Fire safety across the portfolio, one source of truth

RainCity Housing and Support Society is a Vancouver-based non-profit that helps people who have been unhoused find affordable housing, along with support for mental health and addictions. Across British Columbia, they operate emergency shelters; operate housing for individuals, women, and families; and provide clinical services, overdose prevention services, and an addiction recovery program. Every one of those sites carries a responsibility that never takes a month off: fire safety.

Since the Winters Hotel fire in 2022, BC Housing has required monthly fire safety checks at every site. One building is manageable. Multiply it across a whole portfolio and it becomes a serious operational challenge: checks to schedule, complete and document, month after month, with real consequences when something slips. Fire safety violations and fines at best; property damage, injury or loss of life at worst.

An app built by the people who needed it

Rather than buying an off-the-shelf tool, RainCity's own App Team in the Department of Information Services built one. Their fire safety app guides staff through the monthly checks and tracks fire safety activity at each site with an Archilogic floor plan at the center of the experience, showing exactly where things are in the building.

They started small: two sites, floor plans managed in the Archilogic editor. It worked. Now they're rolling the process out to tens of locations, serving thousands of people across BC.

"We ditched our original fire safety inspection app because it was too difficult to match items in the app with items in the building's official fire safety plan. Archilogic and its SDK allowed us to include an interactive floor plan in our current app, eliminating ambiguity and enabling staff to complete the fire safety checks in less time."

— Silvia Hua, RainCity Housing

Why a single source of truth matters

Here's the thing about buildings: almost everything an organization does touches them. Fire safety checks, suite inspections, maintenance, cleaning, accessibility, renovations, moves, different use cases, different tools, different teams. But they all describe the same physical space.

When each of those tools carries its own copy of the floor plan, they drift apart. The maintenance system says one thing, the safety checklist another, and nobody is quite sure which one reflects the building as it stands today.

Running everything on a single source of truth for the built environment means there is one floor plan per building; live, current, and shared by every application that needs it. When the building changes, you change the plan once, and everything that depends on it stays in sync. That's exactly the foundation RainCity's fire safety app is built on, and it's why the same plans can serve whatever they build next.

Function over form

Because updating a plan in Archilogic is something a non-specialist can do, the information stays current without waiting on external drafting services, and staying current is what compliance runs on.

Archilogic builds on the same foundation. The Emergency Signage Creator, an extension in the Editor, reads the emergency assets and escape paths off the plan and turns them into signage, so the signage and the checks come from one floor plan rather than from two copies of it.

When regulation is the use case

A lot of floor-plan use cases are about efficiency or experience. This one is about safety, and that changes the stakes. Monthly fire safety checks aren't optional, and the documentation behind them isn't either. A floor-plan-based workflow gives every check a spatial anchor: not just that something was checked, but where. For a non-profit stretching limited funding across dozens of sites, avoiding a single violation fine matters; keeping residents safe matters infinitely more.

Whatever the use case

Fire safety compliance in supportive housing was not a use case we had on a whiteboard somewhere. That's what we like about it. RainCity had a need, a capable team, and they created the solution themselves using Archilogic's platform which gave them the spatial foundation to build on.

That's the model: whether it's fire safety checks, space management, workplace apps, or something nobody has built yet, if it runs on the built environment, Archilogic enables it.

Learn more about RainCity Housing's work at raincityhousing.org. Curious what you could build on your floor plans? Talk to us at archilogic.com.