Aggregating and Visualizing Housing Access in WA

THE OPPORTUNITY 

The Lunous team engages directly in our communities to find solutions to homelessness. We found that data quality and availability was sometimes lacking, though not because of a lack of effort or interest but more due to lack of time and resources. We saw this as an opportunity to help the hardworking housing providers in our community and others who are working to end homelessness. We created a tool, the Housing Access Navigator, that delivers a comprehensive overview of housing resources in the state of Washington.

RESULTS 

We built a dashboard tool with many levels of information about properties and housing programs that serve people experiencing homelessness. Specifically, the tool illustrates Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), Permanent Housing (PH), Transitional Housing (TH), Rapid Re-housing (RRH), and Safe Parking programs (SP) availability and utilization across Washington state. The data includes contact information, number of units, performance of the property or program, target subgroups that the program serves, and relevant political districts, depending on data available per property and program. The goal is to have the Housing Access Navigator be a source of data for housing providers and for other community members to use as a navigation tool to understand all the housing resources that exist in Washington state – all available in one central tool.

APPROACH AND METHODS 

We built the Housing Access Navigator using a variety of sources, including HUD’s Housing Inventory Count reports, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s performance Dashboard, publicly available information on housing provider websites, and information gathered directly from outreach to providers. From there, we used the information collected from all of these sources to build a comprehensive dashboard using Power BI and ArcGIS.