HomeSight’s Background

 

History:

 

This website and database was originally created by Cinda K. Lester in the Spring of 1998 as the final project for her Master of Urban Planning and Policy degree in the Urban Planning and Policy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Granted a Bachelor of Architecture from the College of Art and Architecture at the  University of Idaho in 1996, Cinda’s interests lie in not only the policy aspects of housing, but the design, community development, affordability, and environmental facets of housing as well.

At the time HomeSight was created, there were thousands of websites around the globe pertaining to a wide variety of housing issues, but only a few catalogs of them. Unfortunately, most of these existing indices were targeted to only one aspect of housing; there were few ways in which to find information about the policy, design, construction, and community development aspects of housing on the same website. HomeSight was created to help alleviate that problem.

In 2006, Cinda passed the future of HomeSight.org on to an organization that is happy and willing to maintain its original purpose. 

Purpose:

HomeSight is an annotated and rated resource guide of housing agencies, projects, policies, designs, and publications available on the Internet. HomeSight is neither a real estate manual nor a directory of available housing units.

Created to serve persons interested in the vast spectrum of housing-related issues, the HomeSight database is constantly evolving. As its target population of student and professional architects, planners, landscape architects, construction managers, developers, researchers, and community organizers is extremely large, the scope of the database must also grow to accommodate their diverse interests in the housing field. It is the aim of HomeSight to cover aspects of the housing profession that relate to all of those individuals’ needs, including, but not limited to, policy, planning, design, construction, and a variety of specific housing types.

 

Future:

In effort to continue the usefulness of HomeSight, the author is regularly searching for new websites to add to the database, and revises the site on a weekly basis. Please feel free to make any comments or suggestions, or provide new websites to be added to the database.

 

Disclaimer:

HomeSight is an independent organization and is in no way sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago or any other agency or association the author is affiliated with.