Read Everything You Can

I got ahead of myself.

The first step was asking good questions. You want to find a question interesting enough to carry you through when nobody is paying you or making you seek out the answer.

Check. See: What is this waiting list for housing all about and why does it exist?

I ended by saying that the next step was to go talk with people who know way more than I do. This would be the people who work at the Lynchburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority (LRHA) and housing non-profits like Miriam’s House, Rush Homes, and many others.

However, there’s another step for me.

Read as much as you can about your subject. Books, article, internet. No surprise, there’s a lot out there.

This is the doing your homework stage. Sometimes, you decide to come into an interview completely cold armed with nothing but your curiosity. You hold your hand open and just see where interviews will naturally take you. That’s one way to do it.

But for this subject, a lot of the initial questions that I have are factual. How many? How much? What’s the difference between? Those are things that I can try to find on my own so we can move on to the higher level questions like “Why?” and “What’s next?”

So, I’ve been reading. A lot.

If you want to do some reading about housing, two books that would be a great place to start would be Evicted by Matthew Desmond and The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

Another great place to learn is to read what agencies and organizations say about themselves and their work. A few websites to spend some time at would be the Lynchburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority, Miriam’s House, Lyn-CAG, Greater Lynchburg Habitat for Humanity, and Rush Homes.