Having delivered a shared housing application to a large housing provider in Los Angeles, we identified a need to know more about the needs of individual potential tenants and their healthy social circles.
Potential tenants that have a clean record, a stable and high income, and are advantaged in other areas have a fairly easy time in finding housing. Yet, even this privileged group often seeks roommates to lower the individual financial burden on housing costs. People that face housing insecurities are not that lucky; they are often depending on case workers and public assistance - a process that often turns the human into a number.
Both scenarios would benefit from a tenant profile that allows for easy tenant-to-tenant matching.
The attached paper illustrates why this is important, and highlights what kind of data would be required to guarantee a high compatibility between tenants for an improved living arrangement.
While the existing research focused on the homeless population (ahd the fault of existing housing service providers to treat these humans as such), the execution of the proposal can be applied to the general population and simpler housing arrangements (e.g. one tenant profile as a base for housing unit matching).
With this proposal, we are addressing the following possible direction mentioned in the challenge brief:
- Introduce common standards and processes and incentivize their adoption across projects
- Ensure the existence of a cohesive knowledge base
Also, we are aligned with the key metric of project synergies as this proposal itself is not a commercial project, but instead allows for open (and commercial) services to be built on top of the tenant standard with inbuilt interoperability. This proposal increases open-source contributions through its mere implementation and furthermore allows for other contributions upon the delivery of the standard for improvements.
There is risk associated with the delivery of the proposal. Scheduling conflicts or overall reduced availability or responsiveness of stakeholders is a risk that may affect the quality and/or completeness of the initial tenant standard drafts. This risk will be mitigated by designing the process of specification drafting with rapid iterations in mind.