Preface

The three authors of this book are professionals in the realms of architecture, geospatial analysis, and urban planning. The publisher invited us to propose a book about GIS applications and left it up to us to choose the application area. In considering our different areas of expertise, we began to hone in on housing. Preliminary investigations revealed a glaring gap in recent GIS applications literature: we could not find a book-length treatment of GIS applications for housing. The reasons for the gap became gradually apparent as we conceptualized and framed the book. First, since housing production is largely left to the market, much of the data and analysis about that sector tends to be proprietary and not readily accessible to the public. Second, housing policy analysis is a highly specialized sub-genre that typically focuses on affordable housing, assessing the impacts of government policies and programs designed to improve housing affordability or the assessment of government policies that attempt to remove structural or institutional barriers to housing affordability. Lastly, the financing of housing production using federal and state-level data that dominate policy conversations, subsuming design and planning considerations that rely on local and sub-regional data.

The study of housing as a GIS applications area has many opportunities and challenges. Undoubtedly, the study of housing is central to other fields such as economic development, transportation, and crime/public safety. As the field of GIS grew and matured in the 1980s and 1990s, GIS specialists, particularly those scholars interested in GIS applications, were actively involved in shaping GIS policies to increase access to spatially referenced data. For example, GIS specialists analyzed home lending data made publicly available through the Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act. These analyses and insights made discriminatory lending practices visible to the general public and to lawmakers. However, in the past two decades, GIS applications in housing appear to have not received much attention.

This book speaks to a new generation of GIS users and specialists who have grown up in a world where the early challenges of spatial data access have largely been resolved. In addition to Census data that is publicly available, a range of datasets generated for different purposes can be accessed and linked using a common spatial identifier. The advent and democratization of geospatial technologies provides us for the first time with the tools to deal with housing in the context of larger societal shifts. Current shortcomings in the provision of adequate shelter for everyone cannot be addressed without seeing its embeddedness in questions of demographic changes (immigration, aging societies, homelessness), climate change, or the impact that  information technology has on labor markets, transportation, and individualized services. Yet, data alone is not sufficient to prompt interesting and intelligent queries - a deep understanding of the phenomena being investigated is also necessary. Otherwise, GIS specialists can develop solutions to non-existent problems or worse, arrive at erroneous conclusions because they do not fully understand the social phenomena under scrutiny. GIS applications research requires that GIS specialists understand the world as it is, not the world that is accessible through the GIS interfaces. The real world is far more complex than the comfortable vector GIS landscape that is comprised of points, lines, and polygons. 

This book engages housing researchers, alerting them to how the GIS technology and data landscape have changed and encouraging them to go beyond simple mapping and overlays of phenomena. Asking, “where are all the public housing properties in the city located?”, is a useful starting point, but GIS in the 2020s can be tasked to do much more. Complex queries and new lines of inquiry require that domain specialists (in this case, housing experts) and GIS specialists work in partnership to resolve pressing social problems such as homelessness. 

Our diverse perspectives invite readers from various fields to delve into these pages, exploring the important and often missed interconnections between housing and broader societal shifts that impact people at the neighborhood level.  We have written this book using accessible and jargon-free language with a wide range of examples from big and medium-sized cities as well as small towns and rural areas. It is our fervent hope that elected officials and decision makers interested in pragmatic problem solving will read this book. We encourage readers to understand our perspectives - GIS tools and spatial thinking allow end users to swiftly move between and across spatial scales to identify actionable policy levers appropriate to solve the problem at hand. Private residential housing production and management is largely a local matter in the United States - and therefore conversations about densification should occur at the local level. National or state mandates about densification notwithstanding, the preferred housing type in America is a spacious, single family home. We encourage policymakers to focus on encouraging a diversity of housing alternatives, emphasizing new designs and new ownership models. We also encourage decision makers to use the integrative potential of geo-spatial technologies to explore the challenges that are coming toward us rapidly - demographic changes worldwide and the global climate change impact the housing situation in the USA and no enclave can be immune to these effects. In other words, housing insecurity and homelessness will continue to increase and it has to be confronted at the local/regional scale in order to have quick and meaningful impacts. 

GIS and housing specialists are focused on numbers; this is unsurprising because quantification is essential to make a case for large investments of public dollars. In this book, we encourage architects, landscape architects, and urban designers to engage with housing and GIS specialists in order to co-create innovative design alternatives, for example,  by investigating new living options for the 55+ and over residential market becomes critical as our national demographic trends shift.

We end this book with a note to students - future architects, planners, engineers, GIS specialists, and aspiring elected officials.  We wrote this book with you in mind. As educators, each of us has worked with hundreds of individual students and we poured our collective knowledge, experience, and expertise into the pages of this book. We filled our pages with dozens of examples from all parts of the United States; so, you can find the context that relates to your circumstance and location. We have provided cross-referencing within the book as well as literally hundreds of references for further reading. We have developed a companion website (gisandhousing.com), where we plan to provide updates, errata, and further examples. In the long run, we plan to write a follow-up volume of GIS exercises that go beyond the limited amount of how-to's that we could include in this volume. Please use our website to engage with us as we strive to keep the contents of this book current. 

Housing is deceptively simple as it is complex. Consider “poor doors”, “dorms without windows”, restrictive housing covenants, or the power that homeowners' associations wield and it becomes quickly apparent that our own values shape and influence housing policy as well as our solutions to serve the most vulnerable among us. If we are going to tackle the housing crisis, developers and real estate professionals have to work in partnership with stakeholders in all levels of government, and the nonprofit sector. We encourage a geo-spatial perspective as a lens to tackle the housing crisis. Our diverse perspectives invite readers from various fields to delve into these pages, exploring the important and often missed interconnections between housing and broader societal shifts that impact people at the neighborhood level.  Our aim is to empower readers to apply a geospatial framework to confront the housing crisis. We envision a future where housing becomes a right accessible to all, fostering a more just and inclusive world.