NYC Teenagers Launch Affordable Housing Portal so Good, it has Attracted Investment

It seems that New York City teens have abandoned all hope of grown-ups fixing the affordable housing crisis and are taking matters in their own hands. Earlier this month Shelterforce reported on the 11th grade honors student helping Chinese-speaking elders navigate housing applications. Now teens Beckett Zahedi and Derrick Webster Jr. have taken the calling to another level, launching the affordable housing portal Realer Estate — something the city’s vast bureaucracy has never managed to do. 

The New York Times reports that Beckett was inspired by the painful experience of hunting for an affordable apartment with his family in Brooklyn. When his economics class later studied the national housing crisis he and Webster were called to joined forces, teaching themselves to code via YouTube and AI and eventually scaling the ambition of the project from a national scope to NYC. 

Since the site’s launch in July, the teens have earned $2600 in subscription fees, $1000 in advertising and even, recently, $25,000 in investment from an entrepreneurship start-up. 

Even the city admits the teens are on to something. “There needs to be a more uniform, streamlined way for people to be able to find affordable apartments,” Leah Goodridge, a member of the City Planning Commission, told the Times. “New Yorkers suffer for it.”