Housing and Society: Precarity and Profit

This course considers the way US society has approached housing and inequality in the past and present – from public housing and homelessness to suburbia, mobile homes, and beyond. Housing is the site and subject of policies, profit, ideologies, biases, regulations, activism, and reputations. The course overviews how each of these shape housing, which in turn shape inhabitants – particularly along lines of race, class, gender –, and what we can do to intervene. Drawing on theoretical approaches and empirical studies from the social sciences, this course offers an advanced focus on the inequality that pervades contemporary US housing, enabling students to understand how people are impacted by their homes.