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.

In 2010, social media, being made available in Arabic, made a large impact in the Middle-East, and social movements throughout several countries exploded from those regions, using the power of social media to their advantage and creating new discussions which were not able to be spoken prior to the introduction of social media in Arabic. Besides creating new social movements, social media has resulted in the transformation and evolution of socialization and how people communicate in their daily lives.
Social media changed the system of networks and connectivity, making communication more tenacious, adaptable, and efficient than ever. Social media is often criticized as a reason for why social movements have not met desired results; however, this is not the fault of social media, rather the fault of the disorganization of people. In this essay, these ideas will be explored, and the many criticisms and misconceptions of social media will be addressed and challenged, creating a more realistic image of social movements with the added power of the new technology called social media.