Open-Source Housing

Open-Source Housing tackles rising housing costs by providing a web app that helps lower-income individuals and families find and secure affordable homes.

Comment

Inspiration

The main inspiration for Open-Source Housing was the story of one of our teammates, who struggled to find affordable, renovated, and secure Section 8 housing for their parents to live in.

What it does

The web app parses data from the US government low-income housing database and filters it through a certain price range (which would be updated based on forecasts, etc.) to output listings that is within the range of the user's budget. From there, further filtering via user input would be conducted to output the listings that the user is most likely interested in, along with any details (such as location, price, amenities, etc).

How we built it

The web app is built using React and JavaScript as the base. Adding parsing functionality and various other features required importing specific libraries from JS to implement all the necessary things for the web app to run.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled a lot with the parsing of the data as our original idea involved using SQL, which failed, and then eventually settling on PapaParse (which also took many headaches to get right). Timing was also an issue as one of our team members fell sick the morning of the hackathon, which led to a lot of scheduling issues. We ended up using Google Cloud's buckets to store and use our data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to complete a proof of concept for the web app we envisioned in our head. Though many of the features are still not implemented properly due to the limit of technology and hardware that we have, we are still proud of the progress that we have made in just 24 hours.

What we learned

  • How to use React.js and JS libraries
  • How to communicate and work together in a team to solve complex problems
  • How to parse data using PapaParse
  • How to use Google Cloud: Run and Build, APIs, and Storing Data
  • How to integrate DeepSeek API

What's next for Open-Source Housing

Our webapp currently only works for residents in South Bethlehem, though our data does encompass the entirety of the United States. Hardware and runtime issues were caused with the full list, so the first step would be to increase efficiency in the program and get better servers to run the web app. Our chat system is also not fully functioning, which would naturally be fixed as server issues improve. Certain CSS and user interface issues were also encountered but fairly easy to resolve given time and refinement. The listings also currently do not show any information, which was mostly because of time constraints, had those not been there more functionalities would've been added.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates