Excellence in housing research earns national recognition
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Dr. Dawn Parker, professor in the School of Planning, and the Urban Growth and Change Research Group have received the Gold Roof Award for Housing Research Excellence. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) confers the award annually to recognize innovative and impactful housing research, training, knowledge mobilization and outreach.
Amidst the ongoing national housing crisis, their research helps address housing supply and affordability gaps by looking at where the gaps in missing middle housing have emerged in Waterloo Region over the last 15 years. The work provides a better understanding of the diverse housing needs of Canadians and addresses the social, environmental and economic sustainability of housing for those in greatest need.
In addition to this novel research, the group is creating open-source tools to evaluate the financial feasibility of missing middle housing builds to understand how these new typologies and to support zoning impact land-and-housing markets. The work has demonstrated the need for new approaches to modelling of housing market actors and outcomes. Moreover, the data has revealed where, how, and why the new ION light rail transit has caused land-value uplift, how household demographics shift values for home attributes and impact housing market sorting, and where markets have failed to provide suitable and transit-oriented development housing addressing balanced supply of housing.
“In 2021, I saw how the development of standardized missing middle housing prototypes could improve our housing markets by streamlining approvals,” says Parker. “I worked with an amazing group of municipal and industry partners to articulate this need and obtain funding from the Social Science Research Council to support our work. This research and award would not have been possible without the participation of members of our Missing Middle Working Group.”
To translate research to practice, the group trains new industry specialists, publishes peer-reviewed articles, and engages in industry partner communication and media amplification.
“It is a real honour to have this organization recognize our research excellence,” she says. "We look forward to future collaboration with CMHC to support economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable housing across Canada."
