TenantShield

We built an app where tenants take a picture of a housing issue, and it instantly tells them if their rights are being violated and what they can do next.

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What it does

Its a website designed to help tenants recognize their housing rights and what they can do in a seemingly powerless situation with their landlords. It uses the location of the tenant to determine the housing laws in the region and allows the user to provide an image of the issue and additional context to decide:

  1. Detect the unsafe housing conditions.
  2. Determine the housing laws that may have been breached.
  3. Helps you understand your rights as a tenant.
  4. Assists you in creating a follow able action plan.
  5. Supports you by generating a letter to provide your landlord.
  6. Uses your location to find the nearest 6 legal clinics.

How we built it

On the front end, we used react to build the UI and to route the pages on the client side, CSS for the styling, Google Maps API for the map component and the locations of the legal clinic locations and OpenStreetMap API for the address autocomplete in the address box in the signup page.

In the back end, we utilized Node.js, Express for the API endpoints, Google Gemini API to analyze the prompt and images given by the user, the Google Places API to find the nearest legal clinic and the Fetch API.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge we faced was the implementation of Maps in the website, the first challenge we faced was getting the address to autocomplete as a dropdown in the sign up page. The second and by far the biggest challenge was getting the Google Maps and Google Place API working but after a long debugging session, we had persevered. The third and final challenge was refining the UI/UX to make it more intuitive and easy to use.

What we learned

We learned a lot of new technologies especially implementing OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Google Places and Google Gemini API. Using Gemini to analyze and provide the solution to the tenants issues helped us learn tremendously about implementing the API and proper prompting. Using a completely new API in OpenStreetMap, Google Maps and Google Places to implement the address functionality, Map interface and to show the clinics near the location helped us learn more about implementing the API, understanding how it works and how it can be used in a real world situations.

We also learnt how important the user experience is in making or breaking a website, if the code has perfect logic but is unusable, no one will use the website. So, we took away that a well designed website is as important as a logically sound website.

What's next for Tenant Shield

Our plans are to expand from just using visual indicators of hazards, but also implementing ways to analyze documents to identify illegal leases, allowing users to create an evidence vault that stores evidence and creates a compiled document to store and use when needed. Also, expanding to for landlords to use to identify if their leases or practices they want to implement are legal in the location they are in.

Links: Github: https://github.com/Jason-Tan1/TenantShield

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