Talk:Housing quality and health outcomes in the United States

Wikipedia Ambassador Program assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

Above message substituted from on 13:55, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Regarding "Reads like an essay"
Some suggestions: Congrats on getting this published! G potestio (talk) 05:48, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You don’t need the statistics in the introduction
 * Eliminate the sentence “The World Health Organization (WHO) provides a useful framework for thinking about housing conditions. According to the WHO,” and just start with “housing should provide.
 * Maybe each Specific Health Outcome could be its own subheader
 * The last section (Interventions/Policy) would perhaps work better as specific examples of policies rather than the goals of policy interventions. I know it’s difficult to determine which ones to include, since they mostly happen on a local level, but an example would make the three points more concrete.

Peer review from Protonk
Hi, I'm an online ambassador in the US education program and I have been asked to take a look at this article and give some general comments. Many of these will be only suggestions and you can (and should) click through to some of the style guides and policies I link to determine for yourself if my comments merit large changes in the article.

Style

 * The lede of the article serves as an introduction and an executive summary for the reader. For an article on a broad and difficult topic such as this the lead should allow a casual reader to peruse a few paragraphs and get the gist of the subject before (or instead of) diving into the article.  There are a few suggestions in our style guide on how to write a good lede but it basically boils down to this: sketch out a few paragraphs containing the outline of points in your article; select some important or salient claims from the body text; try and write a short summary of the points and the important claims, roughly 1 paragraph for each major section in the article.  For an article of this length a good lede could be anywhere from 3-5 paragraphs.  I notice that you have an "Introduction" section directly below the lede.  As a start, try simply removing the introduction section header and seeing how the article reads with the first sentence and the introduction combined into a short executive summary.  You can make changes from there if you like or rewrite the lede more substantively.
 * You have some terms and government agencies "wikilinked" already. That's good.  I would suggest browsing through the article imagining that a layperson was reading it.  What phrases, concepts or words might they run across and want more information?
 * A number of your sections include bulleted lists where the body text is broken into short, separable claims presented in a list style. Generally these formats are used sparingly on Wikipedia.  A short list like the WHO's definition of housing is certainly appropriate but a list of physical deficiencies may be better off integrated into prose style.  This is difficult but it also gives you the editor much more control over presentation of those claims.  Where a list seems to give equal precedence to all of its elements, a paragraph can integrate those elements into a larger picture.  In this case you may find it easier to show which physical deficiencies are more important without worrying about generating a list where some elements are paragraphs and others are sentence fragments.  It can also help you while writing because it forces you to consider each element in turn.  If you cannot integrate a particular claim into a paragraph you may be better off dropping it or moving it to another section.  Hard work, but worth it.
 * your inline references are generally well formatted and consistent but you might want to consider including external links within the references to online available publications. This is not a hard and fast requirement but you will find it makes life easier for readers and editors alike.
 * In some sections you have paragraphs broken down conceptually under headings like Lead or Chronic illness. This is great but the best way to do this is by using section headers available in the wikicode.  Currently you have these headings written as Asthma and respiratory illnesses  .  You can instead write ===Asthma and respiratory illnesses=== .  The number of equal signs on either side indicates the place of the heading in a general hierarchy--most section headings in articles have two equal signs.  An immediate subsection of those would have three and so on.  This has a few benefits.  First, it is standardized across article so an editor can happen upon your page and immediately understand and edit your section headings as needed.  Second, it adds those subsections to the table of contents.  This has an interesting benefit to you as a writer.  If, after changing these headings, you notice that the table of contents is too crowded or doesn't properly reflect the relative importance of the ideas and claims in your section titles you can end up adding or removing them (either the headings or the paragraphs as a whole).  Doing so may actually help you write a more comprehensive and balanced article.
 * There is a tag on the article suggesting that categories should be added. You can add categories yourself by including them at the very bottom of the article text as though they were wikilinks like so:  .  Most of the time you can copy and paste relevant categories from other similar articles (this is what I do most of the time).  However I don't think you need to worry too much about this.  The tag at the top of the article is unsightly but adding categories is something another editor can do.
 * you have a section titled "Statistics". You may find that this section is better merged with other relevant areas.  In other words if you have statistics on housing quality, move them to the housing quality section.  If you have statistics on racial disproportions you can move them to that section.  Not only will this allow you to better source claims made in those sections but it removes the temptation to use statistics as a catch all section for general facts on the subject.
 * Generally only the first word in a section heading should be capitalized. I.e. "Specific Health Outcomes" should be "Specific health outcomes".

Tone/content

 * the article has a number of "citation needed" tags placed by editors after particular claims which may need some empirical support. Resolving these issues is easier than it appears at first.  If you have a section on nutrition (as you do) you can go to the food desert article and peruse the references there.  Some of them may speak directly to claims made in your article and you can add those references in quite easily (often by copying and pasting them).  Other times you may be able to resolve the issue by removing the claim entirely if it is sufficiently extraneous to your purposes.  Take "Inner city minorities have poorer health than suburban whites" as an example.  This is probably true and you can likely find a number of references to support the claim.  However, how central is the claim that inner city minorities have poorer health than suburban whites to the central thrust of your article.  I am not suggesting that you merely remove it on my say so but keep in mind the possibility of trimming and merging specific claims in your article to resolve the citation issues.
 * I assume the history section is meant to encompass the history of housing quality in the US since roughly the middle third of the 20th century. If so, you may want to ask yourself about the importance of the last 5 years in a broad historical context.  There is a wikipedia "essay" on recentism which explains this problem and why it may cause the content of the article to suffer.  That page is not a guideline or policy and you are not expected to agree with it or follow it, but it might be good food for thought.  Remember that a wikipedia article is written today but may be read 10 years from now or even 50 years from now.  If the article isn't edited in the meantime, how important will a short slice of time around 2011 be to a reader in 2060?
 * the article also has a number of tags regarding unsupported attribution. Anytime the text of the article reads "some people say" or "some researchers say" it is often valuable to identify the speaker.  Is your source a speech from a HUD director?  A newspaper article?  Can the sentence be reworded to say "In an article published in 1988, Robert Margo argued..."?  The worry here is anyone can edit these article so we don't want contentious claims made in the voice of the encyclopedia.  As writers we usually understand we cannot say "I feel..." in a wikipedia article but it feels natural to say "some people feel..."  Unfortunately from the standpoint of a critical reader both of those statements are equivalent.
 * Be very careful with sentences such as "Today’s poor housing and neighborhood conditions are a symptom of historic inner city disinvestment and population lose influenced by ill-conceived federal housing policy and finance." That statement is sourced to a Brookings Institute report (a good source for urban housing issues) and I have absolutely no doubt it accurately reflects the position taken by the author based on careful research.  However we are making that claim in the voice of the encyclopedia.  How certain are we that federal housing policy has been ill-conceived?  I'm pretty certain, but I wouldn't want a reader to take my word for it.  In what manner has it been ill-conceived?  A statement like that is much better written as a summary of the findings in that report followed by a direct quote from the author (even just a sentence fragment) where the report makes broader claims.  Housing and urban economics is a phenomenally complex subject area.  There are a number of interacting factors including government policy, migration, economic outcomes, broad changes in transportation and production and so on.  We should be respectful of that complexity when writing articles and be careful to parse out when an author is making a conclusion and when he or she is offering empirical evidence.  This is one area where it is much harder to write for Wikipedia than for an essay or position paper because you must write with the idea in mind that a potential reader should not have to trust your expertise in order to trust the text.
 * In the section titled "Specific Health Outcomes" I would recommend merging the various subsections conceptually. Asthma is a chronic illness and could probably be including in an omnibus subsection on chronic illnesses.  This is merely a suggestion from my end.  How you (or any editor) ends up structuring the content is very much up to you.
 * Some content is duplicated. Under "Specific Health Outcomes" you have a section on lead.  Some of the content there reappears in "Physical Deficiencies".  Strictly speaking there is nothing wrong with this but you may want to somehow combine the two sections.  In my opinion there is enough great research on lead contamination (both from government sources and academic journals) to break it out into its own top level section.  Again, that choice is up to you.
 * The section on "Interventions / Policy" may create some balance problems. Remember that a Wikipedia article is not meant to be a position paper.  We are not advocating for policy changes in the united states, even indirectly.  A section on policy is certainly warranted as there are plenty of existing policies and holes in those policies detailed by reliable sources.  But we should shy away from adding a list of what might make sound housing policy in the future, as well intention as such a list may be.  I have found in my articles that editing a section like this to make it more of a run-down on specific contours of current policy is usually sufficient to show where there is need for improvement without expressly advocating improvement.
 * I would take a look at how the article conflates housing and neighborhoods. There is a strong connection between the two.  It is nearly impossible to talk about the quality of a home without mentioning the quality of a neighborhood and vice versa.  However I think that the flow of the article would be improved by breaking the two apart where possible.
 * "Solutions that focus only on the home may be missing a key factor, community norms." True, but who is making this claim? Can it be cited?

Overall
I feel that this article is a strong start on a difficult subject. Many very smart and very dedicated journalists and researchers have tried and failed to come to a full accounting of the interactions between housing problems and health outcomes. In that respect the article is ambitious. However, the tag at the top announcing that the article reads like an essay is true in some respects. The article could be improved by a small number of changes, mostly structure and references. You may want to look at some similar articles such as Housing inequality, Lead poisoning and Housing discrimination (United States) which may provide some new references or may cover a specific area in great detail. In the latter case you can summarize the larger article in a section and point readers to it with a link to the article. You can see an example here. I hope this helps. Protonk (talk) 04:11, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Notification: Housing in the United States
A request has been submitted to WikiProject United States for a new article to be created on the topic of Housing in the United States. Please join the discussion or consider contributing to the new article. Best regards, -- M2545 (talk) 08:20, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

Invitation to US Housing Edit-a-thon
Please join us on 13 December 2020, 12:00-14:00 EST, as we update and improve articles in Wikipedia related to housing in the United States of America. Sign up here. -- M2545 (talk) 11:31, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Global Poverty and Practice
— Assignment last updated by Aksgpp3131 (talk) 07:14, 19 December 2023 (UTC)