Making the Case for Affordable Housing

Learn about the mechanics of preparing a case study to advocate to leadership about the importance of anchor institute-supported affordable housing.

Speaker

Meagan Ehlenz, PhD. Assistant Professor Arizona State University
Dr. Ehlenz’ s research interests include urban revitalization, gentrification, and community development, with an emphasis on the roles and impacts of anchor institutions in urban settings.

Key takeaways:

• Case studies answer questions about why and how something happened, provides context and/or nuance to a generalized observation, and offers a mean of examining multiple perspectives and/or facets of a phenomenon

• Case study types:

  • Exploratory

  • Descriptive

  • Explanatory

• Single case studies (representative) vs. multiple case studies (comparative)

• The goal with case study work is triangulation: multiple data sources that tell the same story from multiple data sources

Reading materials & resources

• Universities and Affordable Housing: Seven Case Studies
  In March 2023, the Penn Institute for Urban Research convened an Anchor Institution Roundtable with representatives from peer institutions to discuss affordable housing strategies and tactics. Dr. Ehlenz was retained to prepare case studies for six peer institutions: Duke University (Durham, N.C.); Harvard University (Allston campus, Boston, Mass.); Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisc.); University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pa.); University of Southern California (Los Angeles, Calif.); and University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.); and of the University of Pennsylvania. They can be found here and I encourage you to familiarize yourself with them. https://penniur.upenn.edu/publications/universities-and-affordable-housing-7-case-studies
• Making Home More Affordable: Community Land Trusts Adopting Cooperative Ownership Models to Expand Affordable Housing https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10705422.2018.1477082?tab=permissions&scroll=top