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Getting review for your article

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To make sure that the community sees this article, may I recommend that you make sure that other Wikipedia articles link to this one? If you put a link to this article in the text of other articles, then people are more likely to come here or become aware of this page if they are watching related articles which you change to include a link to this one. Good job. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:50, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Peer review from Protonk

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Hi, I'm an online ambassador in the US education program and I have been asked to take a look at this article and give some general comments. Many of these will be only suggestions and you can (and should) click through to some of the style guides and policies I link to determine for yourself if my comments merit large changes in the article.

Style

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  • A number of your sections include bulleted lists where the body text is broken into short, separable claims presented in a list style. Generally these formats are used sparingly on Wikipedia. In the case of this specific article a bulleted list for funding may be appropriate, but in many cases the use of a bulleted list will confound attempts by you or other editors to improve the prose. Take the two dueling sections "Funding" and "Funding Priorities". If we combined the two sections as they are now we might be tempted to shorten the bulleted lists in order to leave only those sources of funding which are most important. but that might not be in the best interests of the readers who could conclude that omitted sources of funding were wholly unimportant. If instead the funding section was a series of paragraphs describing the various funding sources and their relative priority we would not give any readers the impression that a neglected element (e.g. "Sales of City Surplus Land") wasn't actually a source of funds rather than merely not being one of the more important sources.
  • Generally only the first word in a section heading should be capitalized. Proper nouns are capitalized in section titles even if they aren't the first word but almost all the sections should be edited to capitalize only the first word.
  • The section titled "Regional Housing Trust Funds in the United States" contains a table with external links for regional housing trusts. There is a tag on the section now noting that these links do not meet our policy on external links. Adding the websites may seem like a helpful gesture to the reader, but imagine a copy of this article distributed on DVD, flash drive or as a printed book (all possible outcomes for wikipedia articles). That external link would mean nothing to the reader--well, perhaps not nothing but it wouldn't serve to improve navigation. One of the reasons we relegate external links to a section at the end of an article (see this featured article for an example) is that downstream users who wish to republish wikipedia articles on a non-connected device (such as paper!) can merely remove the external link sections. There are other reasons, but that is a big one in my mind.
  • References are generally well formatted and provide links to the sources as well as identifying material where needed. There are some formatting errors in the urls for footnotes 34/35 right now, but that is easily fixed.
  • Take a look at some of the guidance in the manual of style regarding overlinking. You have a number of wikilinks to pertinent topics, which is great! However you also link repeatedly to articles such as U.S. state and Affordable housing (sometimes within just a few lines of earlier links). Linking is a bit like highlighting. If you highlight too much, you lose the benefits of increased focus on highlighted material. For a quick rule of thumb, load up the wikipedia article on a medium sized laptop screen. If you can see more than one wikilink to the same topic without scrolling the view at all, you might want to consider removing one of the links.
    • On a related note, remember that context is extremely important when linking. If you link to Median household income in this article (or Real estate transfer tax) it provides tremendous value to readers as these are germane topics which may help the reader better understand the material in the article. Linking to Homelessness is less helpful. Not necessarily because homelessness doesn't matter with regard to housing policy but because within the specific context of this article the very broad topic on homelessness may not be as illuminating. I'm not telling you to remove that link. Merely suggesting that you pay attention to context when linking.
    • Some of the articles you can link to aren't immediately apparent to new users either because navigation to those articles is difficult or you may not have a good handle on which subjects are likely to have a wikipedia article. for instance the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 has a wikipedia article!
  • There is a tag on the article suggesting that categories should be added. You can add categories yourself by including them at the very bottom of the article text as though they were wikilinks like so: [[Category:Category title]]. Most of the time you can copy and paste relevant categories from other similar articles (this is what I do most of the time). However I don't think you need to worry too much about this. The tag at the top of the article is unsightly but adding categories is something another editor can do.
  • The lede of the article covers the subject fairly well. I have some comments on organization which may relate to the lede but as the article is currently organized the lede does a good job of providing a quick summary of the contents without omitting any major areas or becoming bogged down in details.
  • The section on "National Housing Trust Fund" offers a good example of my concerns with bulleted list (perhaps better than my funding example). In the paragraph explaining passage of HERA and its administration the article covers the basic breakdown of fund targets. Do we need a potentially non-exhaustive list immediately following this short explanation? I think a reader would be better served by simply expanding the prose explanation for funding goals and targets.
  • "Washington's Housing Trust Fund was established in 1987 by RCW 43.185.030." This sentence is only odd because all of the other state (and local) sections begin with a broader statement rather than citing the exact law. Is there a reason why Washington's section is different? It's not bad that it is different, but it caught my eye.
  • In that same section, this sentence "Funding targets households earning below 80% of the county's median income and households with..." is somewhat awkwardly worded. If you want to make a list of complex clauses you may be better off using a semicolon or two.

Tone/Content

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  • "They may also be funded through capital dollars backed by government bonds." Remember to imagine your reader as an interested layperson rather than a subject matter expert. What are "capital dollars"? What does it mean to say that they are backed by government bonds? Which bonds? Treasury bonds? Municipal bonds?
  • "Each trust fund has different objectives and goals based on the needs of the local population and political preferences, and each jurisdiction is responsible for determining how housing trust fund dollars may be used and who is eligible for funding." this is a true statement but I am left wondering what it means, precisely. I'm not trying to be obtuse! What distinguishes the role of trust funds in determining objectives and the role of jurisdictions in determining how dollars may be used? How do these various roles and responsibilities differ as we go down the jurisdictional chain from federal all the way to local?
  • "The governance strategy is primarily important for determining which projects get funding from the Trust Fund, particularly in a highly competitive jurisdiction." this is an interesting point but it is kind of left hanging. Do we mean that the composition of the boards of directors impacts the determination of funding? Or the strategies as distinct from composition choices? Or both. Is there research out there making that connection? Obviously this is just a suggestion on my part. I feel that the article would be improved by elaborating on this thought but it could also constitute a great deal of extra research for a relatively minor point.
  • I don't have a copy of Housing Policy in the United States from Schwartz. Does that book support the claim "...payments have been suspended since the federal government placed [Fannie and Freddie] under conservatorship"?
  • "Advocates and some policymakers are currently exploring new revenue options..." Be careful to avoid unsupported attribution. Anytime the text of the article reads "some people say" or "some researchers say" it is often valuable to identify the speaker. Is your source a speech from a HUD director? A newspaper article? Can the sentence be reworded to say "In an article published in 1988, Robert Margo argued..."? Basically it is very tempting to summarize an article which states "some people say" but when this is written outside of direct quotes you are speaking with the voice of the encyclopedia and attributing praise, criticism or other concerns to unnamed parties makes it difficult for readers and editors to parse the text.
    • "Advocates hope to establish..." Same issue. Which advocates?
  • In the section on Delaware's housing fund we see "Every $1 spent by the trust fund, generates $7 in general economic activity." This is a particularly bold claim and one I would expect to see cited to an academic journal. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this review, a claim that x dollars of spending results in y dollars of net gain in economic activity is very difficult to make convincingly without a strong model or very good data (usually both). The only source I see in that section is what appears to be a newsletter.
  • "As of 2009, 131 county housing trust funds existed across the U.S. In thirteen states, 41 county trust funds existed." I don't quite understand these two sentences. Are we listing 13 states as a subset of the 50 where 131 county housing trust funds exist? Is there a distinction between a "county housing trust fund" and a "county trust fund"? The text doesn't point to a clear answer. I assume you are trying to give a hint as to the distribution of county trust funds across states, indicating that the bulk are in 13 states + PA and WA. Is that the case? If so, the first paragraph should be re-worded to make this more clear, as it is an important piece of information in the article.
  • "...earn less than 120% of the area median income." a number of sections in this article refer to funding cutoffs as percentage of the area median imcome. I imagine you are following the style of the sources, which is perfectly acceptable. You may want to consider re-wording these cutoffs as income deciles. If you don't know what means then feel free to disregard this advice, but i find myself converting 120% of median income to 60th percentile of the income distribution for a state or county. That may just be me. Simple math just as 120%*50% is not generally considered original research, but you may feel changing the wording further confuses the issue rather than clarifying it.
  • The article claims that 4 states have unfunded housing trust funds. This paper claims there are 6 states. Which is correct?

Structure

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In general this article does good work in presenting details of the various housing trust funds without original research or generating a significant bias. However after reading the article I am not sure how much more I know about the idea of housing trust funds in general. I feel part of this problem stems from the structure of the article which is almost exclusively broken down by jurisdiction rather than concept. My comments in this section are much more advisory than those above. Editing the article to meet them may require finding additional sources and changing the scope of coverage which already exists. So please take them as a suggesting from a specific point of view rather than stemming from a style guide or policy.

  • The article lists example state housing trust funds: CA, DE, VT and WA. What it does not do is explain to the reader the significance of those examples. Why did the article focus on those states over others? Did any individual state establish a housing trust fund which was materially more "successful" than the average? Some of the text in your examples mentions funding issues or differences in structure between the example states but without an overarching view I have no way to place this information in context. Put differently, how would a reader know the examples you chose were representative of all states with housing trust funds?
    • the problem is likewise compounded with the county trust funds. There are 131 counties with housing trust funds. How do we know the 2 selected here (dade county's two different funds being mentioned) are representative? Knowing the general demographic characteristics of Napa and Dade counties I can already imagine they are not particularly representative of the remaining 129 counties. Then I am forced to ask why they were chosen. The text of the article gives no clues on this subject.
    • This problem is least significant with the local housing trust funds. I have no trouble believing that Seattle and Boston are relatively representative of the remaining cities, though I would love to see some general information corroborating this.
  • More broadly, the article should (in my opinion) offer a more general explanation of what a housing trust fund does. I respect the fact that activities, constraints and funding sources differ across jurisdictional levels and actual states but there must be some generalist resources on the subject explaining the features for most cases. Adding a section like that would actually allow editors to greatly simplify the remainder of the article without losing much information. As it stands there is some duplication of information across the various examples which could be dispensed with if the reader were first introduced to the basics of funding, expectations, and governance. The funding section as it is written now does that to a narrow extent but it is not focused enough to allow us to speak generally. In a sense I fear this article is missing the forest for the trees.
    • I should be clear. I understand that creating a general introduction to a topic which is mostly defined by legislative peculiarity is hard (and perhaps counter-productive). But I feel it may be worth a try.
  • Restructuring the article to lean more on general content rather than specific implementations would also allow editors to add in research results on the efficacy (or other facets) of housing trust funds without either creating a new section titled "research" or shoehorning the results into a marginally applicable state.

Images

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Of the articles I have reviewed for this class I feel this may be the first which could really benefit from an image. Specifically a map of the united states at the state level showing participating states (perhaps colored by some funding characteristic) and a map of various participating counties in the united states would be amazing. The absence of images like these is not a detriment to the article, but they would be great additions.

Overall

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In general I feel this article is of pretty good quality. It has some big issues to work on (some of them stemming from content questions, others may be a matter of opinion), but it tackles a nuanced subject and provides clear and interesting information to the reader. An article focused on cross-state comparisons of similar (but by no means identical) policies will always face problems with structure and content selection. It is impractical to list completely the various idiosyncrasies in every state and county program (though you could also create List of housing trust funds in the United States) and difficult to select a few to represent the whole. It was a fun read and I am glad to have been able to provide some helpful feedback, however minor. Protonk (talk) 22:39, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

something of an apology

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I think I've been a little hard on this article. In my comments above I criticized the structure and scope of the article and wondered if a better article might more completely encompass the subject matter. While researching the state and county trust funds for the image I added I discovered what is likely the reason for the structure of the article. The available sourcing is, to put it mildly, unhelpful. Less mildly it is garbage. Most of the sources on housing trusts comes from a number of somewhat interconnected non-profit organizations and characteristically uninformative state and federal websites. Even including a few books on housing law, the fodder for this article is thin on the ground. My normal approach for an article like this is running immediately to Google Scholar. Even that was stymied by the very limited published research into housing trusts. I still feel that most of my comments apply, but I now sympathize much more with the struggle the editor(s) must have faced with sourcing. Protonk (talk) 20:46, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Notification: Housing in the United States

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A request has been submitted to WikiProject United States for a new article to be created on the topic of Housing in the United States. Please join the discussion or consider contributing to the new article. Best regards, -- M2545 (talk) 08:21, 4 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment

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This article is the subject of an educational assignment at University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from {{WAP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:48, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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