Decision Science For Housing And Community Development: Localized And Evidence-Based Responses To Distressed Housing And Blighted Communities

There is a long tradition of operations research/management science (ORMS) applications in the public sector, including housing and community development, and specific policy and planning motivations for this book include foreclosure response, vacant property management, and comprehensive neighborhood investment design. Decision models and applications are applied to local responses to the foreclosure crisis, which is an important contemporary issue in urban housing and community development. The book demonstrates that a diverse set of decision models, developed to respond to the recent foreclosure crisis in the US, can contribute to emerging scholarship in public-sector applications of operations research and can provide tangible and practical support to community development practitioners in highly-affected neighborhoods. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of public-sector and not-for-profit applications of ORMS that reflect engagement with community actors, apply diverse analytic methods, and generate specific operations and strategic recommendations. The authors utilize a methods- and modeling-oriented approach that is applicable to interdisciplinary fields such as urban affairs, public policy, and planning. The book consists of eleven chapters, which are divided into five sections and three appendices. The first section addresses the project description, theoretical framework, and analytic methods. The second section discusses exploratory and descriptive analysis of the study area. The third section utilizes qualitative and quantitative decision modeling methods to identify and quantify values that are a basis for prescriptive decision modeling. The fourth section contains prescriptive analysis through quantitative decision models, and the last section serves to synthesize findings, articulate contributions to scholarship, and practice and develop a research agenda for community-focused decision science.

Michael P. Johnson, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Jeffrey M. Keisler, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Information Management Systems at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Senay Solak, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Operations and Information Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

David A. Turcotte, PhD, is Research Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Armagan Bayram, PhD, is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.

Rachel Bogardus Drew, PhD, is Research Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.