Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Housing and Social Policy (Rachel Kleit)/Course description

Course description
This course focuses on the problem of affordable housing and its interrelationships with social problems in the United States. By the end of this class, you’ll be able to answer the following questions:


 * What’s the problem--what exactly do we mean by affordable housing?
 * What is the impact of housing on people’s lives? How is it variously shelter, an investment, an asset, a market commodity?
 * How does the devolved system of housing provision and finance in the U.S. deliver affordable housing? What is the role of the third or social housing sector?
 * What are and should be people’s rights with regard to housing?
 * How can housing enable or prevent access to opportunity for minorities and low-income individuals?
 * What are the equity implications of housing policies?

We begin with an analysis of the causes, extent, and social dimensions of affordable housing problems. In order to understand the current context, we trace the history of housing policy at the federal, state, and local levels since the beginning of the 20th century, analyzing the political perspectives that have shaped the debates concerning affordable housing policy in the past and will shape them into the future. We explore the refocusing of affordable housing policy on social problems rather than the provision of affordable housing, including examinations of mixed-income housing, poverty dispersal policies, low-income homeownership efforts, and maintaining the long-term affordability of housing. Together we will examine the complex delivery and finance system for affordable housing as it has evolved through changing federal priorities, including federal, state, and local programs, the non-profit and private sectors, secondary lending markets, and the tax system. We end with an exploration of promising strategies for the future.

Students of policy and management not only need to learn about subject areas like housing policy, but also be able to communicate about them to a broad, usually non-technical audience. Many of the readings for this class are freely available on the World Wide Web. Some come from books that you have purchased. Others come from peer reviewed journals that are protected from general use by password; only those who have a subscription can access this work. Often that work is very high quality—it has been vetted, most of the time, through a double-blind peer and expert review process. In short, as students and faculty at a major research university, we have at our fingertips a vast storehouse of knowledge about the world.

Wikipedia can link our storehouse of knowledge to the rest of the world. As an on-line encyclopedia, it is a tool for assessing and disseminating information about a huge variety of topics to the entire world. A community vets the articles through an on-line, open, peer review process. An article on Wikipedia is only considered quality if it is well-sourced and written for a broad audience (among other things!). However, for many topics no one has vetted the quality of the information; other topics are missing entirely. Therefore, as part of the work of this class, we will work to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles concerning affordable housing policy. In the process, we will make available that large store-house of knowledge to which we have access, learn how to assess the quality of information, how to cite sources clearly, write for a broad, non-technical audience, experience a peer-reviewed editing process (not too different from what you might experience in the workplace), and gain exposure to one of the most ubiquitous sources of information today.

For more about this course, please see the course website at the University of Washington.

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