“What we realized was that while the city has a ton of data — as all cities do — it was siloed, it was not up to date, it was missing a lot of the elements that a tool to help people find housing would need,” Cano said, and much of the data wasn’t on the internet yet. “The data set that the city now owns, as it relates to housing inventory, is arguably the most up-to-date data set for that type of property in the entire United States.
It originated in 2020 as a spreadsheet — developed by various nonprofit partners including Haven for Hope, the city, and South Alamo Regional Alliance for the Homeless — to help quickly find housing for people experiencing homelessness. Acosta first launched that growing list as a map in September 2021, “which unfortunately was not very user-friendly,” he said. Still, over the next 11 months, the map had more than 18,000 users.
SACRD takes the approach of “get as much data as we can, make it as useful as possible, and get it in front of people,” Neely said. “Our website is a little more basic … we really veered more towards information accessibility than anything else.”