From dangerously rundown houses in rural upstate New York to urban shantytowns in Latin America, substandard housing is a growing international problem linked to globalization and poverty.

This fall a handful of undergraduates from across Cornell's campus learned about the issues, and what they could do about them, in a new course, Poverty and Housing, developed and run by Adam Levine, a senior in the university's College of Arts and Sciences.

For an undergraduate to design and manage a course is unusual, but then Levine is not your average student. The recipient of a Bartels Undergraduate Action Research Fellowship, Levine used the funds to develop the course, which combined talks by guest lecturers on the underlying issues of substandard housing, with a hands-on service-learning component and an opportunity for reflection and discussions. Students who passed the course – which did not award letter grades – earned two academic credits.

"This was a way to give people an opportunity to learn, in a structured format, what causes poor housing and what poor housing causes," said Levine. "If we don't have some social understanding of the conditions in the world, we're missing the boat." Aiming for an eventual academic career in political economy, he also wanted to try his hand at teaching.

The course "gets students to think about 'shelter' in a broad sense, which serves a need at Cornell," said Barbara Lynch, a faculty adviser to the course who is a City and Regional Planning visiting associate professor and director of Cornell's International Studies in Planning program. "In a world where tens of thousands are displaced by natural disasters and millions by war, we haven't given nearly enough attention to the issue of housing people."

"He's made a valuable contribution to the Cornell curriculum, raising the awareness of students about these issues," said Nancy Wells, an assistant professor in the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis whose research looks at housing quality and mental health and who also is an adviser to the course.

While both faculty members sat in on some classes, reviewed the syllabus and helped arrange guest speakers, and Lynch guest lectured on housing policy and practice in Latin America, they each said privately that Levine did all the work entailed in making the course a reality. "Adam invented this course very much on his own," said Lynch.

Among the course's guest speakers this fall was Paul Mazzarella, director of Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Service (INHS), an agency that helps residents renovate neighborhoods house by house. "The population we serve is about 80 percent working-class poor. We try to help them build assets and climb a few steps up the economic ladder and also look at such neighborhood-related issues as whether the street lights are working," Mazzarella told the class.

One undergraduate planning student, Ify Ossai, spoke in class of visiting a house renovated by INHS. The owner told her that being in the restored house changed her life. "Without it she felt she couldn't succeed, and she thanked God every day for it. It made me understand that how and where you live affects how you act, what you can do."

And Duane Randall, a student in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences who had been a contractor and a councilman for the town of Groton before returning to school, related his experience of finding new housing for an elderly town resident whose rat-infested substandard property had been condemned by the town. Entering it was an eye-opener: "I saw what it meant to be poor and old," Randall said. But a visit to the man in his new home a year later was heartening, he related: "We tend to be so judgmental. I imagined he'd treat the new place like the old one, but it was spotless."

The students helped build area homes with Cornell Habitat for Humanity (Levine is a past president and outreach coordinator of the chapter) and interned with INHS as part of the course's service component to do housing-related work driven by community initiatives and needs.

They also kept a journal on their experiences and feelings throughout the course. "The journal is the hyphen in service-learning," said Levine, who reviewed and commented on everyone's entries weekly. And they heard from scholars on local, national and international housing issues and Habitat guest speakers, among them Lisa Nickerson, the organization's Northeast youth coordinator.

In class, Nickerson asked the students to draw on their journal work to describe how the course had affected them. Some talked about their feelings of discomfort when the occupants of a Habitat home they helped build were less than welcoming. Dana Diament guessed that the family's reaction arose from the stigma attached to accepting help from others more well off than they were.

But it was also meaningful to see the family settle into the house. "It made me realize how important volunteers are. If we hadn't been there, how much longer would it have taken for their housing situation to improve?" she wondered.