Refugee Resettlement Housing Scout

TL;DR

This paper presents a data-driven, interactive web tool designed to assist refugee resettlement agencies in efficiently finding affordable housing that meets multiple community and individual needs.

Contribution

It introduces a consolidated platform that integrates diverse data sources and allows dynamic prioritization of housing criteria for refugee resettlement.

Findings

The platform effectively filters and ranks housing options based on user-defined priorities.

It supports resettlement agencies in making informed, timely housing decisions.

The methodology is adaptable to other regions and organizations.

Abstract

According to the United States High Commission for Refugees (UNHCr), there are 65.3 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, 21.5 million of them being refugees. This has led to an unprecedented refugee crisis which has led countries to accept refugee families and to resettle them. Diverse agencies are helping refugees coming to US to resettle and start their new life in the country. One of the first and most challenging steps of this process is to find affordable housing that also meets a suite of additional constraints and priorities. These include being within a mile of public transportation and near schools, faith centers and international grocery stores. We detail an interactive data-driven web-based tool, which incorporates in one consolidated platform most of the needed information. The tool searches, filters and demonstrates a list of possible housing locations, and allows for the dynamic prioritization based on user-specified importance weights on the diverse criteria. The platform was created in a partnership with New American Pathways, a nonprofit that supports refugee resettlement in the metro Atlanta, but exemplifies a methodology that can help many other organizations with similar goals.