Deputy Speaker Williams Q&A: Mangin on empirical evidence for housing scarcity theory

Do you have any empirical evidence of that?

Because I know we had a very lengthy conversation, but when I hear words like driven by root cause, I'm like, well, what empirical evidence do we have that says it is only housing scarcity that is creating these issues?

Do you have any empirical evidence or things that you can direct me to to further understand?

That theory and that stance you have.

Thank you, Deputy Speaker.

It's not the only cause, to be sure, but it's the fundamental root cause that we see.

Of course, when we're talking about

gentrification and displacement, we're also talking about lots of individual stories.

I mean, the displacement risk index that you mentioned notes that the biggest factor in displacement, the biggest vulnerability factor is, you know, families who might be a paycheck or two away from not being able to pay the rent.

And so when they experience a shock, you know, maybe there's a layoff or a health event or something like that and the income drops, those are the families that, you know, then

get hit the hardest by the housing shortage leading to difficulties for those families.

So it's not the only cause.

I would think of it as the root cause.

And I would say that there is a growing body of research over the last 25 years or so that supports that.

And there is increasingly good research on a sort of a smaller scale level that may make that realer for folks who can't quite see the macro picture.

Yeah, I know a lot of the studies that I saw speak to that, but then there are a ton of other studies that have so many other causal claims for, you know, displacement and gentrification.

So I just wanted to know if you were pulling from specific studies.