This friday our class went to the north/clybourn red line stop to interview people on their opinions on housing. We wanted to see what people feel should be done to help repair the public housing system in Chicago. After we finished our interviews, we reviewed our data to help guide and improve our study.
1) A public good is a resource/need that can effect communities and cities as a whole. Public goods can be many different things such as, housing, food, health care and education. These are goods that are offered to everyone and it is non-excludable.
2) Housing is a public good due to its effect on communities all over Chicago. A town with a lot of people who are homeless and/or really poor quality homes will decrease its value dramatically. Also public goods are not mutually exclusive and each can improve or be detrimental to one another. Thus, if housing is improved than this will improve the city in various different way. For example, if there is affordable housing for everyone then can have a house and it will keep people of the streets which will lower the crime rate in the city.
3) Housing should be treated as a public good because one of the most important necessities for humans is shelter. Many people in Chicago are homeless and do not have a roof over there head. If we treat housing as a public good than everyone can help fix the problem.
4) The survey we created was a five question survey that we used to find out people’s opinions on housing. The way we distributed our survey was by asking people near the north/clybourn to take our survey. Some people said yes and some said no. The reason why we did this is because we wanted to find out people’s opinion on our focus area in order to get a better grasp of the topic. We realized that before we start to learn and talk about public goods, we must first find out how the public feels about their goods.
5) After I reviewed the results I realized that there was only one thing that most people agreed on which was: Money. Many people want to help with housing but most people either can’t or are not willing to have higher taxes in order to help fund public housing. This shows us that when studying housing that we need to think of a practical and fiscally plausible solutions to improve public housing.
