Podcast: Developing Affordable Housing in Louisiana

In this episode of GovTech Talks, we are joined by Bradley Ray Sweazy, the Former Interim Director and COO of the Louisiana Housing Corporation (LHC). Sweazy talks about the difficulty his team experienced managing tens of thousands applicants a day via manual data entries and how Quickbase is helping them manage data entries to help connect low income families with affordable housing options.

Established in 2011, the goal of the LHC is to administer funds through programs that assist in the development of energy-efficient housing for low-to-middle-income families. The LHC oversees the Disaster Housing Task Force for Louisiana as well.

Sweazy served as the COO and Interim Director of the LHC for over five years. His first introduction to Quickbase was through the Emergency Rental Assistance program, which was designed to help households pay rent through the Covid crisis. Quickbase allowed his team to successfully manage 40,000 applicants per day.

The applicants could upload all of their required documents, while staff members could more quickly review their information to determine their eligibility, charge fees if necessary, and link up applicants to other Federal programs.

The fact that Quickbase could handle tens of thousands of applicants at once and disburse millions of dollars a day convinced Sweazy that it could also handle the LHC program and help secure energy-efficient housing for families in need. Sweazy and his team were working with hundreds of applicants a day in addition to non-profit organizations and housing providers.

Quickbase allowed Sweazy and his team to engage in real-time interaction with applicants and non-profit organizations to process applications, collect and analyze data, locate landlords, and work with other housing assistance programs.

Now Quickbase works harmoniously with the LHC to ensure their processes are made much more efficient. Quickbase helps organizations like LHC integrate with existing systems while reducing the time spent on monotonous data entries. In the case of Sweazy, LHC is now used to help connect lower-income families with affordable and energy-efficient houses that they can call home.