Add "Subsidy Type" to Housing Subsidies
Ali Ryder
Add a new mandatory field to Housing Subsidy called Subsidy Type. It would be a look-up table like any other. Here are some suggested default values:
- Rent supplement
- First & last month's rent
- Damage deposit
- Arrears payment
- Moving assistance
- Housing start-up
The problem we're fixing:
Right now, people can add a Housing Subsidy but there's no real way to break it down. Sure, you can use the mandatory Program for this purpose, but increasingly communities are using the Program field for things like funding source. So the program might be "Reaching Home" or it might be Ontario's "HPP - Housing Assistance" program.
Then there's the Reason for Service field, which I've seen some communities trying to hack. They say the "Reason for Service" is "First & Last Month's rent" but since that field is shared with other modules, it's not an excellent solution. Besides, Reason for Service is also useful. We want to know how many people are getting evicted by their landlord so we're paying their arrears versus how many got the power cut off, etc.
What I'm trying to say is there's really a third dimension. So either we're getting staff not using the module, or setting up their programs in weird ways to accommodate this, setting up their reason for service drop-down for this, or trying to require staff to add it as a comment in the free-text field, which doesn't lend itself to any analysis.