A lot of my efforts in this blog go toward figuring out solutions to major housing problems. What works? But I also devote time to figuring out what not to do. What doesn’t work and/or just adds new problems? Last year I spent some time working with teammates to direct these efforts into two major reports. I’m linking these reports below.

What should work

I’ve been studying zoning for awhile, and Jens and I began putting together our Metro Vancouver Zoning study back in 2020 as a start at documenting all the ways our local municipalities were limiting housing. As we’ve been documenting on our blogs, reforming zoning seems like a good solution to a host of our major housing problems. As zoning reform entered the policy agenda at the provincial level, we teamed up with Tom Davidoff and Tsur Somerville at UBC’s Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate and Albert Huang of Terra Housing to look at potential results of doing things differently. Our report to the province attempting to model the likely housing outcomes of the province’s major zoning reforms (Bill 44 and Bill 47) was released in December.

To quote from our report: “We model two land use reforms for British Columbia, the Small Scale Multi Unit Housing (SSMUH) initiative, enabling 4-plex housing on all residential lots in urban areas across the province and 6-plexes in the frequent transit network, and the Transit Oriented Area (TOA) initiative, with higher density stepping up to as high as 20 storeys in parts of designated transit-oriented areas.” We think these reforms will enable the production of a lot of new housing, and in turn that new housing will contribute to solving a lot of our major housing problems. See the full report for 200+ pages of details and some great visualizations (back-up copy here in case BC links change!).

What doesn’t

Jens and I also worked together on a paper entitled “The Rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada and Transnational Property Ownership Patterns” just published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) at the end of December. There’s some nuance to the argument, but a basic idea is that blaming foreigners for our housing problems didn’t help much and contributed to a host of new problems. Here’s the abstract:

We consider how housing acts as a potential realm where perception of crisis can activate reactionary nationalism, investigating how it differs from and interacts with other realms (e.g. jobs and wages, crime, and social welfare). We argue that housing produces distinct triggers for reactionary responses, and potentially results in different media framing, politics, and policy trajectories. We detail the rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada, following its spread from British Columbia, where we find that flexible framing of foreign threat often borrowed from other realms. By contrast, pinning Housing Nationalism to policy generally required more tractable definitions of foreignness, tied to surveillance and the application of penalties. We examine the roll out of policy responses associated with Housing Nationalism and lay out potential harms in terms of challenges to liberal ideals, including Canadian multinationalism, immigrant incorporation, and transnational ties. Finally we provide a baseline of Canadian transnational property ownership patterns, demonstrating that within the provinces where Housing Nationalism became most dominant, Canadian residents generally own far more properties abroad than the number of properties owned in Canada by residents elsewhere. Overall, the Canadian case demonstrates the utility of considering housing as a distinct realm motivating the rise of reactionary nationalism.

In addition to the full version of record housed at the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, we have also provided free pre-prints of the paper at UBC’s cIRcle repository. The code supporting our analysis (and another copy of the pre-print) can also be freely downloaded at GitHub. UBC also highlighted the paper through a press release last week, with media coverage on-going.