Housing

Doubling Up – Distinguishing Families and Households

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(Joint with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

The concepts of family and household frequently get mixed up in the broader housing discourse. We have attempted to explain how these concepts differ, their various statistical constructions, and why it matters in the past. But these explanations can quickly turn quite abstract, so we wanted to complement them by talking about doubling up. This is a very simple way of demonstrating why families and households should not be viewed as interchangeable. We’re also hoping to provide an important reminder that households are malleable and should not be used as the basic unit to analyze housing needs.

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Zoned Capacity – promise and pitfalls

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(Joint with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

Is there room for new housing? There are lots of ways to try and get at this question, driven by a variety of different value calculations (e.g. if you need housing you might look around and see room for more of it everywhere, but if you’re well-housed and like your neighbourhood just the way it is, then you might think there’s no room at all). But this can also be transformed into a technical question, where we can pin a definition down to potential methods for making more room. Here’s where we start to talk about planning concepts, including zoned capacity. Is there room for new housing in municipal planning practices and regulations?

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