-2026-budget/
COMING. HERE’S OUR 6 BILLION BOOKS.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s two-year budget, due before June 1 2026, will lay out how San Francisco closes a projected $607 million deficit — a painful cut, but still a fraction of the city’s $16 billion annual budget. Some departments underspent, like Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which left $34 million unused. Others blew past their limits: Zuckerberg San Francisco General is projecting a $94 million deficit, and the sheriff’s department is on track to exhaust its budget by early June. The biggest wild card is Washington. San Francisco gets roughly $3.7 billion a year in federal funds, and after a late-Biden spike, that money dropped 53 percent this year, prompting 14 city lawsuits and a new $487 million reserve. Locally, though, revenue is mostly up — business taxes are booming under Prop M — so far softening the blow. I reworked a pre-existing D3 script with numbers that I collected and cleaned in Excel.
Clockwise from left: A. Data from the Budget and Appropriation Ordinance published on May 12 2026. Data shows the budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Prebuilt then modified using D3; B. Change in San Francisco revenue by source, 2024–25 to 2025–26. Built in Datawrapper.
QUEENS, BROOKLYN STU SWEATING IN UNDERFUN
https://ihumenyuk.github.io/extreme-heat-new-york/
UDENTS LEFT NDED SCHOOLS
In New York, heat is as certain as taxes — and for many of the city’s 1.1 million public-school students, it radiates from the classroom itself. After Central Park hit 99 degrees last June, its hottest since 2012, and the city logged 341 heat-related ER visits over four days, this project dug into the data. Plotting ER visits from 2017 to 2024 showed heat cases spiking sharply once temperatures pass 90 degrees. Experts note it’s the duration of heat, not the peak, that does the most damage, quietly amplifying chronic conditions in cases that often go uncounted. Yet roughly one in five NYC classrooms still lack air conditioning. Queens Village sits lowest, at 18 percent — despite sharing household-income levels with the A/C-rich East Midtown. The likelier divide may be racial: Queens Village is largely Black, East Midtown mostly white. I used Pandas and BeautifulSoup to knit together and clean several Excel sheets obtained from the NYC Department of Public Schools, and plotted my findings using Datawrapper.
Clockwise from left: A. Share of air-conditioned classrooms by NYC neighborhood, 2020. Built using Datawrapper; B. Daily high temperature vs. heat-related ER visits in New York City, 2017– 2024. Built in Datawrapper.
IS AI STEALING JOBS?
https://ihumenyuk.github.io/ai-us-jobs/ Is AI stealing jobs? The data says yes and no. Analyzing thirty professions the Bureau of Labor Statistics flags as AI-exposed, this project found most declining roles had been shrinking for a decade — long before ChatGPT. The likelier forces are subtler. Researchers distinguish automation AI, which replaces work, from augmentation AI, which complements it, explaining why software developers grew while budget analysts and postsecondary teachers fell. Add offshoring and a flood of computer-science grads — up roughly 1,800 percent since 1970 — and you get new coders serving at Chipotle instead of coding at Apple. The Economist argues Americans should worry less. This piece disagrees: white-collar jobs are still rising in number, but their share has flatlined since 2009, even as graduates keep multiplying. AI isn’t the sole culprit — but the market is shifting fast. I reformatted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor into a simple Excel sheet, and designed my charts using RAWGraphs, Datawrapper, InDesign, and Illustrator and published in ai2html.
U.S. occupations b lagged the national
by 10-year growth (2014–2024) and workforce size. Bubbles left of the 14 percent average (shaded) l rate. Base built in RAWGraphs and modified in Adobe Illustrator, published using ai2html.
Clockwise from top: A. U.S. white-collar jobs as a share of total employment, 1985–2024. After rising 8.14 percent through 2008, the share flattened, gaining just 1.43 percent since. Built in Datawrapper; B. U.S. employment by occupation, 2014–2024, per 10,000 workers. Built in Datawrapper; C. Share of U.S. bachelor’s degrees by field, 1970–2021. Computer science (red) grew about 1,800 percent, versus 380 percent for healthcare (blue) — most of it since 2008 (shaded). Built in Datawrapper.
THE RISE OF THE RIGHT
https://ihumenyuk.github.io/republican-history/ For the second time in less than a decade, Donald Trump’s election has sent writers back to a familiar question: what is America, really? This project asks a narrower version — how much of it can be read through the history of the Republican Party. By one way of counting, American history leans right: mapped onto today’s ideological baselines, about two in five presidents align with today’s Republicans, one in five with Democrats, and the rest fall into mixed or transitional territory. It’s a reclassification, not a party count. The same tilt shows in origins and schooling — Ohio has produced the most presidents, and Harvard and Yale dominate, with George W. Bush the only graduate of both. It’s measurement as much as history. For this project I built a scrollytelling header that retiles as you scroll, plus a pie chart, an animated circle chart, and a heat map — all in D3 except the map, which I made in Datawrapper.
Clockwise from top: A. Share of U.S. presidencies that align more closely with today’s Republican Party ( U.S. presidents by university and party lean. The orange pill represents George W. Bush. Built with D3; C header: the block-tiled background retiles and the on-screen text changes as the reader scrolls into the s
(39%) versus all others — Democratic-leaning, mixed, and transitional combined (61%). Built with D3; B. C. U.S. presidents by home state. Built in Datawrapper. Previous page: A scrollytelling-driven animated story.
iryna.humenyuk@columbia.edu