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HousingCleveland.org celebrates two years moving toward one million searches with over 3,000 landlords using its website. HousingCleveland.org was created in August of 2005 and has assisted thousands of individuals, free of charge, to find local housing.
In 2004, housing advocates and housing and social service providers came together with the common goal for creating a web-based system to list available and affordable housing in Cuyahoga County. In the first two years of the site’s existence, over 750,000 searches have been conducted, and more than 10,000 units of housing were added to the website. Over 250 separate searches are conducted every day. Libraries, shelters, and housing assistance centers are directing clients to HousingCleveland.org as the first source of information on affordable housing in Cuyahoga County.
HousingCleveland is governed by 14 diverse organizations and is administered by a non-profit, Socialserve.com. What separates this website from others in the community is that Socialserve (1) maintains a call center to which landlords can call to list their property (1-877-428-8844) and (2) contacts the landlords of the listed properties every few weeks to make sure that the unit is still available.
“HousingCleveland.org has successfully assisted many of this area’s poorest families with limited resources find good housing,” stated Priscilla Pointer-Hicks, Director of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP). “And landlords win when they use it, as well, since units can be rented sooner with the broad reach of this marketing tool.”
Recently, Cuyahoga County Department of Jobs and Family Services announced award of a grant to support the HousingCleveland website. The grant will help expand outreach for this useful resource to suburban communities. Plans for the website also include an effort to construct a separate listing of every project-based subsidized rental unit in the County.
The HousingCleveland advisory board is also pushing for an expansion of the website statewide. “We are contacting every state agency and anyone that builds housing statewide, urging them to push for the development of a similar effort with a call center available for everyone in the State of Ohio,” said Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless director Brian Davis.
There are 19 states currently using the Socialserve network with Louisiana, Maryland and
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