Building an affordable housing search tool with the City of Austin
The housing search tool is a continuation of the work we did with the City of Austin to build an affordable housing data hub and portal. Once we had a reliably maintained source of affordable housing data, we wanted to make sure that information was shared with the community.
Background
This search tool could not have been useful without our work on the affordable housing data hub and portal. For more information about the data hub, check out our walkthrough post.
If you’d like more context and background about the Code for America fellowship and our work during it, check out the following articles and video of our presentation at the Code for America Summit conference:
- Our plan to tackle affordable housing in Austin, TX
- Building an affordable housing application starts with data
The Problem
Searching for affordable housing is a very difficult process. There is a low supply of housing and residents usually have a limited amount of time to find it. Residents are generally faced with working from printed lists with limited or out-of-date information. The other option is to go through a housing councilor who helps to place them from their own list.
Finding units that are considered affordable is just the first step in this long process. Availability is limited and residents must call each property to find out if any of the units are currently vacant. Not only that, but residents searching for affordable housing tend to have more barriers to acceptance such as broken leases, criminal history, or low credit scores. Having applications rejected due to those barriers can cause burdensome costs for the resident.
Our Solution
After shadowing a Section-8 voucher orientation and interviewing residents and housing experts, we found out that there were three main pieces of information that residents wanted most when searching for housing:
- Availability
- Acceptance Criteria (do they accept broken leases, low credit, etc)
- Location
We also learned that the majority of residents access the internet via a smartphone instead of a desktop so whatever solution we built needed to work well on mobile.
Armed with this knowledge, we took a look at the feasibility of getting reliable data from the data hub for the top three criteria. The location data was already there for the most part and wasn’t likely to change, we would just make it easier to interpret by plotting properties on a map. We had fields for acceptance criteria but they were not consistently filled out. Although a field was there for availability, we did not track that in the data hub because it is incredibly difficult to keep up to date.
So, we decided to focus on meeting 2 of the 3 top criteria for residents for the first iteration — location and acceptance criteria. We narrowed down the acceptance criteria category to three main items — broken leases, low credit scores, and criminal history. Since the data in the hub was incomplete for acceptance criteria, a housing councilor was tasked with calling properties to fill the holes.
While the data was getting filled in, we began designing and building the search tool.
The search starts with a series of questions about preferences. The answers to these questions are not only used to help filter properties, but they are also stored within the data hub to give the city an idea about what residents are looking for.
Once the user has set all their preferences, they are taken to a map view of all the affordable housing properties. Different colored pins represent how closely the property matches the filters selected.
Clicking on a pin opens up a view with more details about the property to help the resident make the best decision possible.
Conclusion
We finished an initial prototype of the search tool by the end of our fellowship. Since then, the City of Austin has taken over maintaining and hosting the tool. We still stay involved and up to date on how the project is moving forward. The development of the search tool is still in progress but the city has started doing beta tests with the tool and hope to release it to the public soon.
Initial user testing with the tool has been promising — some users were so happy a tool like this was possible that it brought them to tears. This search application has the potential to change people’s lives.
