preliminary reflections

urban policy in housing

I am beginning to develop a fairly complete dossier of job application materials. One item I have no clear place for is notes about courses I could teach, and the information I've dug up to support such courses.

Researching urban housing last week generated quite a few things. An excellent principal textbook for an urban housing policy course would be Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the US: an Introduction. Routledge 2006. Chapters on taxes, the low-income TC, public houisng, vouchers, subsidies for private rental housing, fair housing and CRA, and state/local policy considerations (incl some examples). Chapters are relatively standalone; the intro is a nice setup to the issues that matter.

I also grabbed a book edited by John F. Bauman, Roger Biles and Kristin Szylvian called From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, Penn UP. 2000. It's a history of policy, from garden cities in the early 20th century to policies under President Carter. 12 chapters deal with with specific acts or eras, about 20 pp each. Probably good for background reading for a course preparation and/or as additional or recommended reading for particular topics.

I also picked up Dolores Hayden's Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing and Family Life - which sounded familiar, and now I see it on my bookshelf as something I've been meaning to read for about 8 years. I have an older edition - it was revised and expanded in 2002. It would be good perhaps for the social relations component of a more general course on human geography.

Last but certainly not least is John S Adams' book for the Russell Sage Foundation called Housing America in the 1980s. It's designed to interpret the huge volume of census data from 1980 for the interested but lay reader. Worth skimming through as background for developing any housing course, as an introduction to census stats and a baseline for interpreting more recent results.