Tech alone can't solve the housing crisis, says researcher

Originally published on Dec. 10, 2021.

Camper vans and tiny homes may seem like idyllic lifestyles popularized by social media influencers, but they're also increasingly becoming necessary housing options — part of a larger movement to downsize in response to an ever-growing affordable housing crisis.

Major cities like Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver and New York, and increasingly, nearby regions are experiencing a steep rise in the cost of living, with fewer accessible housing options available for low- and middle-income workers.

It's a problem that Michelle Boyd, the co-founder and program director of the Housing Lab, is working to address.

The lab, affiliated with the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, supports early-stage entrepreneurs who are tackling the high cost of housing and is currently the only accelerator program in the U.S. that focuses on national issues around housing for renting, home ownership and homelessness.

"We have an incredibly inequitable system. Right now, in the US, the gap between black and white home ownership is just as high as it was in 1960 — a little higher actually," Boyd told Spark host Nora Young.

The boom of tech hubs like San Francisco and Toronto have shown the impact the tech industry can have on the housing market. Over the past few decades, the gentrification of cities has led to the displacement of longtime, often lower-income, residents. 

In addition to introducing new challenges, Boyd said tech can also exacerbate the consequences of long-standing systemic issues like redlining, which continues to impact low-income communities and people of colour years after it was first employed.

"If you think about placing technology and data on top of an inequitable system, when it's number one priority is making things more efficient... you're just making an inequitable system more efficient," said Boyd.

But beyond the negative consequences of technology, Boyd said that it does hold potential in addressing problems that have plagued the system for decades, like racial bias in the appraisal process and predatory housing contracts, which often affect families who cannot access traditional financing.

"There has been recent research that's come out that shows that the appraiser is more likely to agree with a white seller and a white buyer that the price of the house they're paying is the true value than they are if the person who's buying or selling the house is Black."

She said companies like True Footage, one of the organizations working with the Housing Lab, are exploring how tech can be used to promote transparency and equity within the housing industry. The company is developing software that can visually scan a house and make a map of the square footage in minutes.

"By bringing in more unbiased data, by collecting real-time information, by putting out analyses that hold systems in these markets accountable to how racial bias operates on them, there's a lot [technologies] can do. That's just not the status quo at the moment."

Data-driven approach

While some have embraced alternative living arrangements, including co-living, to share the cost of housing — for people who experience homelessness, there are fewer options. And as the need grows, the support remains limited.

"Somebody like myself, having come through the refugee system and the homeless-serving system and the child intervention system, you understand how interconnected they all are. And you understand that just knocking on one door, and solving this part is not necessarily going to have the ripple effect of unlocking the rest of it," Alina Turner, founder of HelpSeeker, told Young.

HelpSeeker is a platform that connects Canadians in need of social support to over 300,000 services, including housing. Earlier this year, they received federal funding for a project that, among other things, predicts where homelessness will rise, through an AI-driven approach and using publicly available data from sources like Statistics Canada and Canada Mortgage And Housing Corporation.

In August, the technology predicted that the homeless population in York Region of the Greater Toronto Area would rise at about 75 times the national average.

"The biggest challenge is that our social safety net planning is not really that proactive," said Turner.

Turner hopes that this data will help policymaking and funding decisions become more preventative, as well as person-centred.

"If we can actually curate these data sets in a way that we can get ahead of it, then we can make some much more nuanced recommendations to policymakers and funders, to not just apply this carte blanche where everybody gets the same amount of money, because not every community has the same level of challenges," she said.

When it comes to economic diversification and growth, Turner said, policymakers should think about the social implications. "Yes, we're making more money... but we've got social challenges that are costing us more than we're making."

Turner said that part of the problem is not so much that the resources aren't there, but a failure to coordinate and match available resources to the people who need them.

And when it comes to building more affordable housing, Boyd added that NIMBYism and lack of civic engagement also present a roadblock to real progress. "I think we always hope that something will solve our problems, an easy way out, as opposed to the long complicated political process of, say building more housing in high-income communities with more schools."

"At the end of the day, we don't live virtually, we live in houses made of brick and stone and wood. And so there are limits to what a pure technology platform can do to build a house," said Boyd.  

Written by Samraweet Yohannes. Produced by Samraweet Yohannes and Michelle Parise.