Last week we visited New American Pathways office and attended the cultural orientation given to newly arrived refugee families. It was an interesting experience. We talked about their process of resettlement of refugee families and found out that a lot of manual labor is required in order to select the best possible location for an incoming family. This made us realize that our goal has to be re-defined. Now, we are not looking for apartment listing results such as Zillow or Trulia results but we have restricted our search to apartment complexes that are located in Fulton and Dekalb counties. Once we develop a tool to visualize those apartment complexes, they can select the apartments according to their liking and proceed with the negotiations with the property managers (as they do so now).
Our work so far has been done using R Shiny as the web app development tool. It has a gentle learning curve and if you know R, developing a Shiny app is not hard. We collected apartment complexes data and supermarkets as well as schools data using Google API. One screenshot of our current (in development) tool is shown below:
Our next step is to put it all together on app and present it to our clients so that we can modify our tool according to their needs!