  According to the United States High Commission for Refugees (UNHCr), there
are 65.3 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, 21.5 million of
them being refugees. This has led to an unprecedented refugee crisis which has
led countries to accept refugee families and to resettle them. Diverse agencies
are helping refugees coming to US to resettle and start their new life in the
country. One of the first and most challenging steps of this process is to find
affordable housing that also meets a suite of additional constraints and
priorities. These include being within a mile of public transportation and near
schools, faith centers and international grocery stores. We detail an
interactive data-driven web-based tool, which incorporates in one consolidated
platform most of the needed information. The tool searches, filters and
demonstrates a list of possible housing locations, and allows for the dynamic
prioritization based on user-specified importance weights on the diverse
criteria. The platform was created in a partnership with New American Pathways,
a nonprofit that supports refugee resettlement in the metro Atlanta, but
exemplifies a methodology that can help many other organizations with similar
goals.
