Digital Arts Service Corps - housing

A Note About Rental Assistance

admin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:18:06 +0000

VISTA members can recieve rent assistance in a couple of different ways.

While VISTA members cannot recieve additional money from their site, they can recieve further assistance like reimbusement for travel expenses and housing assistance. A site cannot give you money for housing, but they can provide free housing or write a landlord a check. Perhaps your director can put you up for a couple weeks in his basement while you are room searching. Maybe there are some extra funds to help with big city rent. Needless to say, all this depends on the resources available to your site.
One of the rarely discussed perks of service is that VISTAs qualify for housing through section 8 (or H.U.D.) and can actually pay a rent of $0 a month, in some cases. It really depends on what is available in an area, as well as the area's demand for low-income housing. The bigger the city/town, the more likely a lengthy waiting list. As with other federal assistance, your locality will require different amounts of bureaucracy to wade through.

Tip: Housing Maps is a website that overlays craigslist housing listings on a map so you can immediately see how close an apartment is to your work/certain neighborhoods/etc. Great tool when searching for a place to live.

2 Ways to Use Craigslist to Find a Cheap Place

Morgan Sully — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:42:10 +0000

So you've just signed up to live for a whole YEAR at poverty level AND you might have even been crazy enough to move to a new city to do this. You're (hopefully!) excited to start your work as a DASCorps member building the capacity of your organization.

But what if you haven't found a place to live yet? If you've just started your VISTA year in a new city, your housing should be a top priority. It's hard to do good work if you're constantly wondering where you're going to live.

In this post, I'll cover 5 tips/tools for rocking finding a place to live. Read on to begin the rocking.

1) craigslist

well duh. Craigslist is almost a given. For the uninitiated, craigslist is an awesome online classifieds service originally founded in San Francisco. It has since been replicated in major metropolitan cities around the world and is used by millions of people each day for finding housing, cars, romance and just about any other things humans can share with each other.

TIP: one of the most under utilized features of craiglist is their search-based RSS feed. *Setting one up is easy:

Click on the 'apts/housing' section (or whatever housing situation you are looking for) and enter in your search terms.
Click "Search"
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the RSS link. You can either subscribe this link in your RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) or simply add it as a bookmark to your browser bookmark toolbar (see the image above for how it looks in Firefox 3 for the Mac).

*A more detailed tutorial of this process can be found on the Get Rich Slowly blog.

2) housingmaps.com

This one is sweet. Google maps + craigslist. If you've just moved to a new city, chances you are not really sure where everything is just yet. When you look for housing on craigslist, the names of the neighborhoods may be irrelevant to you because you don't know where these neighborhoods are in relation to you. Housingmaps.com fixes that.

It has the built in housing search/filtering of craigslist (price ranges, number of rooms, pictures, location) + the marker functionality of Google maps. These two put together allow you to filter the markers that appear on a map to fine tune your search.

Maybe you might get ideas for how Google maps could be used at your organization?

3) listpic

Yet another awesome way that craigslist is being used to help people find things. This lets you browse craigslist visually, so you can see what these places look like.

However, some things to consider: 1) it ONLY searches posts with an image. This may limit what comes up. 2) conversely, by showing ONLY the places with images, it COULD save you some time trekking to the place only to find that it's not agreeable to where you want to live during your VISTA year.

Speaking of trekking, you DID ask your org if they could help out with public transportation, right? We at the Transmission Project encourage you to ask your org about any resources you may need during your year. Living on the meager stipend that AmeriCorps mandates can be tough. Don't make it any harder on yourself by getting burned out trekking across town to run errands, look for housing, let alone get to work.

my (fall, winter) spring project

Rebecca White — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:19:26 +0000

My big project of the spring went public today. It's called the California Inclusionary Housing Policy Database, and we introduced it like this:

The California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) is pleased to launch a free searchable database of more than 130 California Inclusionary Housing (IH) programs, the first of its kind in the U.S.

The California Inclusionary Housing Policy Database contains information on the key characteristics of California IH programs in existence in 2006. At that time there were an estimated 170 programs, of which CCRH was able to retrieve electronic and hard copy versions of approximately 80%.

...

The database provides summaries of characteristics for each policy. Users may search for these summaries by jurisdiction name or by more than 30 other variables. ... In addition, each summary provides a link to the jurisdiction's full policy.

This project has been in progress since the beginning of my service last September. In the fall, I worked closely with two other CCRH staff members to design the database; by the spring, I was designing and implementing the search feature and the policy layouts. My coworker Brandi analyzed the policies and input the data. In the past few weeks I've collaborated with CCRH's ED on the final interface and text; I've recieved a ton of invaluable input from both him and my supervisor. I've also communicated with other members of the nonprofit housing community as buzz built around this project, and during a two week beta test period. This project was interesting and challenging to work on, and has proved rewarding both in what I've learned and in the resource I've helped my organization provide to the community.

And for the techies: I built the CCRH website with Drupal 4.7. The inclusionary housing policies are a CCK content type, because it allowed us to get the design and data entry set up quickly. I used the ConTemplate module to the template for IH policy CCK type from within Drupal. The search feature is a custom module I wrote which can provide a search feature for any CCK content type. I hope to release this module after I clean up the code, flesh out some features, and port it to the latest Drupal version.