The cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area has grown dramatically in recent years, making it one of the most expensive regions in the country in which to live, and creating a crisis for low-income households. The incomes of teachers, police, nurses, gardeners, and other civic and service workers are simply not keeping pace with rising housing costs, stressing family budgets and leading to moves that result in long commutes and overcrowded housing conditions. This region has great disparities, with vast wealth and multi-million dollar mansions not far from dilapidated homes where complete families live in each room, struggling to get by. And in a state where no race has a majority, this region is especially diverse, ethnically and culturally, fueled by a steady stream of immigrants.
A number of organizations are working to help low-income households caught in this affordable housing crisis. Non-profit developers use scarce subsidies to build affordable housing. Organizations help new immigrants and refugees find jobs and places to live. Transitional housing providers help those who have become homeless get back into housing. But all these organizations combined are able to help only a small fraction of those in need. The typical non-profit does the best it can with its resources stretched very thin; it does not have an R&D department to pursue innovations, especially technical innovations, that could help it be more effective.
The CEE 45Q team can do little to affect the forces that underlie the affordable housing crisis in this region. Instead, it will focus on what it can do by seeking a feasible innovation to help those caught in this crisis.
The decision of a household on where to live is constrained by its knowledge of available options. A number of resources are now available that could help build tools to bring better information to struggling households, either directly or through the organizations that help them. For example, a wealth of geographic data about housing costs and neighborhood characteristics, including results from the 2000 Census, are available, as are tools for querying these data and instantly generating maps for display on a Web browser. The Web is, of course, a powerful tool for making information available, and Web-based solutions, once developed, become widely available. However, any Web-based solution for direct use by low-income households must consider ways to bridge the "digital divide" to reach those that do not have access.
With this pressing need and using the raw materials available, the startup team will seek an innovative solution that feasibly can be developed and brought into use. It will first conduct research and field work to gain an understanding of the plight of the households in need of affordable housing and learn about the organizations that currently work to help them. As entrepreneurs, the team will be constantly seeking out and evaluating opportunities where an innovation could have a positive impact. It will assess the feasibility and potential value of various proposed solutions and will select one solution to pursue in depth. With the guidance of an advisory board of professionals, it will then develop a business plan for bringing this solution into reality. The plan will then become a candidate for a proposed social innovation incubator here at Stanford, where such ideas could be developed further and actually brought into reality.
The key milestones of the project are listed below and on the course outline.
| Date | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 25 | 1. | Team consensus on proposed solution |
| May 14 | 2. | Presentation of domain findings and initial business plan to advisory board |
| Jun 6 | 3. | Presentation of final business plan and prototype to advisory board |