Refugee Resettlement Housing Scout

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. 1.INTRODUCTION There are more than 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world today – more than at any other time in recorded history [1]. People are forced to seek a safer place to live and raise their families because of frequent wars, constant political and economic crisis and possible persecution. Essentially, these people become refugees and some of them are resettled in richer countries of Europe, Asia and the US. Up to 70,000 refugees are resettled in the US with approximately 2,500 going to Georgia annually. We have been working closely with the New American Pathways non-profit organization that helps refugees coming to Atlanta to resettle and start their new life. 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 such as proximity to public transit (since most refugees do not own a vehicle), schools (since most of them have children of school age), supermarkets (halal, international), ESL classes, faith communities and other. Also, another major constraint is that refugees often do not the documents e.g. SSN necessary to access some special types of housing. Taking all these constraints into account, finding safe yet affordable housing for refugees becomes non-trivial. Currently, the process of finding suitable housing for incoming refugees is a manual, tedious task. The resettlement agency begins the search for apartments and other relevant information on the Internet, and then working step by step to check if most important constraints are satisfied. For example, the crime situation near an apartment is validated by physically visiting the area and by word-of-mouth reports. In this paper, we present our solution to optimize the process by developing an interactive data-driven web-based tool, which searches, filters and presents a list of optimal housing locations, and allows for the dynamic prioritization of apartment locations based on user-specified importance weights on the diverse selection criteria. The tool is intended to be used by refugee resettlement agencies in their search to find appropriate apartments for refugee families just arriving into the country. The agencies can also use this tool to help refugee families in search for apartments when they decide to move from their intake apartment placement, usually within the first or second year after arrival. 2.APPROACH We approach the problem of finding optimal housing by first assessing the data requirements. There are specific constraints refugee resettlement agencies face when they arrive in the US. The incoming families are on a special visa, do not have social security cards, have little to no resources of their own, do not own a vehicle and are generally dependent on the resettlement agencies they are associated with. This means that the two of the highest priorities for any resettlement location are the rent and access to public transportation. Next in line is access to schools and then international grocery stores, hospitals, faith communities, English as Second Language (ESL) classes, Department of Driver Services (DDS) offices, Social Security Number (SSN) offices etc. Figure 1: Approach taken in this paper After data collection, we use mapping tools to visualize the data and finally develop an interactive web application that is able to filter out irrelevant pieces of information and display optimal locations for refugee resettlement. Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference. 25-Sep-2016, New York City, NY, USA.