National Housing Locator

Presentation to DASFeb. 14, 2008

Helping HUD Locate Habitable Disaster-Relief Housing

● NHLS Objectives– Identify available and habitable

rental housing for temporary housing during disasters

● Users– Citizens– HUD Users– Disaster Centers

● Assets and Partners– HUD

– Multi-Family & Single-Family Housing– Public Housing

– Other Federal Assets– USDA & VA

– Managed & Private Assets

Lesson learned from Katrina: the U.S. government lacked a national inventory of available housing. Citizant completed the

Concept of Operation and is delivering the application.

National Housing Locator System - Status

• Identify available temporary housing in the event of an emergency from existing housing data providers

(Housing Locator)

• Mechanism to collect and make available temporary housing properties not already maintained by existing data providers

(Housing Asset Collection)

• Process to manage and track housing aid provided to disaster victims

(Housing Referral System)

Housing Locator Application

Status Created a simple and

searchable interface Established industry

standard exchanges Signed up data providers

(Working w/ 34) Behind HUD firewall

Next Steps Add more data providers Add more geo-spatial

features

Housing Asset Collection

Status Identified process flow to

collect data from:• Public Housing Authorities• Multi-family Housing• General public

Working with FEMA

Next Steps Continue to create a simple

and easy mechanism to collect data from the local and state authorities

Mechanism to interface with other local data providers

Case Management/Customer Service

Status In process of gathering

requirements Disaster Voucher Program

process/application to be used for HUD assisted case management

Studying portal technologies to provide seamless interface to track assistance provided

Next Steps Continue to gather

requirements Create and validate process

flow

Inside NHLSRich User Experience• User Friendly• Utilizes AJAX for fluid user navigation

•Commenting & Mapping system• Desktop application look and feel under a distributed

Web environment

Rapid Application Development (RAD)• Short iterative development cycles• Developed using the RAD methodology

•Utilized an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to reduce development time

• Quick and flexible development

Perpetual Beta• Constantly accepting requirements• Soliciting requirements direct from Users

•The NHLS team actively engages in communications with the end users to adapt NHLS to the changing needs

• Adaptive/Corrective Maintenance

Long-Tail Approach to Data Collection• Accept data from a large number of sources• No data set is too small• Ability to collect data from numerous sources to

increase the total number of units available

Data Mashups• Utilizing Google’s map API as a data mashup

platform• Overlays

•Potential to display other overlays• Displaying grouped data enhances overall user

experience

Web Service/REST• Means of data exchange between systems• Direct access to property data to outside

organizations• Transfer of data using a simple form of Web service• Adhere to a standard transportation method

Lessons Learned

Seek out industry standards Met w/ industry and associations Leverage existing standards (e.g. MITS Project) Adopt a smaller sub-set

Use standard interfaces Inventory of existing services (e.g. Geo-coding, Maps &

mashups) Innovate and adopt

Collaborate Establish simple data exchange processes Create simple trading partner agreements based around a

common cause