Case Study: City and County of San Francisco reimagines affordable housing access with Exygy’s DAHLIA platform

City and County of San Francisco reduces affordable housing applications to 15–20 minutes with Exygy

The City and County of San Francisco faced significant challenges in its affordable housing process, including a lack of clear information, a tedious paper-based application system, and an obscure selection method for applicants. The city engaged the vendor Exygy to help reimagine this process and create a more accessible and transparent system.

Exygy designed and developed the DAHLIA housing portal, an open-source platform built with Ruby on Rails and Angular. The solution centralized all housing listings and introduced a universal short-form online application. This resulted in a dramatic reduction in application time, from several days to just 15-20 minutes. Since its launch, the portal has received over 70,000 applications and 1.5 million site visitors, with 92% of applicants choosing to apply online when available. The data collected is now also used to inform housing policy at the Mayor’s Office.

City and County of San Francisco