 And thank you for joining us today for this week's lecture and planning series presentation. Our speaker today is Dr. Prentice Densler, assistant professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University. My name is Maureen Abyranan, and I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's Urban Planning Program, and I'll be moderating the session. I will start with a few brief logistical announcements and then introduce our speaker. During the talk, I'd like to remind the audience to please mute their microphones. We will be recording today's lecture, so anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded should turn off their video input. The chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. So if you have any technical questions that pertain only to you, please message me or my co-host, Joe Hennigans, privately. After the presentation, we will have time for questions and answers. We'll start around 2 or 2.15 so that we have enough time for everyone's questions. And we encourage all of you to participate. I'll be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you've already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking another one. And to ask questions, participants can either use the raise your hand feature in Zoom, and we will call on you to unmute and you ask your question directly to our speaker, or you may also type your questions in the chat box and I can read them out. So with that, I'm delighted to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Densler is an assistant professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University. His research sits at the nexus of urban poverty, housing policy, neighborhood change, and community development practices. His work examines how and why neighborhoods change and how communities and policies, policy makers create and react to those changes. Prentice research has appeared in a number of academic reviews, including urban studies, housing studies, urban affairs review, and sociology of race and ethnicity, as well as popular media outfits, such as the Huffington Post. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He also serves as a Fulbright scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He currently sits on the editorial board for City and Community and on the governing board of the Urban Affairs Association. Before joining at Georgia State University, he was an assistant professor of sociology and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Colorado College. He received his PhD in public affairs with a concentration in community development from Rutgers University, Camden. He also holds a master's of public administration from Westchester University and a bachelor in energy, business, and finance from Penn State University. Today, Professor Densler's lecture, Housing Assistance Programs and Neighborhood Dynamics, will look at lessons learned from the US and Canada. The talk concerns housing costs that are consistently the biggest expense for individuals and families. Many countries have tried to address housing affordability by providing housing assistance directly to those who cannot pay their monthly housing expenses on their own. However, many have questioned whether or not the government should supply assistance for those who cannot afford it given the neoliberal turn of state intervention. This neoliberal turn is argued to be seen locally in the case of housing vouchers and social mixing initiatives encouraged by agencies undertaking public housing, restructuring across the US since the 1970s and Canada in the 1990s. Within North America, the two largest housing authorities are located in New York and Toronto. And while there is a lot of literature on housing assistance in New York and other large US cities, there's little research on the greater Toronto area. Given the increasingly unaffordable nature of the greater Toronto area, this lecture focuses on the relationships between housing assisting programs and neighborhood dynamics. I'm sure it will be a bracing and insightful talk. So with that, Professor Densler, I'll pass things over to you now. Thank you, Maureen, for a great introduction. And thank you all for being here today. I'm going to share my screen now so we can begin. And can everybody see that? All right. So I'm pleased to be here today to talk to you about my research agenda, some of the work I've been doing here in the States, but also some more recent work in the Canadian context. So we start off with this picture of FDR in the 1930s, thinking about the New Deal and his bigger approach to thinking about housing assistance and the origination of public housing as we see it. So this picture was actually taken here locally in Atlanta and then the cutting ceremony for Techwood Homes, one of the earliest first public housing sites in the country. And a lot of our conversation today is going to be thinking about a lot of the work I've been doing across the years, thinking about residential mobility, public housing, poverty dynamics, and so on and so forth. But before we begin, I would like to give a few acknowledgments one is for the Fulbright Canada program. So I was able and lucky to be a Fulbright scholar in the Department of Sociology back in fall of 2019. And I've worked with the next announcement for the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, which is their local housing authority across the GTA and collect a ton of administrative data with alongside my colleague there, Aaron Bradford. So we compiled a lot of data sets. We compiled a lot of data across households but also across developments. So they didn't have any type of long-term or longitudinal analysis or study around their residents. And part of the unique way we did it was combining a number of agencies kind of files on different residents. MLI rents produce some of the beautiful maps that you'll see later in this presentation. She's one of our PhD candidates here at the Urban Studies Institute here at Georgia State. And some of the data that we use from the Toronto piece specifically came from Jason Hackwith and Andrew Dick for a faculty member in PhD candidate here at Toronto. And as always, all viewpoints are just mine. Do not reflect the funding source or the position of the agencies, especially when you're being critical of such agencies. So earlier in my writing, I wrote a book chapter for a couple of colleagues who are more so in a public administration. And as an interdisciplinary scholar, I like to think about housing policy as a gateway to understand different dynamics across urban history. And part of what I was doing in that book chapter was to really think about the American dream as a constructive ideology within the United States context. So even how we see it being passed around in terms of housing assistance programs, the overall goal has always been self-sufficiency or promotion to home ownership as the intended goal. But we need to complicate that narrative. So part of it is when we think about the construction of how this really had a change across the 20th century, when we think about processes of suburbanization, a lot of it has been pitched around this kind of constructing a narrative around ideology towards home ownership, which literally tied people kind of housing consumption to broader discourses around being a good American citizen. And we still see that taking place today in terms of how a lot of people are reaching for that, that American dream by obtaining a property of their own or a home for themselves. Within urban history, we also know that there's been a large push in the later half of the 20th century to suburbanization. And we're starting to see some semblance of what that means today with the suburbanization of poverty, but a lot of this kind of push was really around the kind of white flight but also the black flight that followed suit. So you have your 11 towns across different places and thinking about this way to get not just away from cities but also away from communities of color that were actually living in these places as well. Moreover, the kind of iconography of public housing really tends to think about these kind of large, tall public housing sites, right? Even in the case in New York, but most of the public housing sites that were designed around many of the urban areas across the country were more low-rise sites initially. So this is a picture of Techwood Homes and it's initial kind of thinking about war housing, right? So thinking about in times before the first or during the kind of first or the Second World War, you see that a lot of construction was doing this in terms of housing consumption as well. And we also had a housing crisis at that time as well. So when thinking about even a returning veterans in the mid-40s, a lot of it was for this to be temporary housing for returning veterans. But we also know that this has come and become a lifelong refuge or space or a place to call home for many low-income populations and many communities of color. So when we look around public housing across the nation, we have different kind of urban histories overlaying that, right? So you have the classic story of Puerto Rico and St. Louis, you have Cabrini Green, which a lot of it in terms of whole six development and even RAID and NTW, some of the newer kind of housing programs that have taken over and even kind of NYCHA, right? So this is the largest kind of, the largest public housing site in the country with even a mix where a lot of the processes and administrative techniques have been to regulate ownership and also maintenance to more private entities. And even some of the housing sites that you see across New York City have been turned into market rate rentals. So there's a lot of ways in which the business of the government has been one to the curb this kind of long history of public housing as these kind of eyesores, these blights or communities, but also there's an individual level that kind of gets missed in these kind of historiographies. So then we think about people, right? And a lot of the kind of conversation about people tends to focus on people as undeserving, right? Or an abusive, abusing the public system or abusing the social welfare system. And we see these kind of classic caricatures about people like welfare queen, welfare queens. And this, it was an interesting caricature in the time. This was around the 1980s, around the Reagan administration, really thinking about the demonizing of the port. And there's a lot of scholars who talk about this specific case, those, the work of Soss and Joe Soss and others, really thinking about issues of deservedness and issues of whether or not people should actually receive any type of public assistance. But we also know that the welfare cream or the caricature was actually based on a real person, right? So Linda Taylor was the used as a scapegoat around this time to really think about her as a welfare queen, because it was said that she was abusing a lot of different federal and public assistance programs and actually having absorbent amounts of income over a hundred thousand dollars at the time. So it was a way for kind of local policymakers to push their agenda, right? To take the role of the government for actually contributing to these issues of dependency or abuse, but also to allow the private market to step in to quote unquote, solve the issue. Even Reagan himself said in Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record, she used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veterans benefits before, not existed to see veterans husbands as well as welfare or tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year, right? And even if this is one instance that we see, we understand that these have been used to kind of make the case for broader swings in terms of urban policy, but also housing assistance policy across the later parts of the 20th century. Moreover, there's been a lot of work in kind of infusing classical theories and sociology around social construction, but also within a frame of public policy. And I always kind of talk about this work around Snyder and Eagren's work about the social construction of target populations. And it's really kind of interesting for us to kind of think about, it's not just that policies are being planned for particular groups, is that there's an actual picture of people that people are thinking about when they're thinking about aid or the allocation, right? And we can see that even translating into some of the issues around COVID relief. So like the needy tenant or people that need rental assistance has been created a caricature around it. And part of what a colleague of mine did in a forthcoming paper that'll be out I think in April this year, thinking about these kind of positive and negative constructions around people, particularly at the height of this kind of post-World War II period. And what we find is that even at the beginning of federal policy around public housing, there was a lot of kind of critique and discourse that the private market should step in, that public housing should be temporary, and that low-income people should reside in the private market because the private market will actually attribute or solve their issues in terms of housing attainment. And we know this is not the case, right? We know that a lot of private market, private actors have kind of excluded people just from their lives or class, but when you overlay kind of race and gender into this context, it provides a kind of vivid picture about exclusion within these cases. Moreover, we also know that for certain sites, particularly places like New York, there are long spells within public housing, right? So while it is supposed to be a very short-term program for a lot of families, places like New York have some of the highest lengths of time for their residents within this place. And again, there's a disconnect between some people or policymakers seeing as a temporary kind of stint to home ownership or being in a private market, but for a lot of individuals to secure a house in terms of a voucher or public housing is their entryway to have a higher level of residential stability. So they would do whatever they need to do to kind of secure that place to call home for a long term. In our recent administration, we also know that there was a lot of critique about the secretary, right? So Ben Carson was, Ben Carson constantly demonized low-income people and also really talked about this kind of issue of dependency, right? And part of my work, and this kind of started in my dissertation work was really thinking about these issues of dependency and whether or not these narratives actually hold weight when you do some more empirical analyses around them, right? So while there's a larger political discourse that's coming on, I really wanted to look in to see like, are there issues with dependency? Are there issues with longer stays among public housing residents? And what about the neighborhood context that we largely see in the neighborhood as contributing to that or mitigating some of those issues? So here's just a quick snapshot of some of the household counts of the length of stay of households across public housing units across some cities in the United States. So New York has, as I've said before, the highest count, but as a recent report in October 2020 over approximately 44% are living in New York public housing sites for over 20 years, right? So this is a big issue when you're thinking about if this is supposed to be a temporary program where you have some attrition where people coming in and out, this is creating issue if you're not building more housing for lower income groups, right? So you do have some type of issue of longer stays within that. But across most of the other cities you have the kind of opposite. You have more people staying in public housing for less than five years versus these long kind of dependent terms over a long kind of durations over 10 or 20 years. The other reason we kind of look at the threshold of five years as a shorter versus long term is because even in a bottom administration while a lot of other kind of public assistance programs have some type of term limits, public housing is one of those programs that doesn't. So there was actually legislation and talk around legislation to impose a term limit during a bottom administration. And luckily there was really no movement on it. So there's some situations where there are term limits but for the most part operates as one of those public assistance programs that you just don't kind of exhaust that there's a certain amount of time. So in terms of problem-staying, what is the general problem I'm really tackling in is one is that we understand there's a global affordable housing crisis, right? This is not just for low income people. This is not just for people of higher incomes. And the US working households are increasingly more likely to be renters. And then Westin says this pretty much due to three things. One is there's cheap access to capital within these spaces. Two, there's a re-urbanization of that particular capital. So while you see a lot of kind of urban areas growing as a notion and as these processes are ongoing and lastly, there you have greater levels of inter-societal kind of inequality, right? So it really kind of puts people against people in a local context. The other pieces that many individuals are staying in public housing when you just look at across the US around 17% have lived there for over 20 years. So there's these questions of why. And then we know that HUD has largely shifted away from public housing as a viable option, right? There's a lot of advocacy to really kind of implement or re-implement or grow the number of public housing stock. And there's discussions of why that is the case, right? We kind of shift to vouchers more as a private market subsidy as a more kind of flexible option. But advocates like me are still pushing for more public housing and actually funded, right? Because we do understand there was a lot of undercutting in the funding across this history. So this kind of first part of the piece is really based on a paper that's under review right now. Hopefully you should hear back something soon. But the three main research questions I'm tackling is to what extent do individual characteristics explain public housing exits? And this is really much in the kind of social destruction of people. Is it kind of individual attributes that are explaining longer durations of time? Does time spend public housing actually have an effect on the odds of exiting, right? And this gets at some of the duration dependence arguments that people have across public housing, public assistance programs overall. And lastly, what is the relationship between neighborhood dynamics, right? So there's a lot of relationships on neighborhoods. And I really wanted to understand do they mitigate these issues or do they actually support or problematize how we understand housing exits? So in terms of the literature, I'm kind of framing in two different sections. One is the cultural explanations. So there's a lot of cultural explanations from dating back even before this, but I'm looking at Michael Herrington's work in the other America, right? Even the Monahan report, the Negro family, Oscar Lewis in the culture of poverty, and Charles Murray who's constantly writing about kind of these idea of subjective positions of individual attributes. And a lot of it looks at kind of human capital issues or individual characteristics, explanations for poverty status, right? So if you just give people more money or have higher levels of education, they should be economically more mobile. And this was the way that a lot of federal policies have been operating, right? A lot of it targeted not just neighborhoods but also individuals overall. I would say that you didn't get a lot of good discussion in terms of the neighborhood context though, like the mid-80s, right? So a lot of the work in terms of thinking about Wilson's work and a truly disadvantaged the kind of neighborhood effects. Even my, you always have to shout out the advisors. So my advisor Paul Drogowski in this work and being by the concentration of poverty is having his own independent effect to understand poverty dynamics. Massey and Denton's work around segregation and even Sharky's work in intergenerational status of poverty, right? So there's a lot of work thinking about the conditions surrounding poverty concentration and also dynamics. But when it comes to this understanding of thinking about housing spells or tenure statuses, there's not a ton of work. There's more, a little bit more recent work with Kirk McClure, but even Lance Freeman, this is kind of how I got into this kind of discussion looking at some of the earlier work at Lance Freeman, thinking about interpreting dynamics of public housing where he specifically looks at the kind of cultural versus rational choice arguments, his other follow-up article looking at housing assistance overall and asking this question of dependency within that he lumps in public housing and vouchers as well. There's some economists that are doing this work, thinking about the dynamics of housing assistance spells, hunger for his doneness, and even a case study of New York as an extreme case. And even thinking about is the data the issue, right? So Lance uses PSID, there's some SIP data, SIP data user from Hungerford, but even who's a user who's administrative there specifically from New York, Susan branches out and use administrative data from across different housing insights. But a lot of these, the kind of contention I have with a lot of them don't really include the neighborhood context. They use a couple of measures, the thing about workforce or employment, but they really don't get at the meat of the argument when we're thinking about those kind of local neighborhood dynamics in this case. And in addition to that, a lot of them are usually on short time frames, right? There's not like long longitudinal analyses to think about these processes going forward. So at the time I was hoping to get this paper out in 2018, McClure beat me to it. He's using actually administrative data and this paper is published in Cityscape and he looks at the length of stay across different housing programs. I do think my paper is still novel just because it includes a more longitudinal assessment across different neighborhoods and it's a US kind of focus study as well. So within this kind of framing of it, I'm looking at individual attributes and also structural conditions that contribute to poverty spells. There is another kind of piece that is argument I usually like the point out is this kind of efficacy and agency, right? So a lot of it when we're thinking about these helicopter ways of looking at residential mobility or different processes, we're looking at people and also places, but we don't actually ask the questions around why do they wanna live there if they're living there long term. I do have a paper that was published that gets at some of that, but that's where I see my work growing a little bit more too in the future as well. So for this first piece, or I use data from PSID, longest longitudinal data set in the United States and arguably in the world. For this piece, I use data from 1987 to 2011. So while the annual data did start in 1968, there's a reason I started in 1987. The big reason is that they asked a question around whether or not people lived in public housing from 1968 to 1973. They dropped that question and then picked it up in 1986. I started 1987 as a year to control for left truncation. So now I can actually look at people that entered after that point. The unit of analysis is the head of household and is around almost 4,000 observations across the 24 year period. I combined that with US decennial census data from 1990 and 2000, and also ACS five year estimates. Because what I really wanna see is trends across these neighborhood changes across time, right? And part of it is that, yes, I don't have every year within this case, but what I do do is I impute or I employ a interpolation across the census years. So we understand the neighborhoods don't usually drastically change from year to year. There's usually trends over time. So this allows me to get an average of those trends across with the missing data by doing interpolation, a linear interpolation throughout these periods. In terms of variables, my dependent variable is whether or not some of my less public housing. I do use housing spells. There's a small percentage of people who had an accident in another entry. So we're treating that as a second spell. Within a second paper, I use this idea of mobility intentions and I'll come back to that. The policy reform or the policy error is really important, right? And what I do in this particular piece is think about the kind of pre-1996, post-1996 period as different policy reform errors as it relates to housing policy. And there's a few reasons, right? There's one we know that Clinton had the kind of work responsibility act in that period. There's a lot of kind of different policy reforms acted at 1997 period. We're thinking about the implementation of both six but we're thinking about RAID, the rental assistance demonstration program, when we're thinking about the use of vouchers and also demolition processes. A lot of these took place later in the 90s and across the 2000s versus before. In terms of the individual level characteristics, kind of your usual demographics were A, sex, race, marital status, marital status is split up in terms of categories, whether you're single, married or if you experienced a divorce widowed or if you're widowed or experienced a divorce or you're separated. I include children and dependents while we a lot of kind of studies only look at children. There are a lot of households that also have other forms of the parents whether it's an older adult living in a house, extended family member as well. And that could contribute to these longer stays because you have to find suitable housing that fits a bigger family and not just for you and your kids. Income, we would think income will have a positive relationship on exits and also education levels as well. A lot of the housing as we see and especially in the kind of post reform area that I'm looking at too, a lot of it goes to seniors and also other people with disability status or accessibility issues. The PSID has a unique identifier that lets me know if this head of household has a physical or nervous condition and I control for that as well. And then lastly, parental effects to get at some of this kind of intergenerational mix. What I see in the intergenerational thing and this is split between two. One is the ask a question whether or not you grew up with a two family household, single parent household or neither. And the other looks at whether or not you grew up wealthy, average or poor, right? So this is not a perfect kind of indicator but I think it's a proxy to get us thinking about these kind of intergenerational issues. And then across the neighborhood conditions, we see a lot in terms of the vacancy rate, median gross rent, median household income, poverty rate and unemployment rate controlled for at the neighborhood level. And in methodology, there's two parts. One is a bunch of Kaplan-Meier estimates and this looks at the probability of exits across time. And then in the second part, I do an event history analysis that allows me to think about these kind of effects while people are living in public housing and it gets at some of the unbalanced nature of the panel, right? So everybody's not staying in the sample for the same amount of years. So this allows me to compare groups that are staying for shorter versus longer periods of time and I use other ratios. I have another piece of methods and this is to really think about why we should really be doing longitudinal analyses when we're thinking about outcomes, right? So a lot of the analyses that I see, usually think of like the snap or point in time estimates or the snapshot analyses. And really if you do that, you'll get very different outcomes where you're thinking about how long somebody is staying in a place, right? Especially if you're not considering kind of these entries and exits as it relates. So this piece is in the Social Science Journal and it really is to compare observed durations versus completed spells, right? And there's ways to think about that if you looked in terms of observed duration or how long somebody is staying in there, you would get very different estimates numbers versus somebody who's entering and exiting public housing across the kind of life course or experiencing these different events. So there are some limitations. One is that I can't control for the individual independent influence of a local housing authority, right? So because it's a national data set, I can't do that with this particular data. There may be some previously observed periods before that 1986 periods. And also we don't know the specific reasons for the access, right? So people could be transferring to other housing programs. Within his data set, I was able to parse out those particular people. If there are demolition efforts, that you would need demolition data across every housing authority, which I don't have at this point. But also evictions. We know evictions is also, in certain cities evictions is driven by some of the local housing authorities versus other ones. So to kind of read this graph, right? Is that in year zero, there's a hundred percent probability of exiting. And then what we see is that there's a drastic decline after five years, right? So like the odds of exiting are very low for people who are staying in public housing past five year mark for less than, it's around 22%. And even that kind of goes across and then you have some people staying there across the whole duration of this sample. But when we think about differences between groups, right? So this graph says that males exit at a faster rate than their female counterparts, right? And that goes along with some of the literature because there is a lot of feminization of poverty as we talk about in the discourse where a lot of the kind of low income studies have been particularly focused on the overrepresentation of women as head of households. What about the racial dynamics? And this graph is kind of getting at some of that, right? So about a lot of this kind of urban history has been constructed as like an issue of dependency among black households. We do see that in this particular graph that white and black households exit public housing at almost the same rate, right? Across these periods of time. The only difference is that at year 15, white households exit the sample altogether while black households are still in that sample, right? So there's a greater propensity for exit for one particular group versus another. And then you see the other category which is a small sample mumping in every other group together. We think about the kind of multivariate or regression analysis where we see is that, so I split up some of the tenure or the housing spell into three groups. And I'm only reporting today on those that are statistically significant also those that are like practically significant as well. So part of that is that we do understand that the odds ratio on the left-hand side is actually decreasing, right? And when the time is going up and it kind of mirrors the same term type of a visual that we saw just in those kind of Kaplan-Meier estimates. But the interesting thing is this reform variable, right? So there's a 95% higher odds of exiting after that 1996 period. And what is that telling us is that there's higher issues of exit but it also may be due to a lot of the changes in federal policy around housing assistance during that piece of time or at least like a reading of urban history would allow us to think about that. In terms of individual effects, age, other racial groups had a higher probability of exit, other marital status. So if a household experience like separation or the person was widowed, we would expect that maybe that person would have held the housing voucher so they would have be a reason why there's a higher exit between those. But income wasn't statistically significant. And I ran some of this at just regular kind of history just a multi-level modeling, but income became less statistically significant when you're adding all the neighborhood kind of conversations into effect. Now the interesting thing about the neighborhood piece is that you're kind of like this tail of two sides, right? That there's a higher odds of exiting for neighborhoods with higher median household median income and also a higher odds of exiting with neighborhoods with higher poverty rates. And what is that telling us that there may be something at that neighborhood individual level that could be contributing to those exits. And higher income neighborhoods, it may be that some households are getting access to other amenities and resources to get them out of public housing, right? On the flip side, there may be something in lower or poorer neighborhoods where they may be targeted for federal policies but also don't have the access to some of these amenities or resources to become more economically mobile. And this other paper I have in housing studies, we look at the mobility attentions. And this is actually asking the question, are you planning to leave, right? So Liri asked this question to public, asked it for all the sample but Liri took the sub sample of public housing residents. And what you see is in the first five years it doesn't really matter if they plan to leave or not they exit public housing at particularly the same rate but around year four, that's when you see a divergence. So those who actually intend to leave exit at a slightly faster rate that increases over time versus those who don't, right? So there is some type of kind of evidence of poor agency or efficacy arguments but even in that we can understand that since you don't see a clear distinction in those earlier years, there's some limitations in terms of individual agency within the space. So obviously we could run through a lot of policy implications with what we should be doing, right? The big piece I kind of want to take across the day without going through all these is just, we need to really get beyond this kind of narrative of self-sufficiency and really push to a bigger narrative or bigger concern with residential stability, right? So it's not just being economically mobile. We know that is one kind of indicator but even lower income, higher income families there's a lot to be said where you don't have to move again, all right? Or even if you're moving from a lower income to a higher income neighborhood, that disruption causes other disruptions in your life, right? So we really need to think about how can we make kind of more equitable inclusive communities for people to get all the resources and not just particularly tied to class status or income brackets. So what about the case of Canada? And part of the reason I wanted to go to Canada is because it has this kind of discourse of being very progressive. And I was really curious to see if they just did public housing or in their case, social housing better. Just like a lot of the other cities, Toronto remains one of the most severely unaffordable cities in the world. We also know that there's a lot of kind of conversation about what Canada can learn from the US and we see this a lot of in a lot of different cities around the world. And interesting enough, they employ some of the same problematic things we've done, right? So there's a lot of things where we can kind of think about within a Canadian context. One interesting thing about Toronto, specifically as a city, is that they're thinking about not just housing as social housing, but across a spectrum of housing. And they're putting financing and funding into building up all of these kind of individual tenants from emergency shelters to social housing to affordable home ownership all the way up to market home ownership, right? And it's really interesting to think about the role of the federal government and provincial government within a different context, increasing the amount of access across housing tenure statuses versus privileging home ownership over all other ones. So today we were really talking about social housing. So, you know, Toronto's community housing is not without its own critique. There's a lot of people who are proposing that the amount of construction that they're doing doesn't really solve the kind of issue. And more so, when you think about the demographics of who's actually living in Canada, this is from Toronto Community Housing, which is their local housing authorities, annual report. You see that 28% are seniors, 37% are adults. A lot of them are high rise apartment style units, right? Versus the more low rise or housing. And then there's a 26% are same old family and 29% live alone. So there's a lot of ways in which you can kind of get an insane type of characteristics across this. So when we think about the greater Toronto area or the six, there's a lot of different areas where you're thinking about Scarborough, where you're thinking Mississauga and really thinking about the stretch or the breadth of their units. So in here, you can see that they divide their development areas up into operating units. So there are like clusters of operating units across the greater Toronto area. You have your single family zones, which are the blue markers, your family housing, which are the orange ones. And then you're senior housing, which are the darker red ones. You can see in the K to M, the L to G, that those are more in the downtown areas. So they're more clustered compared to some of the other kind of areas sprawled out around the larger region. So the motivation is given that urban housing crises, housing services, a temporary form of relief. We understand neighborhood effects literature tends to be focused on US cities, right? Predominantly coming from a US context. Literature and largely focused on the racialized history of US urban planning and housing policy. And then I would argue that we kind of idealized progressive countries, right? Without really thinking about or doing analyses or whether or not they're actually doing things that actually work. So for this kind of Canadian context, we're actually, I'm asking to what extent are housing assistance programs clustered in disadvantaged neighborhoods, right? Are there relationships between program type and neighborhood conditions? Does Canadians colorblind approach to housing assistance result in greater neighborhood diversity among households, right? If there's so much of a racialized context or story in the US, what is to be said about the Canadian context? And it even does neighborhood context matter and more progressive policy environments, right? In terms of access. So there is some, is there a good amount of literature, some great scholars doing this work. And I'm thinking about the legacy of the ghettoization of black tenants in THA. And that was the precursor to TCH, which came around 2005. There's also this kind of push for neoliberalism and Martina August is talking about this a lot, Jason Hepworth and others are really thinking about this kind of shift to neoliberalism within a more progressive context. There's also this, August does a great lot of work on planning thought in terms of social mixing, right? So while we're pushing for mixed income developments, there is a push up there for social mixing at the development level as well. There's an uneven burden on black women in this space. And we understand that that's very much in line with other racial history in terms of the US. And there's a lot in terms of long waiting lists and strategic evictions that some scholars have argued and criticized TCH for. Now in the Canadian context, there's a lot to think about when we think about the US, right? So just throwing a back out there in terms of Wilson's work, my colleague, Junior Howell's work on a political context that shape their real context. We largely forget that. And even Sharkey and Faber's work in terms of the where, when, why and for whom is the questions we should be asking. But in Canada, it's an interesting case because the findings are very mixed when we think about the neighborhood conditions. So one study in Richardson 2001 found that education and employment attainment rates for Aboriginal groups living in poor neighborhoods are well below those in non-poor neighborhoods. Toronto neighborhoods with higher levels of economic disadvantage, higher proportions of young and black residents and greater residential instability have higher homicide rates. But there's some counter arguments, right? So Oriopolis found that neighborhood quality plays literal in determining a use, eventual earnings, unemployment, likely and welfare participation. So this is in stark contrast to some of the Raj Chetty work that we see here in the US context, right? So there's some things to be said. And then when we think about evictions there was the recent study that tracks with higher black populations have two times the rate of evictions and tracks with higher levels that probably had 2.5 times the rate of evictions. So these are targeted strategic actions that are being taken place among low income populations. So for this second part, we just look at kind of this relationship between neighborhood visible minorities and also a different set of Canadian census data. This data was administrative data from TCH. We're looking at this particular discussion today looking at the development level. I do have the household IDs on the way. They should be here before the end of the month. And the next piece is to create a longitudinal data set to do a similar analysis among households. And we look at these across different dissemination areas versus and census tracks. Particularly we're looking at dissemination areas which are just like block groups here in the US context. And I look at it across median household income, median rent and median property value. And because of the ratio of competes that I'm always thinking about is like is there a relationship between the black population within these contexts? Do you see black people clustered in lower income neighborhoods or neighborhoods with lower levels of household income or property values? So today I'm doing the data visualization part but this is gonna be an ongoing piece. We're doing some quantitative analysis. The summer and then starting this fall, I'll be starting a position at the University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology. So that's where I'll be starting to do some of the more qualitative piece, interviewing and doing focus groups with TCH residents themselves. So this is a map of just different housing types. We have the family, your senior, your contract and these are more so like contracted unions with different property owners and then co-ops. There are some co-ops within this space as well. Where there's a good diversity, right? We can see there's a lot of coloring around this map. There's good diversity across the region. There's even a lot of kind of units being focused in the downtown area, which is along the water side of there. But the other question is like, is it there's their access issue when we think about other amenities like transportation? And when we do see that sites are kind of sporadically located around different kind of high light rail and our kind of heavy rail, but there also the dotted lines are bus routes, right? So there is kind of good access to bus routes around the GTA and more so than you will see in a lot of the kind of segregated communities that we see here in the US context. Now, what this graph does is show you the proportion of black visible minority populations and its concentration as related to median rent. And what we do see here is that there are higher percentages of black visible minorities in neighborhoods or dissemination areas with lower median rents. And as the dissemination area goes up and rental value have lower percentages of a black visible population, right? So there is some clustering of that black visible minority population. We do see a similar dynamic in the red dotted line is the averages for both of those kind of markers, but we do see a similar dynamic when it comes to median household income and we also see a similar dynamic when it comes to house value. So there is a maintenance of issue where we see this kind of clustering of different kind of minority groups within this case. So I'll do some additional steps to kind of think about contracted or co-ops, think about these longitudinal changes across time and also include the qualitative component. There are some takeaways that we can think about. So one is that family and senior developments in the Canadian context or at least the Toronto context tend to have better proximity to railways versus co-ops and contracted housing sites. Family developments tend to be in dissemination areas with higher percentages of black visible minorities with lower median rents, lower household incomes and property values versus senior developments. However, the difference is less significant on upper end of the scales both family and senior developments are within DAs with lower percentage of black visible minorities with higher household market characteristics. And lastly, what are the lessons? Like what can we take away from all this stuff? The first is that neighborhood context is a proxy for quality of life. However, social welfare policies mitigate their long-term impacts. So because the kind of progressive social welfare state of the Canadian context versus the US state, the neighborhood context becomes less important versus here, whereas it really drastically ties you to different resources and amenities at the local level. Most research focused on mobility outcomes tend to accept neighborhood conditions as a causal explanation while relieving the role of public and private institutions in shaping neighborhood disadvantage. So it's not just that there's higher access to employment, the leaving of an employment or a leaving of an institution at the local level creates a disadvantage at that local level as well. So there's a process that's kind of having a causal effect on that neighborhood context. Housing assistance is only one tool of community development and does not solve that urban housing crisis. So we can promote housing vouchers while we want to, but that largely does not address the affordable housing crisis that many families across income brackets are actually dealing with. And racial composition is not just a mechanism for understanding disparities, but also the construction of narratives in public policy making, right? So it's not just that idea of having racial disparities that where black households are not doing as well as white houses when you compare them across these different studies. There's a composition or a narrative that surrounds that public policy making that I really want people to really explore, right? There's a conversation about deservedness. There's a conversation about whether or not the government should be even in the role of providing any type of housing. And those narratives get complicated when we're only focusing on racial disparity work without really kind of uncovering or highlighting the reasons why we're doing these things in the first place. And with that, I'll say thank you and opening it up to questions. Thank you so much Professor Dancer for the very rich presentation. I have many questions myself, but I'll open it up for everyone in the room first to ask their questions. So just as a kind of reminder, you can either raise your hand in the Zoom feature and we can call on you to ask your question directly or you may also type your questions in the chat box and we can read them out after, that pretty much would be like at the end. And you're welcome to turn on your videos. I see, cool. I have a question about the like the deservedness question and comparing with Canada and the US. Did in your work in Toronto, did you sense that that deservedness is not as much of an issue in the political context in Canada or is it sort of emerging as an issue as public housing maybe becomes more racialized in Canada? Cause just I imagine just the sort of different, we think of Canada as traditionally very homogenous country until fairly recently and I wonder sort of if you saw that dynamic play out up there. Yeah, I mean, part of the initial conversation with my colleague Aaron Bradford, I was asking her these questions cause there's a lot of work in thinking about housing authority as that maintenance of neighborhoods at the local level. And I was asking her like, so when people don't pay rent, what do they do? Like what do you do as a housing authority? And she was like, well, we just kind of work with them. And I was like, so what does that really mean, right? Like do you wait a month before eviction? And she was like, we rarely pursue evictions because we would rather work and actually turning that person, like working with that person to get them more stable versus pushing them out and getting another person in just through turnover. And I was like, yeah, that's interesting dynamic cause most housing authorities would never say that, right? In the US context, right? If there's no, there's not a lot of resources, especially across different housing authorities to actually mitigate the issues when there's a rent burden. So it did seem like that initially in terms of like the deserve in this question was more so that, yeah, we're not out to get people or we're not out to just constantly turn over our housing units. It was more so for them to think about what is the ways in which they can do it but also include other kind of entities, private actors in the conversation to just build more housing. It could be that it's a unique case just because it's Toronto, right? So it's very much like New York and being a very extreme housing market. Part of the other kind of conversation or interest is to think about other smaller housing authorities around Canada to see how they fit in this narrative. But at least within the TCH and across the GTA those conversations deserving this weren't coming up when you're thinking about public assistance. I do see a question in a chat that I can probably answer. Yeah, so it's from Baldwin Hum and they ask regarding exits or lack thereof. I'm wondering if there are any poll factors that have been examined where local amenities such as transportation options, social services, community forming and other might be encouraging people to stay longer than they otherwise might want to. Yeah, I think there's two sides of that. One, right, is that if you look across different cities a lot of your public housing units that are left are usually in areas right now that are becoming increasingly less affordable, right? So a lot of the land that is occupied by public housing sites across cities is very attractive to developers and also private interests for that particular reason. So it may be a poll factor to think about whether or not people have to uproot themselves to go to other neighborhoods because they can't just locally bind themselves within their local neighborhoods, right? And part of what we saw in the NTO or the Moving to Opportunity Experiment was that where a lot of people who moved out of the housing sites actually moved within the same kind of communities or neighborhoods close by. So there's a kind of relationship there. I do think there's also like a poll depending on the actual makeup of that individual family. So we understand that people with children move for different reasons versus people that don't, right? And I do think there's poll reasons where a lot of my friends at this point are actually thinking about schools as the number one motivator for moving across income levels, right? So there are definitely poll factors within this case. Can we tease that out a little bit more? I would argue that it's not just the kind of one narrative to push it more or less. I think there's this divergent errors that are happening simultaneously at the same time for households. Thank you. I think Carolyn has a question. Yeah. Hi, thank you so much for this talk. This was really fascinating. I was curious to hear more about your thoughts on what you would want to see in terms of housing policy, especially since we're hopefully at a political moment right now where we'll be able to make some improvements to our affordable housing policies. I know you mentioned that vouchers, you see as something that may not address the affordability challenges and you had some context-specific strategies like community land trust. So I just wanted to hear more about some solutions that you might propose. Sure. I can talk about this all day. I think so last week or I guess it was two weeks ago, I did a presentation at the Atlanta Regional Housing Forum and part of my part in that was to develop a toolkit to think about equitable housing strategies that can promote racial equity. And within that space, we literally just took the toolkit of community development tools that we already have, right? So thinking about shared equity mortgages, thinking about promotional home ownership, thinking about down payment assistance, thinking about home buy educational classes. On the flip side, we also talked about things like mitigating some of the issues where we see our imprisals, right? There's a recent story that just came out on the news about a family whose house was undervalued like almost a half a million dollars, right? So there's these issues where we have to attack the entire system. And I think if you think about it in terms of like federal policy, but also private market actors and also individual level kind of conditions, then we get to pushing more in that. In terms of the housing space, yes, you need affordable housing, but we also need to recognize that affordable housing as we know is basically dependent on your kind of AMI or your area median income of those areas. So there is a segment of that population that doesn't even get to get into those affordable housing units. I would still argue that we need to really build more public housing, but actually finance it as it was initially intended to do, right? Without drastically undercutting those funds. The voucher piece to me is just another way that we're gonna have the same type of discussions around deservedness going forward, right? There's gonna be bigger kind of discussions about whether or not we should do this policy or program. But for a lot of people, it does work, right? In certain places, it does work for families to become a little bit more mobile in their spaces and not confine them to a particular place. And these are just, and using things like Li-Tech and all these other kinds of programs that I think we have the tools, I think there's a lack of political will and capacity to actually implement these things. One piece I'll never forget, I did a talk a year and a half ago with a colleague and Memphis, Tennessee, and we were thinking about how do you call public housing home, right? And part of the discussion, something she said I will always remember was that she was like, I left public housing when I was young, around 16, 17, and I've been searching for community ever since, right? And I think that's a big piece that we largely forget about in more technocratic fields, like urban planning, like public administration, where we're really thinking about the nuts and bolts of equity issues, but really not thinking about that sense of community at that local level. So instead of kind of addressing issues of community relationships or even thinking about the long-term trajectories of families, aside from economic outcomes, we're problematizing them because we're segregating communities or we're pushing mobility-style programs where we need to just upward you and throw you in another community because it's better access to resources and amenities or stuff like that. So there's a lot to be said in that space in terms of solutions. Community Land Trust has found to be very useful. We have one here locally on the south side of Atlanta. James the Philippus and the Rutgers New Brunswick Group has been doing a lot of work on that for years and actually has a new study thinking about the property value surrounding Community Land Trust and found that there are increases in those property values versus those areas with no community land trusts. But again, like a lot of scholars have said, we don't really get at that kind of, the discourse and the narratives that are surrounding the public policy making will be doing the same thing across political swings left and right. So that's probably a long-winded answer, but hopefully I answered your question. So I'll ask the second question in the chat that also came from Baldwin Humm. Are there cities, regions that tended to build social affordable housing more broadly rather than the mass building in very specific areas that typically have been happening in the post-war years? That's a good question. This is a limitation. So I usually only look at US focused kind of public housing and kind of more recently in a Canadian context. Public housing was really kind of big in the US from the 1930s all the way up to the 1960s. But even I don't know if there's region, I think New York is an outlier in terms of the housing construction that it did across different cities. But like if you look across the US now, there are very small assemblages of the massive types of housing counts. And even if there are public housing sites, a lot of them have been converted into more mixed use or market rate rentals versus the legacy of only having public housing tenants. And that goes in line with some of the narratives around concentration of poverty. Goes in line with some of the narratives around access to certain communities. But I don't know if any specific space or region that is doing a better job or a more kind of comprehensive job in building public housing or social housing specifically, at least within the US context in a Canadian context. Even I would say even Canadians kind of plan doesn't build a ton of more units. A lot of it is building slow incremental changes but also encouraging other kind of housing tenure statuses. Yeah. Thank you. I think Connor has a question for you. Sure. Hi, thank you so much for the talk because I was really interesting. And I think, I guess I'm curious about, I guess I have two like related questions. One being, you know, I think you just touched on this in Carolyn's question about, you know, and through your talk about, you know, like quantitative analysis, I guess I'm just curious about like how you look at, you know, because at least in the United States, like how public housing is very stigmatized and like how you like quantify that within this kind of research, like especially when you're thinking about like public housing in relation to neighborhood stability and, you know, income indicators and things like that, like how a lot I would, I mean, like maybe one would argue that, you know, a lot of these results just get very distorted by these kinds of stigmas and social and like you mentioned like these like social narratives and politics around policy. And then I guess my other question is, you know, you had a slide showing the breadth of strategies in Toronto in terms of providing affordable housing and, you know, New York City has like also like a, and they like sort of tout this like, you know, varied tool belt of strategies that like together can address the housing crisis, but I was wondering if you had thoughts on how maybe some of those more social welfare strategies kind of come in conflict with more of the neoliberal practices and how it's not really like they're all working together to achieve this one goal, but some kind of as, you know, vouchers and private incentives increase public housing investment and like maybe like more, maybe like community interest kind of, you see decrease in investment, if that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so to the first question, I would say that a lot of my work has been, I was in a public affairs program, I was trained by a lot of quantitative people, right? So for me, it's more of like the helicopter view to really kind of tease out particular types of outcomes, right? But as an interdisciplinary scholar, I read across different spaces. So I don't think you can kind of uniquely do or adequately do a longitudinal study without thinking about the urban, the changes in urban policy across that history of the time that you're doing, right? And I would say that a lot of work that I read being on an editorial board or just like even in the field, a lot of it fails to contextualize the timing of its study, right? And I think that's really important to understand the nuances of what's really going on within that particular space. And across in terms of the racial stigmatization, part of the reason I got into looking at housing policy because I also wanted to look at racial history. And then at least within the US context, and we can have this argument outside of the US as well, is that there's a deep embedded relationship and a mutually constitutive dependent relationship on housing construction and just racial practices, right? So a lot of it for me is to really think about it's not just the discourse surrounding poverty, right? Because we can de-racialize public policy making and still have very much racist outcomes, right? We can take race out of the equation. We don't have to say, you know, even when you think about kind of contemporary conversations about NIMBYism, where it's like, I don't want those people moving into my neighborhood or I don't want that type of housing, it's because they already have a construction of the person that's gonna live in that space. So for a lot of the work I've been doing or inside my kind of academic research work, but also just community engaged work is really kind of think about how do you contend with these things going on? And partly I think it's the job of the scholar to kind of deconstruct and problematize the way that other people think, right? I think if anything we can do as scholars and researchers in this space is to problematize those narratives and those discussions that are actually going on, right? And I think there, we have the unique advantage to kind of pursue research from an independent, you know, a subjectively independent lens, but it really gets us to tease out the nuances of a particular issue versus just kind of going along with that and that scope. And I also say that, and this has been like, while a lot of kind of my work, I remember sometimes like, why are you focusing on public housing? And it's like, because there's just so much there and there's so much that's still there that I think we haven't really uncovered. There's a great book coming out by a curator, Jerick Rodriguez from UPenn, Diverging Space for Deviants. And she looks at Atlanta, the politics of Atlanta's public housing and cyanate and tenant activism, particularly led by black women in that space. And that's a beautiful book that's written in 2021. That's more of an urban history, but also a book of urban studies that we don't have in a narrative or the kind of literature as of now, right? So I do think in a lot of these spaces, it's our role to kind of disrupt those narratives and those discussions and no discourses where they're veered to go one particular way. And also to bring back in this kind of this space to really think about the politics of policy. And I think this gets to your second question in terms of the policy making is that, I would argue that a lot of times when we're thinking about the politics, we tend to think about kind of national action or federal action that should be taken. And I do think there's a place for that, but I also think we need to really think about policies to be contextually and locally based. If you were to say, hey, we should build, 50 more thousand units of public housing in Atlanta, you'd be hard pressed to actually get that to happen, right? But there are a lot of other places where that may actually be feasible. And I do think we have to really think about the contextual histories, the independent things that are going on in those local areas to really think about the suitable policy solutions. Even in a thing, in a forum a couple of weeks ago, one of the things we pushed was like, don't just designate certain neighborhoods to be available for community land trusts, actually do that across the city. So then you could have a nonprofit entity that actually can build affordable housing across the city and not be specified or targeted in one particular neighborhood or across two or three census tracks in relation to some of the urban development that we have down here in terms of the belt line. Other cities could probably follow the same suit, right? Those cities that can have more kind of control development but also open wider for other affordable housing developers to go in, rent control, right? Rent control is something that gets talked about sometimes but economists say, no, it doesn't work. And it's like, Mo, maybe we need to revisit those conversations. A lot of those analyses haven't been done in the recent 10 years. So maybe now there's the time where we're seeing drastic housing costs that we need to have another conversation of rent control. So I think for me, it's really the thing about how these policies need to be contextually based but also they're very much time dependent, you know aside from the actual feasibility but also the political viability at a particular time. And like you said, we might be in a, even in the last question, we might be in a space where some of these tools and actions can actually be implemented versus the last four years. Thank you. Thank you. Professor Dancer, were you, when you said in the last point or the last question, were you referring to the one in the chat or to Connor's last question? Connor's last question. So we do have one more question in the chat and it's from Chris Robertson and goes, have you come across any housing authorities programs that have offered training programs or other programming that showed success in raising incomes and helping tenants to move out of subsidized housing? Yeah, so part two things. One is that there was some research and also some highlighting, particularly in the space of New York City, that even when some families did have higher incomes that would actually make them not eligible for public housing sites that Nitro was actually keeping them in those spaces. And part of the narrative surrounding that there, they would be role models to other people within those spaces to become more economic mobile. So there's, I would argue that I can kind of understand that it is also a very much paternalistic approach to how we're thinking about that as if lower income groups need more kind of income assistance. There have been some spaces where there were different programs, I forget the actual section number, but different programs that allowed public housing residents to buy their unit, allowed public housing residents after a certain amount of time after going through some educational classes. I believe Philadelphia did this, my hometown fully did this at some point to actually obtain another unit or receive down payment assistance or rental assistance to obtain a unit outside of public housing. Those have been very much piecemeal depending on the locality and the funding to those localities as well. I think the other piece in terms of thinking about income, specifically looking at income is that I was doing some maps even here recently and across the cities I do is that when you look at the percentage of income that people are actually spending on housing, a lot of families are spending 50% or more across income levels. So that for me, that's a big worry, right? Where 30% is usually that metric or that threshold where we see housing is affordable or not affordable. But if a lot of people across income levels are spending 50% or more, then we're gonna have a bigger housing situation and then we also know that the marginalization of poverty or those disadvantages are gonna be a double disadvantage for people on a lower income scales. So there are certain housing authorities that have been doing income-based things or even linking certain job training to public housing residents. I do think they work here and there, but I don't see anyone that's doing kind of long-term commitment strategies or even mobility strategies to say, hey, if you live in this particular space, you can transfer to another space in a private market or something like that. I think we treat these places as one-off instead of thinking about like how you could think about housing as a system, right? So if you have a public housing resident, is there a space for them to go more into like affordable housing market rate so they can at least sustain some level of affordability? But I would say that most housing authorities function in isolation and they don't do that kind of long-term spectrum of housing tenure options. We have another question in the chat and it's from Kirtana Sudhakar. Oftentimes in navigating affordable housing, one is confronted by opposition from community members with concerns about impact of the project on the neighborhood. Additionally, many of the professionals involved in assembling funds and navigating many challenges such as community opposition and restrictive policies. To me, this seems to stem from a prevailing mindset about affordable housing projects as well as normative practices and approaching projects from a mindset of lacking. So in terms of shifting this mindset, do you have any ideas on affecting change such as awareness around the value that affordable housing projects can bring to a neighborhood? Yeah, Rodriguez talks about this a little bit in her book and I kind of still in this idea from her, right? Is that the focus on housing, and I said this in a talk, is that it gets a less of a focus on community. And I think one is that you have to change the discourse around affordable housing and thinking about like sustainable community development or something like that. Something that gets people thinking about not just housing as a physical site but also community building processes, right? And I think that helps articulate a different frame of reference. Cause I would argue and I hint some of the, or I sent some of this in a question is that when you ask people about affordable housing, a lot of them think about public housing, right? So a lot of them think about that they equate each other in the same. And that's part of the problem. Like most people don't know the intricacies of how affordable housing works versus public housing. But if you tell somebody that they're gonna build an affordable housing site or development, they're thinking about you're gonna build the projects, right? So there's a lot of ways in which a kind of that conversation needs to be problematized. And I think if you kind of rearrange or re-orange yourself to think about these as community benefit projects or something like that, that helps at least make it a little bit more palpable to resisting community members. The other piece in terms of we like literally see this across market-rate rentals is that it's not just a place to lay your head. There's all these other amenities that are within housing today, right? Like even in an apartment complex I'm living in now, there's a gym, there's a pool, there's all this stuff that you need now just to make it more marketable for individuals. Why not have more mixed income or more mixed-use developments, at least on a first floor, a second floor, and also having kind of residential spaces up in higher levels, right? So really thinking about how can we think about the design of market-oriented apartment buildings or condos and placing much more in kind of a subsidized space. And I think that's part of the issues that a lot of these housing insights get just plopped off in the middle of nowhere without kind of big conversations about what's really going on in this space. As we're running out of time, I'm wondering if I can ask a question. I am curious to know more about the state intervention in the affordable housing scheme in Toronto or Canada in general. And it goes across socioeconomic, you said it goes from like emergency to public or affordable and then up to even home ownership if I'm not mistaken. And I was wondering if you could speak more about the roots of that thought and what is the vision for such a project? Yeah. Sure. So this is something I went to a presentation and there's a book on the Toronto Housing Market called The Missing Middle. And that's where they saw there's a lot of housing missing for these kind of middle incomes, right? You make too much money to qualify for affordable subsidized housing, but you don't make enough to really live in a lot of the neighborhoods going forward. This is something I think there, to be critical of them, but also be the supportive is that I do think I like the way they're kind of constructing the idea across the spectrum. And this is partly some work in the colleague Alex Scheffrin, who also put this in my head is like, we're privileging ownership as the number one tool to get people to without thinking about complicating what that really looks like. So we have tools like shared equity mortgages. We have tools like a nonprofit in terms of community land trust might hold the actual ownership of the land while somebody else owns the house. And that's part of the narratives we need to complicate. Part of the pushes that Toronto is just a, the GTA is just an increasingly inexpensive or an increasingly expensive place to live, right? So part of that they have massive construction in the last decade, but a lot of it was market rate rentals. A lot of it was tall, high rise condos with less being developed in the kind of affordable housing space. So while they had this big vision, I do think they're kind of late to the game. So they're kind of playing catch up as well, right? So again, while we can think about this place as a more kind of progressive space, there are ways in which even like the narratives progressive don't get lived out in policy. So I would argue that a lot of times we at least need to have like the political will and ideology, which I think they do have at least on a local level and even at the provincial level, but that timing is really important, right? So there's a politics of intervention that we tend to miss because you can build affordable housing all you want to, but that's not solving the housing crisis for a family that's about to get evicted down the street today. So there's a ways in which we need to think about these long-term strategies and curb some of those issues from actually coming up. And there are, I would say there are kind of instantaneous things you could do like rental assistance that we've seen in the era of COVID, but there's also long-term situations of building a more equitable but also diverse housing market, whereas not just market rate rentals or home ownership or private home ownership, there's also affordable housing, there's also low-income housing, there's also shelters and emergency housing that needs to go in line of that. And we see that most of the kind of focus has been to kind of market rate kind of solutions but also projects versus some of the affordable or temporal spaces. Thank you so much, Professor Prentice Densler for your very rich and informative lecture and conversation on behalf of the G-SAP and the urban planning program in particular. I'd like to thank you for taking the time and being here with us today. A few of us PhD students will hang around the Zoom room to have a small chat with you. And I want to thank everyone in the audience for joining today from everywhere in the world. And I look forward to seeing you again next Tuesday at 1.15 where we will have a panel on international planning and what planners need to know in order to enter that field of line. Thank you so much. Thank you.