Questions

Do search costs in general and application fees in particular play a role in voucher holders’ housing searches?

Those fees may play a role, the voucher holders’ most significant challenge is to not be immediately excluded from the rental application process. The fees might be paid by the voucher program.

What are the Privacy Principles policies?

The City of San José Privacy Principles can be found at https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/city-manager/civic-innovation-digital-strategy/digital-privacy

How do voucher holders respond to these obstacles?

As of now, they do not submit an application. If the voucher holder notifies the Program, we will inform the property owner of the violation or inform the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing for enforcement.

How common is source of income discrimination in City of San José?

This Mercury News article gives helpful context. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/16/why-are-so-many-landlords-violating-this-new-housing-law/

Current process of following the complaints against discrimination?

Currently, the Housing Department has an employee manually searching rental platforms to get a small sample of properties in violation, often identifying hundreds per day.

Are you also looking a mobile application for the same?

A mobile application is not required.

Are you looking for Cots or SaaS based application?

The application model preference depends on the proposed solution. In general, the preference for the initial term is a SaaS model.

What are the property listing platforms currently used by the city, and all them will be using the application?

The process for on-boarding property listing platforms is at the discretion of the vendor. The current platforms of interest include: Craigslist, Apartments.com, Apartmentguide.com, Zillow, Redfin, Trulia, Realtor.com

What are the number of users for Future City departments?

The product is anticipated to have 3 to 5 City staff users in year 1. Future expansion will be informed by the results of year 1 and potential for expanding the use case.

10.5.5- it was mentioned that 16 weeks of residency period, is that to be accomplished at no cost?
10.5.5 - mentioned that we should be providing a reasoning of our cost if it exceeds budget- what is the additional budget the City is willing to allocate additional to the $50,000?
10.5.5. - Any penalty in evaluation if we exceed budget.

The expectation during the Residency Period is to provide a “proof of concept” at no cost, the scope of which will be determined collaboratively between the vendor and the City. The $50k budget is allocated for the Initial Term, with plans for expansion to be defined, scoped, and budgeted based on the needs of the project.

The City has an allocated budget of up to $50k for this project. Additional funding is not guaranteed.

Proposals that exceed the maximum budget may not be considered.

Will there be a need for onsite meetings? If yes will that be reimbursed and outside the $50,000 budget?

On-site meetings are not an explicit requirement. Please include anticipated travel within the cost proposal.

Number of potential users who will be using the vouchers?

Up to 10k vouchers per year

Are the automated notifications via direct mail sent to the address of the discriminatory listing or is there another step that the system needs to take to find the address of the owner of the property?

Depending on the website, it will be more impactful to send the notification to the direct email that established the listing.

Does the system need to track whether the direct mail notifications actually affect the listing?

Yes, we want to assure there is compliance and the violation has been corrected.

in general, web scraping is ok as long as it is done in an ethical way, and if the scraper is not reselling data or using it for malicious purpose. however, the legality of web scraping is still somewhat gray when it comes to cases where one company takes legal action against another. in other cases, a site may indicate in either their terms of use or robots.txt file (a file that indicates scraping rules) that they do not wish to be scraped.

1.) does the city plan on requesting permission to scrape the property listing sites in advance?
2.) if a property listing site prevents web scraping (e.g. blocks an IP address, indicates that they do not wish for the page to be scraped) how does the city intend to gather data?

The proposed approach is at the discretion of the vendor to perform both 1 and 2 in a legal manner. The proposed approach must also comply with the City's Digital Privacy Principles.

Does the City have a not-to-exceed budget for this project?

The total contract price is U.S. dollars shall not exceed $50,000 during the Initial Term.