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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 16, 2018)
Page 10 News Street Roots • Feb. 16-22, 2018 Website a promising portal for low-income renters Affordable housing advocates are hoping a new online program can help low-income renters qualify fo r apartments BY AM A NDA WALDROUPE S T A F F W R IT E R ince the December soft launch of a fw w rfiftv website designed to make it easier for renters to find and qualify for housing they can afford, approximately 1,600 people have created accounts, and nearly half have filled out renter applications, according to the company, OneApp Oregon. In September, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and the Portland Housing Bureau trumpeted the rollout of the website and phone app, which allows prospective renters to fill out multiple apartment applications and pay only one application fee, potentially saving Rafèfgh Hitts* renters hundreds of dollars,- time and stress. The average rent for apartments listed on OneApp is $1,700. A range of apartments are listed, from $800-a-month units to luxury condos that rent for thousands of dollars. But much of the work to create the website has been done with an eye toward making it as accessible as possible to the most unstably housed and lowest-income tenants in Portland. Last year, the Portland Housing Bureau awarded a three-year, $375,000 contract to OneApp to list affordable-housing units on its website. The city is also supporting the website with a one-year $150,000 innovation grant. (The Housing Bureau did not provide Street Roots with the bureau’s contract with OneApp when requested, and bureau staff PHO TO BY A M A N D A W A LD R O U P E did not respond for comment by press Tyrone Poole, above, one o f the founders o f time.) O n eA pp Oregon, learned from his own The hope is that OneApp’s services can hardships trying to fin d housing that the make it easier and more efficient for process needed to be more accessible fo r people someone to find housing they can afford. in need. That is difficult in a rental housing market like Portland’s, where nearly half the city’s residents are renters and the average cumbersome and expensive and outdated.” rent grew by 4.6 percent last year. The “Going door-to-door and applying place-to- median rent price for an apartment in place is expensive,” Poole said. “Most Portland is now $1,879 a month, according people (who are) low-income won’t be to a Zillow analysis. successful at the process. There is a certain But simply finding housing can be amount of time and money that it’s going to expensive. Application fees - which cover take to locate one of those needles in the the costs of running a credit history check haystacks.” and criminal and background checks - often OneApp’s prospective renters log on, range between $35 and $60. Applying for create an account and enter a laundry list of housing at multiple properties and through information: their income, employment different management companies could end details, rental history, landlord references, up costing hundreds of dollars in application and so on. That information is then fees. compared with available apartments and OneApp Oregon was created as a solution screening criteria that landlords and to that challenge, one the company’s property managers provide to OneApp. The founder, Tyrone Poole, faced himself. website also runs a background check and In 2005, Poole tore ligaments in his leg credit report. while training to be a firefighter. He spent Prospective renters are then told whether more than nine months in and out of the they “pass,” “conditionally pass” or do not hospital. He became homeless and ended qualify for housing. A searchable map shows up living in a homeless shelter in the Goose the location of the units. A green marker Hollow neighborhood for three months. shows the units renters qualify for, a yellow During that time, he filled out rental marker shows units a tenant is conditionally application after rental application. He approved for, and a red marker shows the estimates he paid more than $500 in units a renter does not qualify for. application fees and was rejected by more Every applicant is given a “scorecard,” than 10 housing units. He found an which shows what factors play into whether apartment, six blocks from the shelter, just they qualify for housing: whether their as he neared the then-90-day limit there. credit score or their income is too low, they From that experience, he said, he have past evictions in their rental history, or learned that “the process to find housing is S a a s s w A y, M A O IS M S&¿ - --' ' ' ' t/w w e ro H A IM T A V IU A 'N y s t D e S T R E E T R O O T S IL L U S T R A T IO N they have unpaid rent. One hurdle: Access Online applications inherently can be challenging to people who are homeless, unstably housed or not computer savvy. That’s what Laura Golino de Lovato, the executive director of Northwest Pilot Project, thought when she first learned about OneApp. Northwest Pilot Project serves low- income and homeless seniors who are 55 years or older. When de Lovato thought of the organization’s clients, she realized how OneApp’s services, which are entirely dependent on using a computer, could be completely useless. “We serve people who don’t know how to use computers,” de Lovato said. “People who don’t have a computer. People can only access a computer at the library. People who cannot work through a housing application process on their own because they’re either homeless or they’re trying to figure out whose house they’re going to sleep at tonight... (and there’s a) high level of stress.” Sometimes there is a “lack of awareness that the people seeking housing assistance have some barriers” to filling out rental applications, de Lovato said. “Sometimes those barriers are being overwhelmed and stressed out. Sometimes it’s mental health. Sometimes it’s a disability.” Many of Northwest Pilot Project’s clients, she said, have poor vision or hand tremors, which can making filling out rental applications, whether online or on paper, next to impossible. The variety of obstacles low-income and homeless people face when applying for housing quickly became apparent to OneApp’s leadership when the company did a test run of the website in November. Approximately 100 people went in and out of a room in a building owned by REACH Community Development Corporation, a local housing builder. The room had 10 computers set up, and OneApp staff asked the volunteers to fill out the See ONEAPP, page 11
