The new rules: housing shortage as an explanation for family and household change across large metro areas in Canada, 1981–2021
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine whether housing shortages can usefully explain household and family change. We contextualize our investigation within the cultural history of emerging normative rules guiding both household formation and municipal regulatory practices within North America across the early Twentieth Century. We argue that encoding the new rules into bylaws has contributed to housing shortages since the late Twentieth Century. The uptake of new rules as cultural norms links housing shortages to household change. As a guideline, the new rules promote households broadly similar to Ermisch and Overton’s (1984) concept of minimal household units. To measure the relationship between housing shortage and household change, we gather data on rents and minimal household unit status across nine major metropolitan areas within Canada. We are able to establish a long timeline for rents from 1921–2021, but available census data limit our investigation into household change to the period from 1981–2021. Conceptualizing household change as being driven by a variety of factors we establish a robust relationship whereby lower rents sort more young adults (age 20–44) into minimal household units over this time period. The rising multiculturalism of Canada’s big cities complicates our interpretation of cultural rules, but the effects of housing shortages on assortment into minimal household units offers a robust explanation for recent historical change in families and households.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".