Austin Affordable Housing

rmathur101 commented 6 years ago

What problem are we trying to solve?

Build tools to maximize high quality affordable housing in Austin TX.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

City government, austinites searching for affordable housing.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

Austin Affordable Housing Inventory City's list of apartments for rent Housing Authority's page about public housing Vacancy Clearinghouse: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs https://medium.com/@rmathur101101/big-data-and-affordable-housing-in-austin-tx-2102c66fdf9c http://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Blueprint_Overview.pdf

What help is needed at this time?

Finding problems to solve or answering questions that people have

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Getting feedback from potential users

Project management

Checklist for NEW ideas :baby:

Hey, you're official! You're now part of the growing civic hacking community in Austin. Here's a few things to get started (a couple you've probably already done).

[x] Create this idea issue
[x] Flesh out the who, where, and what questions above
[ ] Start the conversation about this new idea on Slack (this project uses #general )
[ ] Respond with at least one update on this issue within the next month

Checklist for ACTIVE projects :fire:

Let's get this project started! When this idea starts taking off, the Projects Core Team will start helping this project's lead(s) out with project management and connecting you to resources you may need. To get there, please complete and check off the following:

[x] Post an update at least once a month to this issue. Use BASEDEF for ideas, but it's ok even if your update is just "nothing new happened this month" or "we saw a small increase in traffic to our app this month". If there's no activity for two months, that's no problem, life happens. We'll just label this as backlog so others know you'll get back to it when you have the time. If nobody hears from you at all in more than two months, we may mark it as abandoned so that others can pick up this idea and run with it.
[ ] Take 30 minutes to complete Open Leadership 101
[ ] Create a GitHub repository and Slack channel for work.
[ ] Create a README file in your project repository. This file should help newcomers understand what your project is, why it's important, and kinds of help you're looking for.
[ ] Create issues to describe each task that you plan to do or need help with and how a contributor can get started on that task. You might start and stop a lot, so consider issues as your to-do list.

Checklist for FEATURED Projects :tada:

To have your project FEATURED on Open-Austin.org, complete the following documentation. In past projects, well-documented featured projects have more contributions than other projects.

[ ] In your README, link to the Open Austin Code of Conduct or write your own code of conduct.
[ ] Create file: LICENSE to give your project an open license, allowing for sharing and remixing.
[ ] Create file: CONTRIBUTING.md so others know how they can contribute.
[ ] Create an easily shareable project management artifact, like a Civic Tech Canvas or Open Canvas

Once all of the above is complete,

[ ] Create an issue on the open-austin.github.io repo with the title Add [my project] to projects page. An Open Austin leader will review this issue and post your project :balloon:
[ ] Tell the City of Austin. If your idea is in a shareable format and can benefit people around the city, go to that site and follow the instructions on the bottom of the page to showcase your work there.

If you get stuck at any point, feel free to reach out to the leadership team on Slack by adding @leadership to your message. We're here to help you make real changes to our city.

werdnanoslen commented 6 years ago

Thanks @rmathur101, I edited your post to include your Medium article, if you want to link back here from there, too.

twentysixmoons commented 6 years ago

Hey @rmathur101 any momentum on looking into this? I'm moving this to our backlog.

aidenyang commented 5 years ago

I'm interested in reviving this... I saw the last message @mscarey left in Slack about doing a search & scrape of the Vacancy Clearinghouse. I think writing that bit of code would probably be a good next step on this, then maybe finding some additional sources of affordable housing data on top of the ones Alejandro posted.

I'll do my best to get some of that code written this week, and do some research. I'll also do some thinking about other tooling besides maps, also. I had an experience trying to help a friend find affordable housing and it was a dystopian nightmare, so I think there's likely some helpful work we could do in this space. Please let me know if you are also interested in working on this - a message on Slack would be best!

twentysixmoons commented 5 years ago

Hey @aidenyang ! This is actually active and it seems like you connected with the right folks in Slack! :)

mscarey commented 5 years ago

Status update on this is that it's still active, but @rmathur101 wrote: "the trouble with this project is that CTM is hosting a fork of the open source version that we developed with Code for America. This means that any of the changes that we make to the codebase will not be reflected in the applications the city is hosting."

In other words, it could be problematic for new people to work on the project through Open Austin.

open-austin / project-ideas