Inspiration
We empathize deeply with justice-involved and formerly incarcerated people. This is truly a difficult problem to solve for a concerned group of individuals that are easily neglected in this country.
The statistics for this group of individuals are outstanding to us. Housing is a major challenge for justice-involved and formerly incarcerated people. Formerly incarcerated people are nearly 10x more likely to be homeless. What's worse is that some landlords and property managers do not even do proper due diligence for these individuals as they get instant rejection. This is truly unfortunate because more than half of the inmates are incarcerated for non-violent crimes.
Problem statement
Hence, we decided to solve this problem-statement. How can we use technology to reduce friction/barriers for justice-involved individuals trying to locate, obtain, and maintain housing?
Key stakeholders and their pain points
Before we resolve this problem statement, we decided to understand who our key stakeholders are and dive deeper into their pain points and key challenges.
1. Formerly Incarcerated People
- Need to establish life after incarceration with stable employment and housing
- Has challenge finding housing even with employment offer
- Get instantly rejected with background check
- Lack credit history and guarantor
2. Landlords and/or small property management firms
- Need to maximize property occupancy
- Need for long-term financial stabilities
- Has risk of payment default and property damage by tenants
- Has challenge in evaluating future tenants
*3. Companies
- Would like to hire quality people including formerly incarcerated individuals (as part of DEI initiatives)
- Some offers do not push through due to lack of housing resulting to wasted time and effort -
- The recruiting process could be costly to the companies
What it does
What we built: HOUSEMATCH What it does : One-stop shop between formerly incarcerated people, companies, and landlords How does it work: HouseMatch addresses the landlords' pain point of 'fear of missed payments' by de-risking the payment model *Types of housing offered
- Persevere sub-leases: Sublease directly from a set of rooms rented by Persevere
- Corporate-supported homes: Rent homes with pre-existing arrangement between landlords/property management firms and corporations.
How we built it
- Spent time understanding the market – internet research and industry interviews
- Listed out pain points of different stakeholders, market segmentations
- Brainstormed solutions
- Building wireframes
- Validated solutions with some of the stakeholders
Challenges we ran into
The problem we are solving requires deep understanding of the market, the pain points on both the demand and supply side. We spent significant time on researching existing government-funded solutions and companies who are supporting incarcerated personals such as Slack. We also spoke with a variety of people such as commercial real real-estate owners to understand the market.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we have been working on a really tough problem and our solution is based on thorough research on the industry. We are also proud that our solution received positive feedback from key stakeholder.
What we learned
- Systematic problems that incarcerated people face
- Problem solving skills
- Cross-functional team work – UI/UX, engineering, product management
What's next for HOUSEMATCH
- Continue to refine and validate solution with key stakeholders
- Establish relationships with corporations and NGOs
- Build MVP for HouseMatch platform
- Expand the proposition across three phases (see attached file)
Sample Code
import React from "react"; import NavigationMainComponent from "../NavigationMainComponent"; import "./LandingPage.css"; function LandingPage(props) { const { screenShot20221002At10181, title, loremIpsum, searchListings, loremIpsumDolorSi, getConnected, getInvolved, loremIpsumDolorSi2, stories3, learnMore1, learnMore2, stories5, stories6, nounAccount15172081, housing, place, about, navigationMainComponentProps, } = props; return (
{title}
{loremIpsum}
{searchListings}
{loremIpsumDolorSi} {getConnected} {getInvolved} {loremIpsumDolorSi2} {stories3} {learnMore1} {learnMore2} {stories5} {stories6}
{housing}
{place}
{about}
);
}
export default LandingPage;
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