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
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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cumbersome and expensive and outdated.”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
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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