BAHFA’s Doorway Housing Portal Receives CALCOG Eureka! Award

The Bay Area Housing Finance Authority’s (BAHFA) Doorway Housing Portal received a Eureka! Award for Regional Excellence from the California Association of Councils of Governments (CALCOG) yesterday during the organization’s Regional Leadership Forum in Long Beach.

The Eureka! Award recognizes regional projects or programs that demonstrate the creative leadership and thinking needed to develop and implement new ideas that can serve as examples or best practices for others to follow. 

Doorway, launched in 2023, is the first multi-jurisdictional online affordable housing portal in the country. It works to improve affordable housing placement in the Bay Area through policy change and process improvement. The primary tool is the Doorway digital platform, consisting of the Doorway Housing Portal, the Bay Area’s one-stop shop for searching and applying for affordable housing, and the Doorway Partners Portal, which provides placement support for housing development owners/operators and jurisdiction partners.

Housing seekers across the region can use the portal to search for housing on their phones or computers and complete an application in less than 10 minutes. In addition to saving time, housing seekers can determine eligibility up-front, apply for multiple listings, and get up-to-date lottery, waitlist and placement information. For owner/operator partners, the platform makes it easier to reach interested housing seekers and accept applications.

“The exclamation, “Eureka!” captures the Doorway team’s excitement about way the Doorway Housing Portal already is improving lives throughout the Bay Area,” noted BAHFA Chair Sue Noack, who also serves as Chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and as a Pleasant Hill City Councilmember. “Doorway also opens a path to help communities around the state and across the country better serve their residents. On behalf of all my BAHFA and MTC colleagues, I commend the team for their hard work and congratulate them on this award." 

“When it comes to housing, it takes more than a village — it takes a region,” said Barry Roeder, BAHFA’s Doorway Housing Portal manager. “People look for housing across jurisdictional lines — they look where they live now, where they work, near their families and friends. We’re so grateful to see colleagues in the Bay Area and across the state increasingly embrace this thinking.” 

To date, Doorway has seen approximately 500,000 unique users and has helped place over 3,300 households. By consolidating the process of finding and applying for a home into one platform, Doorway has assumed responsibility for work that previously was performed by Bay Area jurisdiction staff, freeing them up to focus on other responsibilities. Doorway’s open-source platform provides a product that jurisdictions anywhere can reuse themselves — helping communities throughout the country save money and staff resources while improving their affordable housing search and application processes. 

Established in 2019 as the state’s pioneering regional housing entity, BAHFA focuses on large-scale solutions for affordable housing production, preservation and tenant protections. BAHFA is jointly governed by the BAHFA Board, which is composed of the same members as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Association of Bay Area Governments. Learn more on the BAHFA webpage.