New Website and App Helps Set Up Homeless People With Housing

Transitioning from homelessness to affordable housing is rarely a smooth process, but a new platform aims to make it a little easier. As Fast Company reports, Lease Up is an app and website designed to connect landlords to caseworkers looking to place people without homes in apartments in Los Angeles.

Lease Up, a project from the nonprofit People Assisting The Homeless (PATH), resembles a regular real estate search app. Case managers can narrow down results based on factors like bedroom size and proximity to spots like health clinics and grocery stores. On the other end, landlords can list an available apartment, and after it's been inspected, they're paid a holding fee of up to $1100 as an incentive to set it aside for a homeless client. The payment comes from a Los Angeles sales tax recently passed to help fund services for the homeless.

The platform offers a few advantages over the conventional way of doing things. Instead of juggling calls from multiple caseworkers before finding a tenant, Lease Up streamlines the process for landlords, and they can use the website and app as a customer service resource if they have any questions. In addition, listings are updated in real time, which can save time and frustration for case managers looking to find homes for their clients as quickly as possible.

By making it more convenient to list apartments, the team behind Lease Up hopes to get more landlords involved in programs that provide housing to homeless people. They aim to get at least 2000 listings uploaded to their database in 2019.

[h/t Fast Company]