Project Home Share
Posted on Monday, April 8th, 2024
Project Summary:
Our study shines light on leveraging resources we have in a community by allowing
homeowners that need financial assistance to safely open their door to renters in
need of affordable rent.
| Client | City of Ottawa | |
| Professor(s) | Jed Looker | |
| Program | Interdisciplinary studies in Human-Centred Design | |
| Student Team Members | Emma Taylor Jade Fan Samhita Sinha Lakshya Dabral Mayur Radadiya |
Project Description:
We designed and conducted a mixed-methods study to better understand young adults perceptions towards alternative homes. Our research helped us design a strategic roadmap for the City of Ottawa to implement to improve housing affordability for young adults in the next 10 years. This strategic roadmap is called Project Home Share.
We found a significant knowledge gap, especially in the 26-30 year old age group, regarding awareness of financial subsidies for housing provided by the City of Ottawa. As young adults become mature adults, they become more financially stable and become less reliant on outside supports. This group of mature adults do not realize that they can still participate in these financial subsidies provided by the city, just from a different perspective. As of now, only landlords have the opportunity to apply to the Rent Supplement Program as the city only accommodates whole units to be rented through their programs. As validated in our literature review, affordable housing is a prominent issue. Currently waitlists are increasing, supply simply cannot keep up.
In reaction to these findings we see opportunity in increasing supply by leveraging the resources we have available within a community. Our recommendation includes a service that aims to connect homeowners with people on the Ottawa Social Housing Registry waitlists. Homeowners would follow an onboarding process just like landlords already do in the Rent Supplement Program. The difference is, instead of renting the entire unit out this service would allow homeowners to rent out a spare room and safely co-live with their renter. Homeowners would receive monetary compensation that renters would provide in the form of “rent” which homeowner could use towards their mortgage. Renter will have a safe and affordable place to live.
This service would run through a regulated digital platform that connects two groups that can help each other. Project Home Share will provide renters with safe affordable housing, homeowners will have another source of income providing them with financial relief and the City of Ottawa will have the ability to regulate and apply safety measures through the onboarding process to keep both parties safe. According to our research this service poses a great opportunity as young adults already search for this type of connection through unregulated sites. An example being, renting a private room through facebook marketplace but face many fake listings or scams. Project Home Share is an opportunity for reducing waitlist times as this is yet another source of housing supply that young adults have a positive perception towards.