Housing4All

Connecting Students to Housing.

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Inspiration

As a student at a public university with one of the most highest rates of student homelessness, I can understand the stress and trouble students go through when it comes to applying for housing on the campus. Many students end up homeless because the University is unable to accommodate them with housing. Every year, the University ends up accepting more students than there are graduating, and this leads to an overpopulation on campus. Because of this overpopulation, the University cannot take care of all their students, and ends up leaving behind many students who cannot keep up with the competition that is posed by their peers. After seeing this first hand, I decided to create this app to try to help out students with housing.

What it does

The app connects those who are renting their properties(renters) to students. Renters can upload a property with the address and description of their property. A student who see the property on their side of the portal can choose to apply to the property. The renter can then contact the student using Email or phone number to communicate over the property.

How we built it

I used React Native with an Expo Client Server and as backend, I used the Firebase/Firestore database.

Challenges we ran into

I was having lots of troubles with small errors with using Firebase/Firestore for this project. I was also running into lots of UI troubles so I decided to simplify the UI part down as much as I could. This was also my first time using React Native so I had to learn as I worked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is actually the first time I have created an app using Firebase/Firestore and React Native. I learned entirely using the documentation and a couple YouTube videos.

What we learned

I learned a lot from this experience and hope to keep using React Native for future apps.

What's next for Housing4All

I plan to improve UI, perfect the app, add image recognition for students to input their ID cards so that we can make sure that they are students, and more. I plan on making Housing4All a community app for people to discuss the situation surrounding their communities.

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