Growth in the Affordable Housing Market Fuels coUrbanize’s Momentum in 2020
Boston, Mass., October 14, 2020 — With new pressures on affordable housing developers to build more units, faster, this real estate sector is turning to coUrbanize, an online community engagement platform, to create support for what is a critical need in so many communities.
So far in 2020, coUrbanize has seen a 300% year-over-year increase in new sales from the affordable housing sector. Affirmed Housing, Beacon Communities, Mercy Housing, POAH, and the Just-A-Start Corporation, among others, have all launched new projects on coUrbanize this year. Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco continue to be particular markets of growth for the company.
“There’s one commonality that all affordable housing projects face – opposition rooted in misunderstanding and misinformation,” said Karin Brandt, CEO and Founder of coUrbanize. “Our platform lets affordable housing developers tackle this head-on through early outreach, debunking myths, promoting community benefits, and building trust.”
There are three trends propelling coUrbanize’s momentum in the affordable housing market:
- The pandemic’s impact on traditional, boots-on-the-ground public outreach and the new role that digital community engagement plays in the entitlements process
- The services and support that affordable housing developers bring to the community in terms of food access, job training, childcare services, etc.
- The need to proactively address biases and misconceptions about affordable housing before misinformation spreads within the community
On October 20th at 12:00 pm ET, coUrbanize is hosting a discussion about the State of the Affordable Housing Market, with Molly Ekerdt (POAH), Jolene Saul (Brinshore Development), Craig Nicholson (Just-A-Start Corporation), and Aspasia Xypolia (The Community Builders). All are welcome to register here.
This summer, coUrbanize launched new features to help real estate developers and urban planners alike to make development and design discussions more inclusive and representative of the communities where projects are being planned and built. These new features include a prebuilt Affordable Housing FAQ tab to combat bias and falsehoods about the negative impacts that affordable housing has on communities. coUrbanize also introduced new Community Guidelines and comment moderation procedures to more clearly address implicitly biased comments, expanding its existing rules against hate speech, violence, and discriminatory comments.
About coUrbanize
coUrbanize gives people a way to share their feedback and have a voice in a development or public planning process without having to go to a meeting – by simply posting a comment online or texting in their ideas – and having a two-way dialogue with the project team. More than 400 real estate teams have used coUrbanize to scale public outreach in a more inclusive way, have more productive conversations with the community, and ultimately build critical support for their projects. For more information, please visit cour.loc.
