Important Update! Achieving the Near-Real Time Bed Availability Criteria

The New Jersey HMIS team has agreed to begin refreshing its data about shelter bed availability every six hours instead of once a day.

Of course six hours is not exactly “real time”, using this dataset does fulfill the requirement for “near-real time” bed availability, and thereby establishes a quantitative definition of “near”.

Providing near-real time bed availability is considered the “floor” and not the “ceiling” for the following Project REACH evaluation criteria; we’d love to see clever solutions that could make it even faster:

“Creates a mechanism that allows for simple aggregation of near or real time bed availability at shelters local to JBJ Soul Kitchen, which is located at: 207 Monmouth St., Red Bank, New Jersey 07701.”

Instructions for downloading the new Near-Real Time Bed Availability data set:

1. Visit https://hmis.njhmfaserv.org/lst/?p=pol

2. Under the heading “Developer,” locate the file named "Project Reach Datafile"

3. Download the file named "bedregistrYYYYMMDDhhmmss"

We’d like to express a HUGE thank you to our HUD colleagues and the New Jersey HMIS team.