Dr. Marah Curtis is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Social Work and a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on how differences in housing conditions, benefit policies, and other circumstances affect the health and well-being of families. We asked Professor Curtis about her recently published paper Housing as asset or community good? Making the case for alternative models in U.S. policy, which she frames as a conversation starter for those interested in rethinking housing programs.
For those who aren’t familiar with your work or recent research, could you give us the ‘elevator pitch’?
Our new work looks at how the United States approaches housing policy and what could be gained from incorporating alternative models into that conversation more directly. Both the logic and the mechanisms embedded in alternative housing models offer options, comparisons, and potential ways to move forward that, we argue, should be compared with standard approaches.
What inspired you to ask the question of whether housing is an asset or community good and to dig into different models of affordable housing?
Well, all my work to date has examined how dominant housing policies operate, their impacts and the like. I was invited to give a talk at the Just Cities housing conference last year and the direction was to “do whatever I wanted.” What I wanted was to understand this sector more, but to do that I had to convince myself that it made sense. So, the upfront of the paper looks at U.S. housing policy more broadly, details how and who we support with the dominant programs, as well as available comparable data we could find on alternative housing models. It is like the conversation I needed to have before taking any next steps. In short, I had to convince myself that I could think about alternative models given their relatively small proportion of the total housing stock and significant data limitations.
What was most surprising or unexpected to you in this work?
The idiosyncratic nature of where, how, and when alternative housing models developed. Often a confluence of social, political, regulatory and housing market conditions is part of the origin story of many alternative housing models. There are a lot of moving pieces as to where these develop. So, this gives an unexpected number of variables that could be made clear to broaden the menu of what housing can look like in a host of different communities.
In what ways could this research impact people in programs, daily life, or policy?
This paper is a start to a conversation with a base of shared understanding of what we do in housing policy and offers ways to think about what else we might consider. I think about it mostly as I did for myself, this was an intervention in my own information system as someone who has thought, taught, and researched around housing topics as a career. Housing security is a big challenge for a host of folks; this is not new, though it has intensified and broadened over time. The logic undergirding alternative models is different, it offers a challenge to how we provision housing that is often unquestioned and implicit. I am hopeful that our conversations around how we structure housing is expanded.
Looking ahead, what are you most excited to begin or to continue exploring?
Well, in the writing of this paper, we end with a series of questions we offer to the field as useful to answer for housing folks in the community, in the housing sector, and to researchers. We realized we compiled quite a lot of data to write this paper so we will work to formalize this into a dataset that can be expanded and added to other data sources for folks interested in this area. We will figure out how this dataset can be shared. If we can increase knowledge of and research about how alternative models work and compare these to dominant approaches, fantastic. The idea that communities can figure out where, what, and how these models might work requires data and evidence to help with those decisions. We hope this data will be helpful in this way too.