HousingScan — Affordable Housing Search Across the United States
A platform that turns HUD's open data on assisted housing into a search experience anyone can actually use.
A search engine for the people who need it most
US federal housing programs publish enormous amounts of information — but in formats built for administrators, not for a family hunting for a subsidized apartment. HousingScan flips that around: type in a state, browse HUD-assisted properties nearby, see what a Section 8 voucher covers there, and find out whether your income qualifies. No jargon walls, no PDF spelunking.
It is one of my own products — I designed it, built it and run it end to end, from the data pipeline to the on-page SEO.
What the platform does
- Property search across every state and territory, with per-state browsing (1,794 listings in California alone).
- Fair Market Rents lookup — how much rent a Section 8 voucher covers in each metro or county.
- Income limits review, the thresholds that decide eligibility for HUD-assisted programs.
- Eligibility Calculator that answers the key question — "do I qualify?" — in seconds.
- Expiring-contracts tracker flagging properties whose subsidy agreements are close to ending.
- Stats, guide and blog walking applicants through the process step by step.
Dataset coverage at a glance
Straight from the numbers the site itself displays:
Under the hood
You cannot run a directory of this size on an off-the-shelf CMS. Every property, state and county page is generated from a database — so the build is a custom Laravel + PHP application with a schema tuned to serve tens of thousands of pages quickly and cheaply.
SEO is programmatic by design: titles, meta descriptions, structured data and internal links are derived from the HUD records themselves, meaning each new property ships with a page that is ready to rank the moment it goes live. No themes, no plugins, nothing along for the ride.
HousingScan FAQ
Where does HousingScan get its housing data?
From public HUD datasets on assisted housing in the United States. The platform reshapes them into a browsable directory of 23,768+ properties, plus Fair Market Rents and income limits for each area.
How big is the coverage?
It spans 56 states and territories and more than 1,703,495 housing units, browsable state by state — from California with 1,794 listed properties down to the smallest territories.
What does the Eligibility Calculator do?
It checks whether a given household income falls within the limits for Section 8, public housing and other HUD-assisted programs in a specific area, so visitors know if applying is worth their time.
Why does the site track expiring contracts?
Because when a subsidy contract between a landlord and HUD ends, the property can leave the program. HousingScan currently tracks 1,383 expiring contracts — early warning that matters to tenants and case workers.