HokieHood

HokieHood helps Virginia Tech students find affordable housing by comparing options based on food proximity, safety, and campus distance, using Google Maps data for detailed insights.

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Inspiration

A desire to help fellow Hokies find affordable, convenient housing. Our goal was to combat food insecurity, financial instability, and transportation limitation.

What it does

Our website application allows Virginia Tech students to see housing all across Blacksburg and compare housing options based on their own interests. Any student can determine the importance of food proximity, safety, entertainment, and distance to campus by giving weights to each category. Students can then see scores for any given location to better judge whether or not it is a good fit for them.

How we built it

We set-up a website using Microsoft Power Pages. We then spent some time researching different API resources, such as Zillow and Apartments.com to see if we could get local housing information directly into our website. With the limited time and access we have, we decided to get data via google map's API as it had information regarding location, reviews, and distance to other interesting points. We then tried to include this information in our website in an easily digestible manner.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating JavaScript with Power Pages was difficult, but we eventually worked around it with jQuery instead. Unfortunately our team didn't have as much time available this weekend to dedicate as we would have liked, but we still feel that we learned a lot. Some of us didn't have a ton of exposure to JS and other web technologies before this point, so troubleshooting dysfunctional code was a challenge!

What we learned

We learned about different technologies we can use in the future for building our website, and gained experience for choosing our provider next time. We gained a stronger understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and Google's JavaScript Maps API. We also know more about the limitations and abilities of the technologies we worked with, and how we can better leverage them in the future.

What's next for HokieHood

Given more time, we would further investigate the capabilities of the Google Map's API to further expand the overview of each rental property/agency in the Blacksburg area. In addition, we would reach out to companies like Apartments.com and Zillow to get API access to their public housing data. We would also implement a feature to do side-by-side comparisons of 2-3 locations.

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