Design study · Public housing authority · California
Four doors, not a department menu
A housing authority concept reorganized around the four reasons anyone actually visits, with Spanish parity on the same pages that have it in English rather than a thinner translated subset.
Click-through redesign concept prepared for HACSC-2026-RFP-03. Not the live HACSC site.
- Housing authority website
- Audience-first navigation
- Spanish parity
- HUD news feed
- Section 504
- Accessibility audit
Housing Authority of Santa Cruz County — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Housing authority websites are organized by program — Housing Choice Voucher, Project-Based, FUP, VASH — which is how the agency is funded and audited, and how almost nobody arrives. A family looking for housing does not know which program they qualify for; that is the question they came to ask. Meanwhile Spanish-speaking applicants typically get a reduced version of the site, which in a county with this demographic is not a translation gap but a service gap.
The approach
Four audience flows replace the department menu: I want to apply, I'm a current tenant, I'm a landlord, I need an accommodation. Each opens into the real tasks behind it — eligibility and waitlist status; recertification, income changes, transfers, case managers, the resident portal; payments, inspections, listing a unit. Spanish reaches parity on the same pages English has, not a subset. A live HUD feed keeps federal changes visible, and the site foregrounds what is actually bearing down on residents — an Emergency Housing Voucher cliff, a proposed HUD citizenship rule, a building leasing up — rather than generic news. Section 504 accommodation gets its own door instead of being buried in policy, and a live accessibility scoreboard keeps the redesign honest about its own conformance.
The result
Twelve routes covering applications, tenants, landlords, Section 504, search, and accessibility, with Spanish counterparts and language assistance surfaced at no cost across five languages.
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