With information technology comes a digital divide that makes it as tough to find affordable housing online as it is easy to browse for market-rate housing.

That's unfortunate because those who can least afford housing need quick access to the greatest cross section of homes in order to find a home that's the best fit for their budget and only a few efforts are addressing the problem.

Home buyers seeking new and existing market-rate housing have at their fingertips massive national online multiple listings services that begin with Homestore.com, an electronic umbrella for listings and housing information from the National Association of Realtors' Realtor.com and the National Association of Homebuilders' Homebuilder.com.

Homestore.com also offers market-rate listings for renters, RentNet.com and listings for older home seekers, SeniorHousingNet.com.

In somewhat redundant operations, real estate listings portals, as well as national, regional and local real estate firms and home building companies also offer their in-house listings online. Also, individual real estate agents post listings on their websites and a host of niche market listing sites offer second and vacation homes, gated communities and timeshares. The handful of national apartment rental sites also makes it easy to seek market-rate rental housing online.

Those seeking affordable housing to rent or to buy, however, most often still look for homes the old fashioned way.

"I don't know of any national or central clearing house for affordable housing" (listings) says Michael Tucker, with the Washington, D.C.-based National Multi Housing Council.

Unlike the nation's relatively uniform market-rate housing market, which had national trade networks in place long before the advent of online listings, the affordable housing sector is a hodgepodge of often unconnected federal, state and local government-programs, as well as private, philanthropic and charity operations.

What's more, in the affordable housing market, the definition of affordable housing and the eligibility qualifications can be as varied as the different programs and as local as an individual development.

And then there's the cost.

"The (market-rate) real estate industry is a much more financially rich system. There's a huge incentive to hook up an operation like Realtor.com. There's not that kind of incentive in the affordable housing world," said Tracy Lehto, a housing program specialist for the city of Portland OR's Bureau of Housing and Community Development.

"For this kind of tool to be useful it really needs to have a lot of listings. It's about housing choice. Finding the best place to live anywhere and in a very easy and convenient manner," says Lehto, who oversees Portland's Department of Housing and Community Development's new affordable housing website Housing Connections.

Like Charlotte, NC's SocialServe.Com, Silicon Valley's (Santa Clara County, CA) HousingSCC.com, and perhaps a handful of other local operations, Housing Connections seeks to make it easy to browse for affordable housing.

Housing Connections offers Portland-area medium- and low-income residents a listing service that includes 52,000 houses and apartments for sale and for rent, owned or managed by more than 1,300 property managers or owners, including public housing agencies and private landlords.

The site, designed by city employees using a $480,000 U.S. Department of Commerce grant, gets more than 3,500 hits a week. Housing shoppers can find units by price, number of bedrooms and section of town, and they can find maps that show nearby amenities such as schools and parks.

Just as SocialServe.Com is expanding into Arizona, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri, as well as throughout North Carolina, Lehto hopes to port her agency's affordable housing listings engine to other cities, states and housing agencies.

Portland has hired Bowman Systems of Shreveport, LA, a supplier of Web-based solutions for the social services sector, to market Housing Connections under the name of HOUSINGpoint to other jurisdictions for profits to be used to further fund Portland's Housing Connections.

"Trying to find a place to live is hard. We wanted to make it easy to find a place that matches people's needs. Then we started getting calls from other communities. I would love to see Housing Connections in a lot of communities and we are trying to sell it for less than it would cost to develop it from scratch, especially where they don't have the technical expertise and time and resources," said Lehto.

Related online operations are scarce, and while they typically don't offer online listings of affordable housing, they do offer Internet referrals and links to agencies that can help locate affordable housing. They include:

• The Chicago, IL-based Affordable Housing Online listings site also partners with market-rate services Rent.Com and VacancyNet.Com. The site also includes links to state housing authorities, Section 8 information and a rent/income calculator among other features.

• The National Housing Conference's (NHC) Affordable Housing Clearinghouse offers an extensive list of related referrals to NHC members, government agencies and other affordable housing services.

• The National Council Of State Housing Agencies offers links to housing agencies in 50 states.

• NHC affiliate, the Center For Housing Policy offers a "Paycheck To Paycheck" engine that allows users to select 64 occupations in each of 130 of the nation's largest housing markets to determine wages for those jobs and rents in those housing markets.

Published: November 9, 2004

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.