Housing 2.0 Needs a New OS That Provides Health, Security, and Resiliency

“More than 50% of my tenants pay their rent by money order that they deliver in person. Our collections are way down for the past two months.”

“Residents in seven of our eight buildings have died from COVID.”

“We shut down the Wi-Fi in the common areas of the building because we did not want tenants congregating there.”

These statements are from three high-performing affordable housing portfolio owners.

COVID has created great urgency for housing providers to rethink the connection between housing and health. The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of the current housing operating system—fragile for tenants, who are struggling to socially distance and access online resources; fragile for owners, who are struggling to operate remotely and collect rent; fragile for our economy, which needs healthy workers who have a place to be safe but still engage in everyday activities.

We have two essential problems that we need to solve for immediately.

First, housing has been working in the equivalent of analog mode in a digital world. While it gets the job done, it is slow, it is clunky, and it is hard to adapt to changing conditions. It is time for an upgrade to a digitally driven approach that enables remote engagement for staff and residents; collects, stores, and transacts all information online; and has resiliency baked into its DNA, allowing for adaptability under changing conditions, greater accountability, and most importantly, better health security for the residents.

Second, most housing places lots of people in a dense space that is shared or “common.” Density has desirable qualities: It makes housing more affordable, it places people closer to jobs, and it mitigates climate change. But, in the face of COVID-19 and future health threats, we must change how we design and operate housing to keep residents and staff safe and healthy, applying a whole new set of standards that were never before on the radar, and that recognize that we need to make a large investment in housing as infrastructure and housing as a vaccine for personal and community health, and for economic mobility and viability.

Providing a health-secure environment cannot be achieved without taking these two critical steps—the current playbook will not get us there.