Task order supports National Housing Locator System

To better serve citizens and foster agency collaboration, HUD awarded a task order to Citizant Inc., headquartered in Chantilla, Va. Based on the task order, which has an estimated value of $1.9 million if all options are exercised, Citizant will maintain, operate and enhance the National Housing Locator System (NHLS) on behalf of HUD.

Citizant began working with HUD in 2006 to develop the NHLS, a Web-based platform that helps federal, state and local agencies rapidly identify available housing for people displaced from their homes by a disaster.

One of the lessons learned from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was that the government lacked a national inventory of available housing to accommodate evacuees. HUD closed this gap with an intergovernmental tool designed with Web 2.0 technologies. By combining federal housing resources with commercial housing locators and Web sites in one integrated platform, the system can identify available housing based on various search options.

Planned improvements

Under the new task order, Citizant will continue to provide operational and maintenance services for the NHLS, as well as upgrade the system with important new features, including:

• Expanding the customer-service and case-management applications to help manage the location of evacuees and provide access to resources such as the American Red Cross.

• Establishing relationships with more than 4,000 public-housing authorities to ensure that housing data is readily available prior to any disaster.

• Improving the interface with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s systems to better facilitate resource allocation.

• Enhancing Web service capabilities to support interaction among programs within HUD.

"We are proud of Citizant’s collaboration with HUD on the NHLS, since this work truly makes a difference in the lives of the citizens we all serve," said Alba M. Aleman, president of Citizant. "Now we are focused on bringing even more resources to families impacted by natural disasters and providing a platform to allow government agencies to work closely together during these disaster recovery periods. This phase of development further underscores HUD’s commitment to quickly and efficiently serve the needs of citizens displaced by disaster."

Citizant Inc. provides a range of technical solutions to government agencies. Specialties range from enterprise architecture to program management support.

For more information about Citizant’s capabilities, visit http://www.citizant.com/.