Housing and Community Development

Researchers in housing and community development design and evaluate policies regarding access to attractive, affordable and sustainable housing and improving the social, physical and economic infrastructure of communities, especially those in the urban core. Practitioners in this field confront political considerations, administrative guidelines and limited funding. Decision science can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of market-rate housing development and provide support for policy responses to issues such as affordable housing, race and class segregation, ineffective and/or inequitable economic development, and sustainable development. This research spans many disciplines, including systems modeling, urban economics, multi-criteria decision modeling, stochastic models and decision support systems, and is often interdisciplinary and applied in nature. A common thread in this work is the need to explicitly address the needs of multiple stakeholders, to capture the public and private nature of housing, and to incorporate best-available evidence regarding markets, policies and impacts of housing and community development. We describe the policy context for this work, review previous research through the lens of descriptive, prescriptive and decision support models, and identify important limitations to work in this area to date. We then describe diverse opportunities for research in this area that can address current policy concerns such as sustainable development, post-disaster reconstruction and individual and group decision support

A Tutorial on Geographic Information Systems: A Ten-year Update

This tutorial provides a foundation on geographic information systems (GIS) as they relate to and are part of the IS body of knowledge. The tutorial serves as a ten-year update on an earlier CAIS tutorial (Pick, 2004). During the decade, GIS has expanded with wider and deeper range of applications in government and industry, widespread consumer use, and an emerging importance in business schools and for IS. In this paper, we provide background information on the key ideas and concepts of GIS, spatial analysis, and latest trends and on the status and opportunities for incorporating GIS, spatial analysis, and locational decision making into IS research and in teaching in business and IS curricula

Willingness to pay for intangible environmental amenities in Anguwan Rogo-Anguwan RIMI, JOS, Nigeria

Real estate is a package that extend beyond dwelling home but encompasses social, neighbourhood and environmental amenities and characteristics. The provision of basic amenities and services to accommodate the increasing population is among the major challenge of successive government in Nigeria. The property or rental values are influenced by residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for both neighbourhood and environmental amenities or characteristics. The aim of this dissertation is to evaluate the tenant willingness to pay for intangible environmental amenities in Anguwan Rogo-Anguwan Rimi Jos, Nigeria. A questionnaire survey was used with 389 household as total respondents, only 369 questionnaire were return and used for analysis. Among the 11 environmental variable, only 4 are found as amenities to be improved in the study area. Correlation analysis was used to find the relationship between monthly income and the willingness to pay for environmental variables. Among the 11 variables, only 3 seem to have significant relationship with the monthly income. This are electricity, household size and educational standard. The rental model was developed of willingness to pay environmental amenities using hedonic pricing concept, were the R value is 0.98 and the adjusted R2 value is 0.96 meaning that 96% of variance in WTP is predicted by all the 12 variables. The F value is 749.71 which is statistically significant. Out of the 12 independent variable, 7 variables are statistically significant. These includes improved drainage, air quality, water supply, waste dump site, accessibility, natural lightening as well as improved security with t value of 14.69, 7.43, 2.28, 23.61, 22.85, 26.94 and 9.72 respectively. It was recommended that the model can be used to evaluate tenant’s willingness to pay for environmental amenities in Anguwan Rogo-Anguwan Rimi Jos, Nigeria

When Johnny comes marching home, where is home? A look at where homeless veterans are finding housing and implications for HUD-VASH

The HUD-VA Supported Housing Program was initially implemented in 1992 as a pilot program that combined VA supportive services with Housing Choice Vouchers for homeless veterans. Expanded in scope and numbers in 2008, the HUD-VASH program has begun to allow homeless veterans to move into permanent housing around the country. This study begins to look at where these veterans are finding housing, and concludes that most veterans are moving to areas of relatively high poverty, high renter-occupancy rates, high rates of families headed by females, and low median incomes. In particular, the majority of veterans in the sample moved to areas with high neighborhood indicators for violent crime and poor mental health. Several recommendations are put forward to improve outcomes for the program.Master of City and Regional Plannin

Representing spatial and domain knowledge within a spatial decision support framework.

Experts are looking for ways to improve the monitoring of unstable slopes. A spatial decision support system (SDSS) is a software tool that can be used to support an expert in making complex decisions when solving problems. Many SDSSs use a geographic information system (GIS) to help analyze and manage spatial data. However, many GISs do not take advantage of expert knowledge. An expert system (ES) is a program that can be used to represent and reason with different kinds of knowledge when solving unstructured problems. The ability to find solutions to these problems can be enhanced by integrating a CIS and an ES. This research presents a candidate framework that represents basic spatial and domain knowledge through ontologies and integrates the knowledge within an ES-GIS environment. C Language Integrated Production System and ArcCIS provide the ES-GIS framework that is used to demonstrate this candidate framework through two small monitoring examples.Dept. of Earth Sciences. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .R698. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0470. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

Building Consensus using a Collaborative Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis System

This thesis studies the use of a collaborative spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis tool in site evaluation with multiple participants. The approach is situated within the context of three concepts of space, choice and participation, and is informed by fields as diverse as Decision-Making, Participatory Planning, Geographical Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Voting, and Group Collaboration. A collaborative spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis software tool called MapChoice was designed for this thesis, built upon open source components and featuring easy-to-use decision support functionality in both single-user and collaborative modes. MapChoice was then evaluated in a real-world site selection situation with a case study on the location of much-needed affordable housing in the Town of Collingwood, Ontario. Based on previous discussions and workshops on the project, a workshop was held with a group of community housing advocates to compare a set of possible sites for an affordable housing project according to a set of spatial and aspatial criteria. The study indicates that a collaborative spatial MCA approach can be used in dealing with complex planning problems, and that it has the potential to contribute to improved consensus between participants