Inspiration
I've thought of creating something like this for almost my entire life: something to help those who are financially overwhelmed and just want a fresh start to life, whether they are alone and frustrated, new immigrants to the United States. My app is a social justice project, seeking to empower the underprivileged to take control of their lives by finding an affordable place to live for them that meets their needs.
What it does
HopeHomes helps the underprivileged, new immigrants, and those who want a fresh start in life find a home that's just right for them. All they need to do is select a price, how many people will be living in it, and whether they want to take into account how good local schools are. Taking this criteria into account, which also involves safety and low-skill jobs nearby, HopeHomes then gives them the top 5 house recommendations for them.
How I built it
HopeHomes had to take into account the house's size, the price, nearby low-skill jobs and schools, and also safety. For this hackathon, I implemented HopeHomes for houses in San Francisco, but in the future, I plan on extending it to other large cities.
I found a nice dataset that had the size, price, and location (in longitude and latitude) of each house; I used this to filter out houses that weren't in the user's price range / didn't have enough space to accommodate said people. The location part of the dataset helped a lot, because it allowed me to implement my safety/job analysis on the houses. I implemented k-nearest neighbors on the data to see which houses were the furthest away from recent crimes (safety) and which ones were the closest to job opportunities (nearby low-skill jobs). To code my application, which utilized this algorithm, I used HTML, CSS, and Python Flask.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge I ran into was probably the brainstorming. It was hard for me to settle on a topic from all of my ideas, but I'm glad that I chose this topic. It was the idea that I was the most passionate about and I think that's what gave me the motivation to cope with all of the difficulties during the implementation process.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I was able to get through all of the challenges related to brainstorming. During this hackathon, it was especially difficult for me to narrow down on all of the options. Some of them solved a really big problem but were too hard to implement, and others were easier to implement but just offered a small improvement to an existing problem. This idea was the perfect balance, because it solved a large problem and wasn't extremely hard to implement, and looking back at it, I almost can't believe that I've come this far.
What I learned
I learned a ton about what really makes an idea great. The hours I spent on brainstorming really exhausted me, but they taught me an important lesson: great ideas don't necessarily have to be cool at first glance; they just have to solve a pressing, important issue.
What's next for HopeHomes
For the sake of this hackathon, HopeHomes was only implemented on houses in San Francisco, so in the future, I would like to expand it to other cities in the Bay Area. I would also like to make an iOS app for HopeHomes, in addition to the web application that I've already created.
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