User talk:Ahb492/Sandbox

Non-Substantive Review

Hi Ariel,

I enjoyed reading your wikipage about mixed-income housing. I’ve done some reading about neighborhood effects, and so it was good to read about policies such as mixed-income housing that are supposed to address the issues associated with concentrated poverty. Your wiki is a clear extensive description of the different aspects of mixed-income housing, such as the reason behind its development, who funds/builds such housing, and the effectiveness of mixed-income housing in reducing problems of concentrated poverty. From my review, it seems there’s a bit of overlap between many of your sections so I’ve suggested below another way to organize your wiki to reduce overlap. My suggestion is to collapse your sections into the following sections/headings: intro, development of mixed-income housing, the purpose behind such housing (this section could also be incorporated into the one on the development of mixed-income housing too since there seems to be some overlap between the two), measuring the success/identifying the challenges of mixed-income housing, and then mixed-income housing in a international context. You can construct subheadings within each of these larger headings. I have questions and comments within each of the headings/sections below that you can consider as you think about revising your wiki. If you have any questions, please let me know. These are suggestions so fee free to use which one is helpful and discard the rest. I look forward to reading the final product!

Yang

Organization Suggestions

Intro

• You start off with a sentence that there is no single definition of mixed-income housing, but you don’t actually discuss the different definitions. Perhaps what you mean to say is that the definition is broad and encompasses an eclectic group of dwellings. I would suggest taking this first sentence out or putting it later on in your intro if you think it’s critical. I think that by starting off with this sentence, some readers might question the significance of even focusing on mixed-income housing, e.g. if we don’t even understand or are not sure of what it is, how can we talk about its development or measure its impact.
• Perhaps define market-rate housing. I don’t know what it is and I expect some readers might not know as well.
• Who is considered low-income, moderate-income residents? In other words, how do you identify who is low-income or moderate-income, what income level do they the fall below or between. E.g. Within 150% of the poverty line to be considered low-income.
• How do you determine if an area is mixed-income housing area? Is there a minimum percentage of low-income houses for an area/neighborhood to be considered a mixed-income housing? Is it measured at the neighborhood level/zip code level? You do include a line at the end of the intro that gets at it, but you might want to elaborate on it a bit more.
• Development of mixed income housing – since the focus of your wikipage is on non-organic development of mixed-income housing, you might want to include that in the intro. Your intro has a line on Berube’s argument that it is an organic process, but that it remains contested. However, the focus of your paper is on the deliberate effort of a number of entities such as gov’t, non-profit, and private developers to build mixed-income housing. You might consider devoting a section to the debate about whether mixed-income housing develops on its own or whether government policy actually influences its development [sounds interesting to me, but it’s up to you]

Development of Mixed-Income Housing

• How did it get started
  • Your section on the history of encouraging safe and adequate housing
  • Your section on Federal policy/HOPE IV program
    • You can discuss how it emerged out of studies about the importance of housing/neighborhoods in affecting the social/economic outcomes of its residents
    • You can bring in Wilson about the consequences of concentrated poverty; Denton and Massey about the consequences of segregation
    • When you discuss the negative outcomes associated with neighborhood poverty, you might want to define these types of neighborhoods. For the most part, I think scholars that study neighborhood poverty tend to study those with at least 40% of the residents living below the poverty line.
    • An article that is useful for your discussion of neighborhood effects is: http://www.centerforurbanstudies.com/documents/electronic_library/neighborhoods/assessing_neighborhood_effects.pdf
    • You might want to include reports about the increasing concentration of poverty in America, and perhaps that another major reason why people should be concerned about the importance of developing and maintaining mixed-income areas.
      • You might want to link to the wiki on concentrated poverty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty
• You can discuss who’s involved in building/financing mixed-income housing: local, state, federal, and private/non-profit
• Are there any trends in funding or development of mixed-income housing over the years?

What’s the purpose behind mixed-income housing?

• Your section on framework for mixed income as poverty alleviation
  • how mixed income housing is supposed to address the issues of concentrated poverty

Success of Mixed-Income Housing

• Your section on precondition for success
• Your section under success of mixed income housing
• Your section for policy and research
• There’s a bit of overlap between the 3 above sections, and they all pertain to success or challenges so that is why I suggest putting them all under the same heading
  • As part of the challenges of building mixed-income housing, it might be interesting to include something about the challenges of getting funding for mixed-income housing.
• Are there examples of communities that have successful developed mixed-income housing – perhaps you can include a brief description of how such a community came about in this section

Other suggestions/questions

• It might be nice to have an image of some mixed-income neighborhoods if you are able to find it
• Are there critiques about the role that the gov’t plays in encouraging mixed-income housing; issues of gentrification here?
• I like how you have the content box which allows readers to visually follow your wiki-page. However, you might consider putting that content box after the intro as I’ve seen other wikipages place their own outline/content box. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ylor916 (talk • contribs) 05:06, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Substantive review

All in all, a really well-researched and thorough article. It needs some Wiki-ization to bring it into line with the rest of the website's tone, structure, and reading level - but the meat of it is there.

In your history section, I would expand upon the line, “Historically, public housing authorities sought to achieve the goals that efforts of mixed income housing developments seek today.” Maybe list those goals out so that the reader can immediately reference them as a kind of bite-sized package? I would also like to see you add some evidence for the connection between Wilson, Massey & Denton, and the Congress for New Urbanism and federal policy. While it is true that the books are examples of renowned scholarship, can you provide any links to sources that show they indeed convinced policy-makers of the need for change, or were they just contributing to the general spirit of the times in recognising that poor, urban Blacks were getting a raw deal? It seems like a bit of a jump to go directly from the authors and the movement for New Urbanism into the creation of HOPE VI – I would suggest filling out that section with a bit more about how HOPE VI came to be, what the political debates were, etc. As it stands I'm not sure if what happened was correlation or causation.

One issue that is totally not a reflection upon your work, but rather on the nature of Wikipedia itself, is that this article doesn’t always come across as easy to read. The “What Research Says” subsection reads more like part of a journal article, which I commend you for because it’s well-written and referenced, but as it sits right now it might confuse a novice who is just looking for the basic information while surfing the web. I think there are two ways this could be handled – either by simplifying the text altogether, or by perhaps breaking down the section on neighborhood effects into its own article. You may have seen on Wikipedia pages the way the author puts italicized text underneath the section heading like See also: neighborhood effects with a link to an article that goes into the concept in greater detail. That way, if someone wants to know more about neighborhood effects, they have that option, but if they’re not terribly concerned with it, they can quickly move on to the rest of the mixed-income housing article. You could still provide a bitesized overview of neighbourhood effects, but save the details for a separate article. Some people might be intimidated by a “wall of text” in an article, and doing something like this could help make it more accessible.

The “Methodological challenges” subsection could also use some simplification – in fact, I don’t think you have to include it at all, as it seems to belong more in an experimental study than in an encyclopedia article. As it stands now, it’s slightly unclear why there is a methodology. The important facts from it, like selection bias, could be moved elsewhere and developed further. I think the “Purpose” section is really well done because the four mechanisms are clear and concise.

Under “Necessary pre-conditions,” I would expand upon what is meant by the seven points, because some readers are going to come into this with no background at all. For example, maybe elaborate what is meant by a critical mass of higher-income people, or why it is thought that good management is so important. What are “the basics of real estate and management” and what, specifically, is needed in addition to “income mixing and good management”? (I know that you mention what else Brophy and Smith say is needed in the next section, but it gets a bit lost in all the text)

The section on assessing mixed income housing is kind of long – again, someone who doesn’t know much about the topic might turn away when he or she sees the wall of text – so I would suggest maybe breaking it up into sections about what proponents claim, what critics claim, what are different political perspectives, etc. I can tell you’ve done your research, it just needs to be a bit simplified and re-organized for the general Wikipedia public. You also don't always need to mention the author who is making every argument - for example, under "Mixed Income Housing in the International Context," I think you could take out Berube's name altogether and simply say that research has been done in these other countries. The footnote then does the job of citing the author for you. Of course, when we're talking about a big name like William Julius Wilson, then it's useful to distinguish what he says, because he is such an the influential figure. For lesser references where what is being said is important but who is saying it is less so, I think you could just leave the mention of names to the footnote.

One thing about mixed income housing that would be interesting to see in this article is an examination of the controversies surrounding it. You do mention some of them within the section on assessing mixed income housing, but I think they are important enough to warrant their own subsection. For example, your line beginning with "Given the the controversial scholarship of the culture of poverty..." is a good place to start; the idea of there being a culture of poverty is so politically loaded that there's plenty to say about it. Another ripe seam: the public-private partnership, where essentially the government is paying private companies to provide a service for the poor. A section on politics and controversy would also make it easy for a reader to learn a lot about the background of housing policy in one place.

Excellent research. I can tell you put a lot of time into making this thorough.

Checklist of elements:

-All current references cite checked and are accurate - These are my only comments:

Citation 6 – after reading that part of the article, I think the sentence this citation is attached to could be expanded to mention that White immigrants have tended to move to places that are more affluent as their situation improves, while Black households’ choices have been historically restricted. That would give more detail than only saying there is doubt about the level of organic change happening (though I would definitely keep that in).

Citation 43 – In the text, do you mean “politically palatable”? (Then again, mixed-income housing was the opposite of that to a lot of wealthy homeowners)

Citation 67 – I think this sentence should be reworded as it’s not exactly what’s being said on Vale p. 266. From the article, it appears that Vale is saying the management is done by an outside entity, but the residents are providing informal control, and this can be done even if they are all poor tenants.

Citation 69 – I think this should be Joseph instead of Joseph et al.

Also, in the main text there’s the citation “(Berube, 239)” – might want to make it footnote-style like the others?

-Article needs suggested additional resources, e.g. a "see also" section with related articles:

I would suggest the following if you want to flesh out the section on other countries:

Kleinhans, R. (2004) "Social implications of housing diversification in urban renewal: A review of recent literature." Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 19(4): 367-390.

Arthurson, K. (2005) “Social Mix and the Cities” Urban Policy and Research 23:4, 519-523.

Casey, R., S. Coward, et al. (2007) "On the planned environment and neighbourhood life: evidence from mixed-tenure housing developments twenty years on." Town Planning Review 78: 311-334.

Here's a good article specifically about outcomes for the poorest: Popkin, S. et al (2000) "The Gautreaux Legacy: What Might Mixed-Income and Dispersal Strategies Mean for the Poorest Public Housing Tenants?" Housing Policy Debate, 11:4, 911-942

When it comes to assessing the impacts, one aspects you might want to look into is community cohesion - how the poorer tenants get along with richer owners or renters. You could build this off what you've already written about social networks. Here are a few articles exploring that:

Kleit, R. G. (2005). "HOPE VI New Communities: Neighborhood Relationships in Mixed-Income Housing." Environment and Planning A, 37, 1413-1441.

Tach, L. (2009). "More Than Bricks and Mortar: Neighborhood Frames, Social Processes, and Mixed-Income Redevelopment of a Public Housing Project." City & Community, 8:3, 269-299.

Jupp, B. (1999) Living Together: Community Life on Mixed Tenure Estates. Paper for the Demos think tank, London. Online: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/livingtogether.pdf?1240939425 (Applies to Britain, but still interesting)

This article talks about nearby property values, which is an interesting way to look at impact on a neighborhood:

Bair, E., and Fitzgerald, J. (2005). “Hedonic Estimation and Policy Significance of the Impact of HOPE VI on Neighborhood Property Values”. Review of Policy Research 226, 771–786.

And finally, one more good general article:

Salama, J.J. (1999). “The Redevelopment of Distressed Public Housing: Early Results from HOPE VI Projects in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Antonio,” Housing Policy Debate, 10(1), 95-142.

-All current references checked for accurate format

-The article could benefit from some images, perhaps of some mixed income developments.

JuliaK (talk) 00:51, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Final update: JuliaK (talk) 23:16, 19 November 2011 (UTC)