One Million Searches

Housing Cleveland.org Goes Over One Million Searches

NEOCH is co-administrator of the website, Housingcleveland.org along with 211/First Call for Help.  This affordable housing website contains around 2,000 available units.  Last week we reached a milestone with over 1 million searches having been conducted over the last year.  There were over 140,000 unique users who conducted these searches.

For more information go here.
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

Erie Square Residents Need Help

Cleveland Housing Network Looks For Help from the Community

We received a note today from the staff over at the Cleveland Housing Network asking for help from the 44 households burnt out of their apartments over at Erie Square on East 79th and Euclid. There were no serious injuries, but all 60 residents of the west wing of the building need a new place to live. Erie Square was renovated in the last three or four years, and was one of the quality subsidized housing complexes in the community.

CHN is looking for help from the community to get these families out of hotels and into housing. They are looking to connect each of the 44 households with donors who could help with gift cards to local merchants. The residents need to start over with household items, beds, furniture, cleaning supplies, personal items, clothing, and anything else to re-establish a home. They are looking for churches, religious groups, civic organizations or even corporations who want to help a family move back into a home while Erie Square is rebuilt to contact CHN.

You can reach CHN if you want to help by contacting Laura Boustani, coordinator of the family to family effort at 216/774-2364 or e-mail familytofamily (at) chnnet (dot) com. You can also click on family to family on the CHN website. Residents burnt out of an apartment do not automatically get a housing voucher that will follow them. They will get a temporary subsidy to use in an apartment somewhere in the community while the building is being rebuilt, and then they will return to Erie Square.

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

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
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

Homeless Coalition Updates

Photo appearing in the new Grapevine #84 by 2008 Photography student Cheryl Jones.

After Four Months--Grapevine is Available

The Grapevine was forced to take a break, but we are back on track. We have a bunch of new vendors and the new paper is out. Available downtown, and at the West Side Market. We had to take a break and re-group, but things are looking good. There are some great photos in the new paper from students taking the 2008 Photo class. There are stories about North Point Shelter, and a few stories about homelessness across America. There is one interesting story about the City of San Francisco passing a shelter standards bill. The Grapevine has a few sad stories about hate crimes in Ohio and those who had passed away in 2007. Check it out.

We had a nice Teach In this week. The next Teach In is set for September 16, 2008 and will focus on voting and identification issues at 5:30 p.m. We will have an ability to RSVP on our website in June.

The new Street Cards are out and available on our website. We have distributed 4,000 so far. Thanks to University Hospital for printing this year's Street Card. In case you are not familiar this is a one page piece of paper that lists all the services available to homeless people right from the streets. We have published 18 updates of the street cards over the years.

HousingCleveland.org saw a huge increase in users over the last month. This must have something to do with the large number of foreclosures in Cleveland, but the housing search website saw over 1,700 more searches done this year over last. We have doubled the number of unique users from the same period as last year. In the last month, 6,517 unique users made over 50,000 searches on the website--a new record.

In a similar story, the Plain Dealer covered the story today of the dramatic increase in homeless children using the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. We are so lucky to have Project ACT in our community. Imagine everything in your world collapses including your housing, but Project ACT is there to make sure that your school situation does not have to change.

Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.