Funded Affordable Housing Project & Grant Database, OCHFT

Project Title & Client:

"OCHFT Projects and Funds;" Orange County Housing Finance Trust

The Challenge: 

The Orange County Housing Finance Trust had experienced significant growth in the number of projects funded and grants received since its founding four years prior, but was still using a manually updated HTML chart on its website to track its work both externally and internally. The chart was often out of date, and the lack of any calculation capability forced staff to manually copy the data for every new reporting or administrative need, which created unnecessary extra work and introduced errors and variances in reported impact numbers.

Solution: 

The custom-built Airtable database provides a comprehensive overview of the Trust's multifamily housing funding program. It features interconnected records related to grants received and the projects that they funded, pulling the information from thousands of pages of legal contracts, agreements, applications, and grant agreements. It is used to generate reports, monitor loan and construction progress, account for remaining grant funds, and transfer information from the Development Manager to the Compliance Manager. The database was designed from the start to be expandable to include funding sources from other government agencies (cities and the county) to streamline the regional management of publicly subsidized affordable housing projects.

Impact & Results:

Integrating the funding source with the projects detached the information from annual award cycles, allowing the Trust to holistically monitor the funds awarded, paid, and remaining, as well as the projects and units funded across multiple years and award cycles. Instead of a static chart, the Trust's efforts can now be analyzed from every possible angle, including project demographics, award size, time to completion, and indirect impact on creating affordable housing, to name a few. Pre-set views and custom interfaces created consistency in reporting, significantly reduced staff time spent generating reports, and made the Trust's true impact clearly visible to funders, the Board, and other stakeholders.

Role:

Homefrontally led the full database design and implementation, including business analysis, data migration, and staff training.