National Housing Locator

1. National Housing Locator Presentation to DAS Feb. 14, 2008

2. 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.

3. 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)

4. 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

5. Housing Asset Collection • 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 • Status • Identified process flow to collect data from: • Public Housing Authorities • Multi-family Housing • General public • Working with FEMA

6. 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

7. Inside NHLS • Rich User Experience • User Friendly • Utilizes AJAX for fluid user navigation • Commenting & Mapping system • Desktop application look and feel under a distributed Web environment • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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

8. 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