Tim Tai

New Haven’s affordable housing market is getting a reboot.

The Housing Authority of New Haven, Elm City Communities, is partnering with Bob.ai to automate the affordable housing marketplace.

New Haven renters can apply for housing vouchers, view available rental units and recertify their eligibility for affordable housing using a centralized online portal. Landlords use the same technology to submit Request for Tenancy Approval forms and put units on the market. Bob.ai uses real-time automation software and artificial intelligence to manage the process.

“There’s a lot of paperwork that is entailed when you apply for housing, a lot of data gathering and document gathering,” Shenae Draughn, Elm City Communities President, said. “And so [Bob.ai] was meant to cobble all those things together and streamline the process.”

The Housing Authority began rolling out the technology in January and sent out mailings to community members informing them of the change. Elm City Communities’ “Client Portal” webpage now directs users to a new “Housing Choice Voucher Management Tool” with instructions for creating an account with Bob.ai.

According to Draughn, staff are closely monitoring data to manage errors and evaluate the system’s efficiency. Paper materials are still available to those who request them.

Draughn anticipates that Bob.ai will be able to halve the time it takes for someone to enroll in Elm City Communities’ voucher program, which grants housing subsidies to low-income families. According to other public housing authorities that have partnered with the company, the difference may be even greater.

The Tampa Housing Authority is in the “implementation stage” of its partnership with Bob.ai and hopes to launch the system in the next 60 days. Mike Tepfer, director of information technology at THA, said they anticipate their application processing time shrinking from one week to a single day.

“We want to be able to automate more processes so, in case it comes down to, ‘we don’t have the number of staff to handle all of this,’ we do have these processes,” Tepfer said, explaining that high staff workloads can pose a funding problem for the Housing Authority.

Entrepreneur Bejoy Narayana launched Bob.ai in 2018 as an outgrowth of his tech consulting business, BoodsKapper. In a March 2024 interview for Forbes Books, Narayana explained that the company began when the Dallas Housing Authority requested his consulting services to help expedite their unit inspection process, which had been suffering delays.

Narayana told Forbes that the system utilizes both software and autonomous AI agents to expedite the public housing authority’s services. For instance, Bob.ai uses a software program to evaluate whether a rental unit meets a given participant’s affordability needs and to notify a landlord when a unit’s rent is too high for the market. Artificial intelligence comes in to evaluate paperwork like W-9s, ownership proof, and management agreements.

Narayana explained that the online portal enables both landlords and renters to transact with any PHA in Bob.ai’s network.

“The clients and applicants can apply to about 34,000 properties,” Narayana told Forbes Books. “Like college applications, you create the application once, and then you can send it to any property.”

While Bob.ai’s artificial intelligence tools primarily serve to verify landlord and resident identity, critics have raised concerns about efforts to integrate AI into housing screening, citing risks of discrimination and privacy violations.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank based in Washington, published a report in June 2024 advising housing regulators like the Department of Housing and Urban Development to “consider addressing potential artificial intelligence (AI) risks to housing fairness and discrimination.”

In a March 2024 memo, the Office of Management and Budget highlighted AI use in tenant screenings and monitoring as “rights-impacting,” and directed agencies to “assess AI’s impact on equity and fairness, and mitigate algorithmic discrimination when it is present.” 

Elm City Communities was established in 1938.