Details

Timing the Continuum: An Agent-Based Model of Housing Continuums and their effects on Housing Insecurity

Year: 2025

Term: Winter

Student Name: Malick Sylla

Supervisor: Alan Tsang

Abstract: This honour's project set out to develop an agent-based model to investigate how construction timing across the housing continuum affects housing insecurity and homelessness. Despite adequate overall housing supply, the model's simulations reveal that delays in market ownership housing construction can create a "housing gridlock" effect that cascades through the entire continuum. This gridlock compounds pressure on lower forms of housing, effectively blocking out lower income households from accessing the housing affordable to them - resulting in increasing onsets of housing insecurity and homelessness. More work needs to be done to verify and nuance this emergent relationship, but the findings do suggest that effective housing policy may need to consider not just the quantity of housing built, but critically, when and in what sequence different housing types are delivered across the continuum.