Understanding Affordable Housing Policy
This course offers students an introduction to affordable housing policy in the United States. After briefly tracing the history of public housing in the United States, the course will familiarize students with the key policy tools available to build, maintain, and preserve affordable housing. Many of these policies also endeavor to de-concentrate poverty, create mixed-income communities and ensure economic opportunities for low-income households. Students will draw on current social science research to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and identify challenges to current policy. Students will gain working knowledge about core housing programs and innovative policy interventions designed to ease the crisis of housing affordability.
This course will be delivered virtually through five two and a half hour synchronous sessions over the course of five days.
Faculty: Brian McCabe
Course Goals
By the end of the class, students will be able to:
- Understand the causes of the current housing affordability crisis in the United States;
- Identify key programs to build, preserve, and maintain affordable housing.
- Consider the ways that multiple scales of government (e.g., local and federal) work together to implement housing policy;
- Evaluate contemporary social science research used to improve social policy; and
- Develop an independent vision to improve the provision of housing assistance to low-income families.