In Los Angeles, it’s now far simpler for nonprofits to find apartments to help people get off the street.
For someone living on the street or in a homeless shelter in Los Angeles, the wait to get housing through the county’s Coordinated Entry program–a system that tries to connect people who are homeless with an apartment or house as quickly as possible–usually takes months, leaving a person waiting without a home. A new platform may help make the wait a little faster, by making it easier both for landlords to list new apartments and for caseworkers to find them.
The platform, called Lease Up, has a website and app that looks a little like Zillow: On a map of the area, it’s possible for caseworkers to search for apartment listings, which are updated in real time, and filter by criteria like bedroom size or the type of subsidy available. For landlords, the new platform gives a single point of contact instead of multiple different homelessness organizations. When a landlord lists a new unit, nonprofit staff inspect the apartment, and then pay the landlord a holding fee of up to $1,100 so they can keep the unit vacant until a homeless client can go through the paperwork to move in.
Caseworkers can use the platform to search for a particular client’s needs. If someone wants to live near their doctor’s office, for example, it’s possible to easily search for listings close to that address. Each listing includes details about accessibility, critical for clients with disabilities, and it’s possible to see at a glance how far it is to the nearest grocery store.
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