Geography of Housing

This course will draw from a range of academic and popular sources in order to give students a strong foundational understanding of the geographic, social, and economic realities of housing in the United States. We will critically examine the geography of housing development as it has varied in time and place. We will query the popular ambivalence towards renting, the normative ideology of ownership, and look at the community-based attempts to rethink and reconstruct residential property relations. We will investigate major local, state, and federal housing laws and policies of the past century. We will demystify the relationship between the US housing market and the global economy. Based on what we learn through these lines of inquiry we will take up and grapple with the key issues in housing today: gentrification, uneven development, local housing shortages, the affordable housing crisis and the foreclosure crisis.