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Housing Issues (housing + issues)
Selected AbstractsHabitat For Humanity: Building Social Capital Through Faith Based ServiceJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2002R. Allen Hays This essay examines citizen involvement in community housing issues through Habitat for Humanity as a faith, based expansion of social capital in urban communities. This article expands Putnam's model of social capital to include criteria for evaluating the conditions under which social capital formation has a positive impact on the larger community. Using a representative sample of nine cities from various regions of the US, it examines the functioning of the Habitat affiliate in each of these cities and the attitudes and motivations of their most active volunteers. Habitat has emerged as a highly effective volunteer, non, profit producer of housing for lower income persons, yet the nature of the social capital created by this organization also reflects the contradictions raised by such an undertaking in a complex urban environment characterized by deep social divisions. [source] Living outside the system?LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2007The (im)morality of urban squatting after the Land Registration Act 200 The Land Registration Act 2002 (LRA 2002) has effectively curtailed the law permitting the acquisition of title through adverse possession in relation to most types of adverse possessor, including the paradigmatic urban squatter. While the traditional principles for the acquisition of title through adverse possession enabled a squatter to secure rights in land ,automatically' after 12 years, under the LRA 2002 an urban squatter seeking to defend their possession of land in this way must now apply to the Land Registry, who will serve a notice on the registered proprietor alerting them to his or her presence. This procedure provides the landowner with an opportunity to recover possession of the property before the squatter's occupation has given rise to any claim on the title to the land. On the whole, these reforms have been presented as, and accepted as being, wholly justified in the context of a modern regime of ,title by registration'. This paper argues, however, that the reform of adverse possession also implements a contentious moral agenda in relation to advertent squatters and to absent landowners. While these provisions of the LRA 2002 will have important practical and philosophical consequences, the Law Commission has attempted to close off any prospect of further debate on the subject, without explicit consideration of current social and housing issues associated with urban squatting, or of the matrix of moral issues at stake in such cases. [source] No place called home: the causes and social consequences of the UK housing ,bubble'THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2010John Bone Abstract This paper examines the key causes and social consequences of the much debated UK ,housing bubble' and its aftermath from a multidimensional sociological approach, as opposed to the economic perspective of many popular discussions. This is a phenomenon that has affected numerous economies in the first decade of the new millennium. The discussion is based on a comprehensive study that includes exhaustive analysis of secondary data, content and debate in the mass media and academia, primary data gathered from the monitoring of weblogs and forums debating housing issues, and case histories of individuals experiencing housing difficulties during this period. This paper is intended to provide a broad overview of the key findings and preliminary analysis of this ongoing study, and is informed by a perspective which considers secure and affordable housing to be an essential foundation of stable and cohesive societies, with its absence contributing to a range of social ills that negatively impact on both individual and collective well being. Overall, it is argued that we must return to viewing decent, affordable housing as an essential social resource, that provides the bedrock of stable individual, family and community life, while recognizing that its increasing treatment as a purely economic asset is a key contributor to our so-called ,broken society'. [source] Contexts of interpretation: assessing immigrant reception in Richmond, CanadaTHE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 4 2001JOHN ROSE This article examines the responses of established residents to contemporary physical and social changes in Richmond, British Columbia, a Vancouver suburb that has received a considerable number of ethnic-Chinese immigrants over the past decade. In the metropolitan Vancouver context, recent considerations of immigrant reception at the neighbourhood level have focused on the critical reactions of ,white', European-origin residents in upper-middle class areas to local immigrant settlement and housing stock transformations. These studies have given rise to conflicting interpretations of the relationship between immigration and neighbourhood landscape change, the motivations behind resident protest and, in particular, the definition of their responses as racist. Drawing from extended interviews with fifty-four long-term Richmond residents, I attempt to provide a broader account of immigrant reception as a supplement to works that have revolved around housing issues and ,white' resistance. I also critique the way that the term racism has been used to describe resident reactions to immigration-related changes, calling for researchers to be more reflexive and explicit in their application of the concept. [source] | ||||||||||