Unqork and the City of Chicago’s Housing Solution to Distribute Rent Relief Funds Receives Over 25,000 Applications
Chicago is the latest jurisdiction to leverage Unqork’s flexible no-code Rent Relief solution; to date, Unqork is supporting the management of more than $430M ERAP funds across all customers
NEW YORK – June 24, 2021 – In its latest partnership, Unqork, the leading enterprise no-code platform, added the City of Chicago to its more than a dozen states, counties and municipalities, leveraging its no-code Rent Relief solution to support the City’s third round of rental assistance since the onset of the pandemic. The Chicago Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) application portal closed having received more than 25,000 applications with residents applying to receive up to 15 months of rental assistance including 12 months of past due payments and three months of future rent. Chicago’s ERAP was open between May 24 and June 15 and in addition to seeking rental payments, applicants also requested utility assistance through the site.
“Since we opened our first round of rental assistance grants in March 2020, we’ve seen the need for additional assistance continue to grow and threaten an eviction crisis,” said Marisa Novara, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Housing. “I would like to thank Unqork for its creativity and diligence in creating this customized platform that will allow us to get these funds directly to those who are most in need.”
Unqork Rent Relief gives state and local governments a way to effectively and securely manage ERAP funding and distribute support to the millions of households unable to pay rent and utilities due to the pandemic. Unqork is the only truly end-to-end solution in the market that includes: eligibility assessment, application submission, application review and quality control, payments, auditing, and reporting to the US Treasury and other regulators. Because of Unqork’s flexible nature, the application can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of each jurisdiction while quickly and accurately getting funds to citizens in need, at scale. To date, Unqork Rent Relief is supporting the management of more than $430M of ERAP funding at a total cost of less than $3.2M across all state, city and county customers.
Unqork’s enterprise no-code platform was built to support the complexity, scale and security that mission-critical applications in regulated industries require, all without creating a single line of code. Using Unqork’s visual drag-and-drop interface, customers are able to build, deploy and manage solutions significantly faster than traditional coding methods.
“We are proud to support the City of Chicago and the Department of Housing, along with all of our state, city and county Rent Relief customers, to ensure that families in need can stay in their homes,” said Cas Holloway, Head of Public Enterprise, Unqork. “COVID-19 has greatly accelerated the need for virtual public services, creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize the way the government meets the most critical needs of the people they serve.”
More than a dozen states, counties and municipalities are leveraging Unqork’s no-code Rent Relief solution. In Santa Clara County and the City of San Jose, rent relief funds are being distributed through the countywide Homelessness Prevention System, a partnership between public agencies and local nonprofits, led by Destination: Home and Sacred Heart Community Service. They have used Unqork's Rent Relief application to manage the full ERAP program to benefit the lowest income County residents.
Unqork has a proven track record of swiftly addressing government needs with secure, flexible no-code solutions. Last spring, Unqork supported a number of digitization efforts to help governments support their residents during the pandemic, including the support of COVID hubs for New York City and The District of Columbia. Unqork partnered with Deloitte to build and launch in one week an application enabling lenders to efficiently process loan requests through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Unqork and KPMG worked with The Community Preservation Corporation to rapidly build and launch a mortgage forbearance solution to support new challenges in the housing industry caused by COVID. Unqork’s Virtual Government Services offering has enabled government agencies to digitize everything from family benefits to marriage licences, building permits or vehicle registration.
Before Unqork, this kind of transformation would require teams of software developers and expensive retainer contracts to handle future changes. Using Unqork’s no-code platform, government CTOs, CIOs and their teams can work with the agencies they serve to quickly get reliable solutions to market--and easily make future updates without generating any code.
To learn more about Unqork’s solutions for the Public Sector, visit Unqork.com.
About Unqork
Unqork is the industry pioneer no-code enterprise application platform that helps large companies build, deploy, and manage complex applications without writing a single line of code. Organizations like Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual, the Cities of New York, Chicago and Washington, DC and Maimonides Medical Center are using Unqork's drag-and-drop interface to build enterprise applications faster, with higher quality, and lower costs than conventional approaches. To learn more, please visit: https://www.unqork.com.
Media Contact:
Dana Davis
