Issues of Affordable Housing Research Paper

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The sociological issue examined within this document is the dearth of affordable housing. This phenomenon is adequately deconstructed in an article in USA Today entitled “The ‘affordable housing’ fraud”. The premise of this article is that affordable housing does not exist. The use case on which this article relies is the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area’s dearth of affordable housing is characterized by astronomically high rental rates, steep prices for homes, and small spaces for these costly prices (Sowell). It is worth noting that although this phenomenon is examined in the Bay Area, it is a national social problem particularly prominent in places such as New York and Miami. Thus, there are many concepts in Mooney’s Understanding Social Problems which are applicable to it.

The structural-functionalist perspective would analyze this problem from a granular level. This perspective is predicated on the notion that society is formed from a montage of different cogs, each of which is assigned a particular social function (Mooney et al 8). From this perspective, there appears to be a granular issue with the way society is functioning. A basic social function is to provide housing for people at the civic level. If the average one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco costs upwards of $3,000 to rent (Sowell), then the housing function in this city is not properly operating because that amount is much too exorbitant. Specific parts that are failing in this instance include politicians for allowing developers to enrich themselves at the expense of their social duty, developers for doing the same thing, and aspects of the economy which are not creating situations in which average working people can afford housing.

Another important concept related to the lack of affordable housing is the tenet of sociological imagination.

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Sociological imagination is the capability to understand how the personal problems of a specific person correlate to the public problems of society. It involves not just looking at statistics and data as numbers, but as people with real lives affected by systemic sociological issues. In particular, there seems a lack of sociological imagination on the part of housing developers and realtors who are getting rich from overpricing housing so that there is no affordable housing in the Bay Area. The same applies to the banks and financial companies who are contributing to that shortage of affordable housing. People in these positions are simply looking at their bottom lines, and not the displacement of individuals who cannot afford real estate.

The tenet of sociological imagination naturally lends itself to certain facets of the conflict perspective of societal problems. This perspective contends that social problems stem from conflicts of certain groups of people who have oppositional interests (Mooney et al 10). The partisans in the set of conflicts for this particular problem of housing are clear. On the one side there are developers, real estate agents, bankers and political magnates who are all wildly profiting from the escalating prices of housing. On the other are the middle class and lower class people who cannot afford those prices. The objective of this latter group is to pay as little as possible for housing that it as beneficial as possible. Meanwhile, the objective of the former is to extract as much money as possible from housing and from those who pay for it. This conflict of interest can explain the housing shortage because the developers have the….....

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