Homelessness - week 20

Question 1

SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE URBAN LIFE

Answer 1

1. Improvements to infrastructure (water, roads, electricity, highways)
2. Gentrification – revitalizing neighbourhoods
   → brings up property values, and standards in neighbourhoods, and encourages businesses to open
3. Incumbent upgrading – improving transportation, affordable housing, green spaces, etc.

Question 2

GENTRIFICATION

Answer 2

• revitalizing neighbourhoods
• brings up property values, and standards in neighbourhoods, and encourages businesses to open
• Darkside: Tends to displace the people who lived in a place before it was gentrified
  → ex) Landlords know that if they make improvements they can increase the rent

Question 3

FUNCTIONALISTS ON CITIES

Answer 3

• Organic vs. mechanical solidarity
• Gemeinschaft – a close-knit community in which strong personal bonds unite members (mechanical)
• Gesellschaft – a community that is large and impersonal, with little commitment to the group or consensus in values (organic solidarity)

Question 4

CONFLICT THEORISTS ON CITIES

Answer 4

• Cities are capitalist machines and sites of mass economic inequality
• corporations urbanize previously rural areas in search of cheap labour
• Money ultimately dictates how cities are designed

Question 5

SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISTS ON CITIES

Answer 5

• sense of community in a small town where you know everyone
• Cities can make us individualistic and divide us
• However, they can also bring marginalized communities together

Question 6

KIM ET ALL 2023 - People experiencing homelessness

Answer 6

• Created a program to capture all tweets containing the word “homeless” from April to June 2013
• Determined there is a “stigma theory” of homelessness, where people attribute undesirable characteristics to PEH (unhygienic, socially deviant, sexually aggressive or deviant, threatening and violent)

Question 7

PATTILLO 2013: Topics of interest to sociologists studying housing

Answer 7

1. How is the housing market financed for prospective buyers?
2. How do inequalities in property values affect wealth stratification?
3. What happens to people who cannot afford prevailing house prices?

Question 8

URBANIZATION

Answer 8

refers to the transformation of a society from rural to urban