Gimme shelter

IN THE WAKE of the government'sunderwhelming response to the needs ofpeople left homeless by hurricanesKatrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005,Congress mandated the creation of a unifiedinventory of available temporaryhousing.The Housing and Urban DevelopmentDepartment responded by building theNational Housing Locator System(NHLS). Since January 2007, state, localand federal officials have used the systemto help thousands of people find affordableand appropriate housing soon after adisaster.'When Katrina hit, I was in charge, andwe all thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice if wehad a single source of information aboutavailable apartments that all caseworkerscould use to access the various housingdatabases that were available,' ' said AlfredJurison, now HUD's senior adviser forpublic and Indian housing disaster responseand recovery operations, who ledthe department's response team in late2005.NHLS uses an array of Web 2.0 featuresbuilt around the application's service-orientedarchitecture. It provides caseworkersaccess to information from more than100 different government and commercialhousing data sources. Contractor Citizantregularly adds housing data providers.The system uses virtual private networkingto link to data from commercialhousing information providers such asApartments.com, Hotpads.com andRent.com. NHLS also provides data fromgovernment agencies such as the VeteransAffairs Department and the FederalEmergency Management Agency.Jurison, his HUD colleagues, FEMA officials,state and local officials, and Citizantagreed on various features of NHLSin the months following the storms.'We knew it had to be paperless, we knew it had to work on aircards [for wireless data transfer],and we knew it had to work on PCs,' Jurisonsaid.Jurison cited the project team's esprit de corpsand creativeness in solving unusual problemswith innovative approaches, even if they bentfederal regulations.He said he drew on his experience in an inspectorgeneral's office in directing staff on how tospeed the government's disaster response. He requiredHUD employees to write memos of whatthey did, especially at times when they had tospeed help to members of the public by skirtingregulations. Those records, created with accurateinformation gathered at the time of the event,could explain why the compelling needs of publichealth and safety trumped regular rules.Jurison's team, together with other HUD offices,local public housing authorities and Citizantmet repeatedly in discussions that coveredNHLS' capabilities for locating housing by county,radius from a given place and ZIP code,among other criteria.Citizant received a contract in late 2006 tobuild NHLS. In January 2007, about 60 dayslater, HUD and Citizant deployed the system.The national scale of the emergency helped galvanizethe project team, Jurison said. 'There wasan attitude at the time that we need to do good,and we need to do it quickly,' Jurison said. 'Someof this stuff was done on a handshake.'Subsequent audits of how HUD responded tothe technical challenges generated no negativecomments on department officials' decisions andno recommendations for procedure changes, Jurisonsaid.Ramesh Ramakrishnan, Citizant division director,said the system used state-of-the-art Web2.0 components and standards that HUD alreadyhad to conserve time and money.'I think the biggest challenge was interfacingsystems from several vendors to bring various elementstogether,' Ramakrishnan said. 'I think ofit as a two-prong task. The first prong is the information.It is available in different formatsfrom different vendors. Trying to bring that informationtogether is a challenge.'The other challenge is to bring services together,'he said.Ramakrishnan said NHLS incorporatesgeocoding features that provide, among otherservices, the latitude and longitude of given addresses.The NHLS team at Citizant used thegeocoding application already available in HUDto save time and money.This year, NHLS helped officials meet thehousing needs of evacuees from HurricaneIke, floods in the Midwest and tornadoes inFlorida.XXXSPLITXXX-Housing and UrbanDevelopment Departmentofficials envisioned thebroad outlines of a nationaltemporary housing databasewhile they scrambledto meet the housing needsof thousands of familiesdisplaced by Gulf Coasthurricanes in 2005, saidAlfred Jurison, senioradviser for public andIndian housing disasterresponse and recoveryoperations.HUD and contractorCitizant chose rapid applicationdevelopment methodsto build a system thattaps information from morethan 100 incompatiblehousing data sources. Usingcommercially availablehousing market datareduced National HousingLocator System designcosts by millions of dollars,experts said.However, in choosing touse outside data, NHLS'planners faced the problemof extracting informationthat existed in many formats.They relied on thewidely used MultifamilyInformation andTransactions StandardsExtensible MarkupLanguage architecture tosnag a limited array ofinformation from the datasources. 'You don't want toinvent everything fromscratch,' said RameshRamakrishnan, divisiondirector at Citizant.NHLS' planners chose touse a data-centric serviceorienteddesign so the systemcould access informationthat outside providersupdate continuously, at nocost to the government.That fundamental designchoice contrasted withmore complex databasedesigns that could havecost HUD as much as $10million to $15 million,NHLS planners said.NHLS relies on a simpleform of Web serviceRepresentational StateTransfer to provide a standardizeddata format fornewly added informationsources. Using that formatallows newly recruited dataproviders to quickly accommodateNHLS' formatrequirements.NHLS designers built thesystem with a service-orientedarchitecture, Oraclerapid application development,virtual privatenetworktunneling andmashups such as the GoogleMaps application programminginterface. All of thosetechnologies help NHLSgenerate overlay informationabout schools, healthcare facilities, public housingauthority offices andother community features.NHLS uses AsynchronousJavascript and XML, whichprovides a rich user interface,Ramakrishnan said.Choosing AJAX as a commentingsystem and mappingtool rather than alternativetechnologies allowsNHLS to import a limitedamount of informationabout an apartment, forexample, without forcingthe server to reload theentire page. That processreduces the bandwidth burdenon the server, headded.