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All Subjects: Housing
All Subjects: public policy
Status: Published

The Effects of an Energy Efficiency Retrofit on Indoor Air Quality

Description

To investigate the impacts of an energy efficiency retrofit, indoor air quality and resident health were evaluated at a low‐income senior housing apartment complex in Phoenix, Arizona, before and after a green energy building renovation. Indoor and outdoor air quality sampling was carried out simultaneously with a questionnaire to characterize personal habits and general health of residents. Measured indoor formaldehyde levels before the building retrofit routinely exceeded reference exposure limits, but in the long‐term follow‐up sampling, indoor formaldehyde decreased for the entire study population by a statistically significant margin. Indoor PM levels were dominated by fine particles and showed a statistically significant decrease in the long‐term follow‐up sampling within certain resident subpopulations (i.e. residents who report smoking and residents who had lived longer at the apartment complex).

ContributorsFrey, S.E. (Author) / Destaillats, H. (Author) / Cohn, S. (Author) / Ahrentzen, S. (Author) / Fraser, M.P. (Author)

Created2015

Inclusive Housing and Social Justice: Creating a Community-Centered Approach to Housing Policy

Description

There are many historical inequities regarding housing in the United States, such as the lack of access to affordable and secure housing for people of color, which is a result of centuries of exclusion. These problems remain ineffectively addressed or unaddressed by policy. Indeed, many community-based organizations report that housing policies fail to address the needs of the people—especially those in marginalized communities. Top-down approaches are efficient and more broadly applicable but miss important community-specific problems. Meanwhile, bottom-up approaches excel in highlighting community perspectives and the lived experiences of residents, but they are challenging to generalize across jurisdictions. This thesis captures community-based understandings of policy through in-depth interviews with community-based organizations (CBOs) and applies these understandings to develop a new quantitative framework for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of housing policies that can be applied across the United States. The thesis also explores various housing policies through a multi-dimensional, intersectional, and forward-thinking analysis that centers marginalized communities.

ContributorsMoen, Anders Jacob (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Pfeiffer, Deirdre (Committee member) / Lee, Sangmi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)

Created2021

Rights and Responsibility in the Sex Industry A 20-Year Study on Decriminalization and Legalization in Sweden and the Netherlands

Description

It is extraordinarily well-documented that death, physical assault, rape, and psychological trauma are common to those working in the sex industry. This is true around the world, despite the varying laws of different countries. 20 years ago, two opposing policies were introduced in an attempt to end abuse and provide support to those in the industry: the Nordic Model of partial decriminalization, and legalization with regulation. Both models were created with the intention to decrease abuse of the vast number of primarily women and girls in the industry and increase their freedom and protection, as they are some of the most vulnerable and marginalized of society. However, these models approach the issue from conflicting views on the nature of the industry itself and use criminal justice approaches without connecting rights, resulting in unreliable means of protecting the rights of those in the sex industry. This paper utilizes a rights-based framework grounded in criminal race theory (CRT) and feminist rights-based literature in conversation with the reality of working within criminal justice systems to understand how fundamental understandings of the sex industry influence policy making, what the presence or absence of government involvement does to the protection and freedom of sex workers, and what kind of government involvement helps or hinders sex worker’s rights. This will be seen in a case comparison of how both policies have succeeded and failed to provide basic human rights to those in the sex industry in the Nordic Model of partial decriminalization in Stockholm, Sweden, and the legalization model of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

ContributorsDauster-Anderson, Jessica (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Smith-Cannoy, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)

Created2021