Housing Application & Waitlist “Going Digital”

About the Program

Category: Community and Economic Development (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

The Housing Authority of Maricopa County (HAMC) owns and manages 900 housing units in 17 communities throughout Maricopa County, and administers 1590 housing subsidy vouchers. The demand for affordable housing and housing assistance is consistently high with waiting periods of up to several years depending on voucher or unit availability, family size/income, and other factors. The demand for housing and housing assistance always exceeds the limited resources available, and long waiting periods are common. The opening of Public Housing (PH) and Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) waitlists have always been challenging due to the intensive paper and manual processes employed to administer the process. In 2014, HAMC developed and implemented an online waitlist application and eliminated the paper all together. The online application improved accessibility to our housing applications, improved customer service, eliminated the abundance of paper received by HAMC, improved the data integrity of our systems, eliminated expenses for paper and postage, and decreased the overall cost of waitlist administration.