Why we built this
What if housing stability was built into the home?
Every apartment has a smoke detector for fires, and nothing for the hard month. So we moved stability into the home, on day one: one link on the fridge that opens the building, the neighborhood, and a quiet door to real help before a hard month becomes a move.
How it works on a block
- Lease
- Welcome
- Connection
- Resources
- Early signal
- Help arrives
The story
It started with a counselor’s question.
Neighborhood Blocks started in Tulsa. Blaine Ottman is a substance abuse counselor by day, and a designer and founder the rest of the time; he lives in a Tulsa apartment building himself. In his work, the hard month shows up early, as a short rent, a notice, a shut-off, and the help that exists is rarely one tap away. Every building hands a new resident a move-in packet with the rules. None of them come with the help.
So he built the page he wished was on his own fridge. Rent, repairs and the office in one place. A passport to the neighborhood. And Deco: a door that asks what’s going on and hands back this building’s own numbers and a page of real local help, privately, day or night.
Blocks is built in Tulsa, at Gradient, the city’s innovation hub, with the people who run buildings and the organizations who serve the people in them. Blaine came up through The Mine, Tulsa’s human-centered design program, and Co.Starters.
The bigger idea
A smoke detector in every building, and a city that can see its own need.
Blocks starts with one building and one magnet. What’s behind it is meant to outgrow the page.
On every block, a resident taps what’s going on and gets the office’s numbers and real local organizations, with the one to call today marked. A layer of housing stability that works with the software buildings already run.
Meet Deco Pulse, our data in the openEvery request made through Deco is counted once, anonymously, by city and by need, and published live. A signal of housing need that a city, a funder or a researcher can act on before the 1st does, instead of reading about it in an annual report.
See PulseThe team
Who’s on the block.
Counselor, designer and entrepreneur in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Builds Blocks, and lives in an apartment building himself.
The database, the builds and the checks behind every page.
How resident data stays private, from the page to the count.
Grab a coffee with us.
Whether you run a building, serve the people in it, or want to help us keep building, book a coffee and we will show you where you fit on the block.
Book a virtual coffee