New community of practice highlights digital housing tools

Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA) staff, in partnership with the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, launched a new virtual community last month to support government and nonprofit agency staff using digital innovations to improve affordable housing placement. 

The community of practice was developed to exchange ideas with other communities in the U.S. and Canada on how to address shared challenges and further affordable housing advocacy.

This community grew out of a longtime working relationship between Barry Roeder, BAHFA’s Doorway Housing Portal manager, and Roshen Sethna, a former partner at Exygy, who has worked with Doorway and the City of San Francisco’s DAHLIA Affordable Housing Portal. Doorway is a first-of-its-kind regional online portal that centralizes housing listings across most of the Bay Area. Both Doorway and DAHLIA help the public search and apply for affordable housing and help affordable housing property owners and operators create listings and manage applications.

Roeder regularly fields requests for information from staff in other communities interested in developing similar digital housing tools. Roeder and Sethna, who also worked together on DAHLIA, wanted to create an outlet for other people doing this work to be able to make connections, share resources and get support. They also want to leverage their collective data to advance housing work regionally and nationally.

"We want to take full advantage of this benefit of the public sector, which is to openly share our best practices across agencies," Roeder said.

The community – which includes government agency staff from several jurisdictions across the country – plans to meet every other month to chat and brainstorm solutions to common challenges. The community and some resources from the Bay Area were recently profiled in the Beeck Center’s Practitioner Picks: Digital Housing Edition.

For more information, contact broeder@bayareametro.gov.