Housing Cleveland update

The affordable housing website for Cuyahoga County, housingcleveland.org was funded by stimulus dollars for another three years. It is a real gem for the community, and we wish the state would invest funds to expand this site statewide. It is administered by Socialserve.com in North Carolina, and organized locally by 211/First Call for Help and NEOCH. To be honest, the current state of Ohio funded housing website is a huge waste of money. Taxpayers should be up in arms over the horrible waste of money. HousingCleveland is regularly updated (every three weeks) and has a bilingual call center. The Ohio funded housing site is a static website that is rarely updated, and has only a fraction number of units that we have on the Cuyahoga County site.

Here are some stats from the Housing Cleveland site from May 15, 2010:

• There are 1,360 available listings or 2,026 total units on the Housing Cleveland site with a total of 26,982 total units in the database.
• 54% of the units are within the City of Cleveland and the rest are spread throughout the county.
  
• There have been 2,281 units added to the site since January 2010. This is down from the 3,500 units added in the same period in 2009. We suspect that many people were marketing their houses as apartments because of the foreclosure crisis in 2008-9, but not doing that as much in 2010.
• There are 1,706 basic searches done everyday from 217 unique users.
  
• There were 693,000 searches done by 88,600 unique users done in the last year.

There is also an expanded site in Medina County (HousingMedina.org). They have 44 searches done every day, and 61 available listings or 166 available units. Housing Medina could benefit from some marketing help, but that is another story.

It is time to make Socialserve the sole provider in Ohio for a housing website. It is a wonderful non-profit that is surprisingly affordable.

Brian
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