The situation
The Chicago Housing Authority is the second-largest public housing authority in the United States, serving more than 133,000 residents across 63,000+ low-income households through a portfolio of public housing, Housing Choice Vouchers, Project-Based Vouchers, and related programs, operating across all 77 Chicago community areas. Resident services at that scale is fundamentally a case management operation.
Every resident has a history — housing status, family composition, services received, interactions with case managers and social workers. The workers serving residents need that history available at every touchpoint. And resident services data has to connect to property operations: lease status, unit assignments, maintenance, compliance flags. In a housing authority, what happens in case management and what happens in property operations are the same story viewed from two angles.
Off-the-shelf social services software typically assumes one program model, one funding stream, one workflow. A housing authority serving multiple HUD programs, multiple resident populations, and multiple service modalities doesn’t fit that template. CHA needed a system built around their actual operations and integrated into Yardi, where their property data already lived.
How we approached it
As part of a multi-firm delivery team, RJR contributed to a custom Salesforce case management system spanning Sales Cloud (resident accounts and relationships) and Service Cloud (case management and interaction tracking), architected specifically for CHA’s resident services workflows. RJR led the integration engineering connecting the Salesforce system to Yardi.
On the Salesforce side, the system tracks every resident as a managed account with complete history, captures every worker-resident interaction (home visits, phone calls, service referrals, eligibility reviews), routes cases by type and specialty across teams, and surfaces the right history to the right worker at the right time.
The Yardi integration was the other half of the story. Yardi is CHA’s property operations platform — where leases, unit assignments, rent, maintenance, and compliance data live. We built the integration bidirectionally: housing context flows from Yardi into Salesforce so case managers see the whole picture, and service outcomes flow from Salesforce back into Yardi where that context matters for housing decisions. Without that integration, case management and property operations would have stayed two parallel systems pretending the other didn’t exist.
Why this matters
Resident services in a public housing authority isn’t call-center work. It’s long-term relationships with families across years — navigating housing, employment services, senior care, eviction prevention, and a hundred adjacent issues. Getting the case management system wrong means workers can’t see history when they need it, or they spend their day doing data entry instead of seeing residents.
The system had to fit CHA’s operational reality — multiple programs, multiple populations, integration with property operations — rather than fit a packaged product’s assumptions. That’s another instance of the principle we work from across domains: the client knows their operations better than any vendor template, and the technology should be built around their work, not the other way around.
Outcome
- Custom Salesforce case management system (Sales Cloud + Service Cloud) live across CHA’s resident services operation
- Full history of resident relationships and worker interactions captured in a single system, accessible across case management and support teams
- Bidirectional Salesforce–Yardi integration — housing context flows into case management, case outcomes flow back into property operations
- Single system of record for worker-resident interactions, tying case management and property operations into one coherent view
What this demonstrates
Capability beyond HCM — custom Salesforce delivery and domain-specific system integration for public-sector case management. Government and public housing execution at nationally-significant scale: CHA is the second-largest housing authority in the United States, and the stakes of getting the system right are both political and operational. Integration engineering between Salesforce CRM and Yardi property operations — the kind of domain-specific integration that generic Salesforce consultancies typically don’t handle. And the same principle that threads through our HCM work, applied in a different domain: build technology that enables how the client actually operates, not how a vendor’s product assumes they should.