True North Housing Alliance — the Rental Atlas for Butte County
True North Housing Alliance · 2026
Civic housing data platform for Butte County — the Rental Atlas and Community Services Directory, serving residents, caseworkers, and local government.
- Problem
- True North Housing Alliance connects Butte County residents with housing and the services that make housing stick — and needed working data tools, not a brochure, for residents, caseworkers, and local government alike.
- Solution
- I built a civic data platform on Next.js and Supabase: an interactive Rental Atlas tracking 5,700+ properties with HUD Fair Market Rent calculations, a Community Services Directory of 200+ services across 12 categories, and an admin suite with a scraper engine to keep the data current.
- Result
- Live in production on Vercel as its own standalone codebase, split out from the Quenga Designs monorepo in July 2026 so it can deploy independently; a custom domain is the next step.
The brief
True North Housing Alliance connects Butte County residents with housing and the services that make housing stick. The organization needed tools, not a marketing page: a map of the county's rental stock and a directory of the services residents actually get referred to. And the audience is three-sided — residents searching for housing, caseworkers making referrals, and local government looking at the same data everyone else is.
What was built
Two public tools and the machinery behind them.
The Rental Atlas is an interactive map of Butte County covering 5,700+ properties, with HUD Fair Market Rent calculations built in and flags for post-Camp-Fire rebuilds, Section 8 acceptance, and student housing.
The Community Services Directory catalogs 200+ services across 12 categories — food, shelter, mental health, legal aid, and more — so a referral is a link, not a rumor.
Behind Supabase-gated auth sits the admin suite: address and APN imports, property management, a resource hub, an AI copilot for data curation, and a GitHub-bound code workspace. Data platforms live or die on upkeep, so the admin tooling got real attention.
Under the hood
Next.js on Vercel, Supabase as the data layer. The piece I care most about is the scraper engine that keeps property data honest: Puppeteer running stealth with a native-fetch fallback, a four-strategy extraction pipeline with a GPT-4o-mini fallback for stubborn pages, Zod-normalized output, and idempotent Supabase upserts so re-runs never duplicate rows. The scrape endpoint is SSRF-guarded — an API that fetches arbitrary URLs is a liability until you make it not one.
The codebase started life inside the Quenga Designs monorepo. In July 2026 I split it out into its own repository so the alliance's tools and my own studio site could ship and deploy independently — the shared Supabase project meant no data migration was needed, and the old /true-north paths became the site root.
Where it stands
Live in production on Vercel, serving residents, caseworkers, and local government from one codebase. The remaining step is a custom domain decision; the metadata and sitemap are already staged for it. The data pipeline keeps running either way.