New system makes it easier for low-income Oakland County residents to find housing

Lake Orion-based landlord James Maciejewski says he’s always “embraced” housing choice voucher holders as residents.

“I believe everybody needs a place to live, so I like to provide a good place,” he says. “The tenants I do get, I get for a long time.”

However, Maciejewski says the process of finding those tenants can be complex. Maciejewski says he usually has to call around to local housing service agencies to identify prospective renters when he has a vacancy to fill. But he’s finding that process much easier to navigate with the help of Padmission Connect, a new technology solution the Pontiac-based Alliance for Housing has implemented to make it easier for homeless services organizations, landlords, and people exiting homelessness to find and work with each other.

Padmission offers a centralized web platform where housing service providers can recruit landlords to participate in their housing programs, landlords can list eligible properties, and housing seekers can search for homes that suit their housing vouchers and income restrictions. Maciejewski says a few new prospective tenants have already found his properties on Padmission.

“Once you set up your profile and set up all your units and apartments, if one becomes available, it’s just an easy click to turn it on, and … you’re getting prospective people looking and wanting to take your space,” he says.

Padmission is a company spun out of the Arizona-based real estate brokerage HOM Inc. in 2019. HOM Inc. used Padmission to support its landlord engagement service, Threshold, when it launched in 2021. Threshold data show a marked decrease in the length of time it took for people in Threshold-supported programs to move into housing. In 2021, the median wait was 83 days; in 2023, it was 53. Daniel Davis spearheaded Threshold’s launch and is now the director of product and customer experience for Padmission. Describing Padmission as “incredibly successful” in Arizona, he says Padmission is now working to produce the same results in 40 communities across the U.S., including Oakland County.

“When a tenant who is experiencing homelessness is trying to get off the streets, they’re going through a lot of trauma,” Davis says. “They already have a ton of barriers to access housing. This does a lot of the work before they even start looking.”

How it works

In Oakland County, Darnell Obamwonyi is the main person responsible for implementing Padmission. As the Alliance for Housing’s landlord community engagement specialist, Obamwonyi has been working to get more local landlords to list properties on Padmission.

“It works similar to any other platform that advertises property for people to rent,” Obamwonyi says. “We will reach out to local landlords within the county and encourage them to list their properties for affordable housing agencies to have properties to sort through when housing their tenants.”

Davis says Padmission streamlines landlord engagement work, which can be complicated for some homelessness and housing service organizations. 

“Everybody’s doing the same thing, which is they’re either using a spreadsheet, a Google Sheet, or Excel, … and they’re just tracking landlords who will work with them,” he says. “And then when somebody gets a voucher, they hand that Excel spreadsheet out. And as you can imagine, the moment that that happens, it’s already outdated.”

Davis says HOM Inc. launched Padmission to “get rid of all these internal tracking sheets we had” and replace them with real-time info on housing availability. He says Padmission also helps service providers to approach landlord engagement as more of a “sales process,” identifying new leads and getting them on board with local housing programs. He says that sort of approach often gets lost because housing organizations are “literally just trying to help this one person get into this one unit.”

“All of these providers, all over the country in different communities, work in silos right next to each other, and often with the same landlords,” Davis says. “So by centralizing your landlord engagement, what you’re doing is you’re enabling somebody to do all the outreach, somebody to focus on sales instead of just the social work side of it. And then also you’re bringing landlords to the table in a way that they’re able to help solve the problems with you.”

Combating stigma

Obamwonyi says this kind of increased landlord engagement capacity is helpful in combating the stigma many landlords associate with housing choice voucher holders and tenants transitioning out of homelessness. He says many landlords think that “Section 8 housing means that I’m gonna house someone with 100 kids and they’re gonna have 10 dogs and they’re gonna destroy the house by the time it’s turned over.” 

“That’s just a stereotype because there are working men and women that need a place to stay that look like you and me, that don’t have any of these extracurricular issues that are associated with the stereotype,” Obamwonyi says.

Maciejewski says he thinks some landlords have a “misperception of who is actually using the vouchers.” While he says he’s had “problematic” tenants, they’re the exception, not the rule.

“I would probably say 90-95% of my people are good people,” he says. “No problem.”

Davis says misperceptions can result in low-income housing seekers becoming concentrated in the same handful of rental properties, creating what he describes as “mini-projects.” 

“Instead of just going back to those same properties, [we want to] reach out to more properties, ask more landlords, go higher up the chain to executives, and sell people on whole portfolios to bring more units in that people can search from,” he says.

Davis says the approach has been successful in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Padmission launched. Just 92 units were available on Padmission at launch time, but today there are 2,400. As Obamwonyi works to recruit Oakland County landlords to Padmission, he hopes to see similar results here.

“I’m just encouraging the landlords that once upon a time there were people that have money now that didn’t always have money that needed some support at some point,” he says. “And reminding them that when they go to their next coffee meeting or their next restaurant out in Birmingham or Bloomfield Hills, that those same wait staff need a place to stay as well.”

Early results and longer-term plans

Although Padmission has only been active in Oakland County since February, Obamwonyi is pleased with the preliminary results. As a former full-time real estate agent, he says he has a “strong network of landlords in Oakland County, so it wasn’t very hard to get the word out.” Over 1,000 Oakland County units are now listed on Padmission, and Obamwonyi says 20 new leases have been signed just in the past two months.

“We’ve been doing a pretty good job of housing tenants,” he says.

Leah McCall, executive director of the Alliance for Housing, says her organization has secured funding to continue using Padmission for the foreseeable future. Davis credits the Alliance for Housing for being “willing to try new ideas.”

“They do seem to be pretty critically engaged with ‘What are the problems? And what are the solutions?'” he says.

Maciejewski says he hopes more Oakland County landlords make use of Padmission.

“Everyone needs to learn about it,” he says. ” … I think it’s great that the community is outreaching to try to help the situation. … I’m looking forward to using it more.”

More information on Padmission in Oakland County is available here.