[IMPACT]

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.

[FEASIBILITY]

June 2022 - requirement refinement:

• 4 Focus Groups
• 10 individual interviews

July 2022:

• Propose tenant standard to stakeholders
• Refine tenant standard draft

August 2022:

• Refine tenant standard draft until stakeholders approve
• Deliverable: Tenant standard draft

September 2022:

• Present at USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and/or other institution that promotes novel solutions that tackle societal problems

• Project management $8,000/mo, 2 months: $16,000

• 2 Data Modeling Experts $10,000/mo, 2 months: $40,000

• Focus Groups and individual interviews: $4,000

Matthias Sieber, Eli Selkin, and Tori Breitling designed, developed, and maintained a shared housing application (named AROYO) and accompanying questionnaire app for a large housing service provider (LA Family Housing) in 2020 through 2021.

While hundreds of people that were facing housing insecurities found suitable shared housing with the help of our apps in the first year, we identified many unnecessary bottlenecks in the processes imposed by our partner. The team is excited to build a more impactful and flexible solution that addresses the global housing crisis from different angles. The team is supported in project management, development, and establishing government connections where appropriate by additional members of Loxe Inc. Some of the team members are listed below. We reserve the right to make adjustments in the team configuration at any time.

Matthias Sieber

• Lead Engineer for AROYO - a shared housing project in 2020/2021
• Professional Software Engineer for over 20 years
• Recommendation Engine Specialist
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer
• CEO Loxe Inc.

Eli Selkin

• Sr. Software Engineer for AROYO - a shared housing project in 2020/2021
• Professional Software Engineer for over 10 years
• MS in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer
• CTO Loxe Inc.

Tori Breitling

• UX designer for AROYO - a shared housing project in 2021
• Product/UX designer for over 20 years

Victor Corcino

• Co-creator of AIM Community Tools (CA/vCA Tools, Voter Tool)
• Experienced Project Manager
• MSc Specialization in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer
• COO Loxe Inc.

Ambassador Steve Rhodes

• US Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Zimbabwe
• Professor of Negotiation, Conflict Resolution and Peace Building

In the closing keynote of the NODES 2021 conference, Matthias Sieber - then Lead Engineer at Citizentric - explains why homelessness is a graph problem that can be solved.

[AUDITABILITY]

We will measure the progress of this project for community auditability based on our milestones. Internally, we assess our progress formally weekly with retrospectives and sprint planning.

A successful implementation of the project establishes a tenant standard which can be used for varying housing applications. The deliverable is a specification of the tenant standard. It will be published as an open-source repository to further collaboration and showcase implementations.

This proposal is an entirely new proposal.

SDG Rating

Sustainable cities and communities.