Meet the people involved in the Balanced Supply of Housing Research Cluster.

Meet the people involved in the Balanced Supply of Housing Research Cluster.
Dr. Martine August is an Assistant Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the political economy of housing and the pursuit of urban social justice, exploring themes related to gentrification, displacement, community organizing, public housing redevelopment, and the politics of social mix. She is an alumnus of the University of Winnipeg and the University of Toronto, holding degrees in Physics (BSc), Urban Studies (BA), and Urban Planning (M.Sc.Pl., PhD).
Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust
Experienced community developer with a history in Nonprofit Organization Management, Affordable Housing and Community Land Trust (CLT) development. Skilled in Community Planning, Strategic Planning, Affordable Housing and Policy Analysis. MS. Critical Urbanism: Design and Urban Ecologies, The New School (NYC).
Dr. Bunce's research centres on the role of sustainability in the context of spatial planning, development, and redevelopment practices in urban communities and neighbourhoods. Her research examines the actors, interests and motives in the adoption of sustainability principles and practices within urban communities and neighbourhoods and explores socio-environmental discourses, sustainability planning, and strategies for socio-environmental justice and change.
CP Planning
Cheryll specializes in a human rights approach to urban planning. Her methods drive collaborative processes that mend relationships between various stakeholders within the community, non-profit, private, and public sectors. She is dedicated to working with diverse populations and ensuring that their experiences are responded through program design. She is the founder of CP Planning, a non-profit planning firm that applies artistic and creative methods to build bridges between stakeholders and communicate public interests as it relates to city-building.
Tom Davidoff is an associate professor in the Real Estate and Strategy and Business Ecomics groups at the Sauder School of Business, UBC. Prior to joining UBC, Davidoff obtained degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT, and worked in real estate development in Brooklyn and as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. While at UBC, Davidoff has advised the White House on housing and mortgage policy, and worked with two startup real estate intelligence companies.
Professor Flynn’s teaching and research focuses on municipal law and governance, administrative law, property law, and experiential education. Her previous project, “The Landscape of Local in Toronto’s Governance Model,” looked at the overlapping geographies and governance of city space, including the formal and informal bodies that represent residents. The project, which resulted in several peer-reviewed paper and public reports, conceptualized how cities are understood in law and how they govern.
Josh Gordon is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy. He completed his PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2012 and joined the School in August of 2014.
Dr. Penny Gurstein is a Professor Emeritus and former Director of the School of Community and Regional Planning. She is currently the Co-Director of the Housing Research Collaborative. She specializes in the socio-cultural aspects of community planning with particular emphasis on those who are the most marginalized in planning processes. Her current research is investigating strategies for affordable housing both in Canada and internationally.
Lu Han is Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy and the Premier’s Research Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness at Rotman. She is a Chief Scientist at the Behavioral Economics in Action (BEAR), a Research Fellow at the Centre for Real Estate and Urban Economics and a Weimer Fellow at the Homer Hoyt Institute. She currently serves on the Board of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and the Editorial Boards for Journal of Urban Economics, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Housing Economics, and Regional Science and Urban Economics
Julia Harten is an Assistant Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning. In her work, she leverages innovative data strategies for the study of housing and socio-spatial inequality, focusing on the housing strategies of marginalized people and the role of cities and housing for social mobility.
Zachary is an urban geographer and sociologist who studies city governance, housing and development. Across his research projects, he looks at how the dynamics of capitalism play out on the ground through political struggles over the built environment, the meanings and ideas of social actors, and the histories and institutions of cities. He is currently working on a SSHRC funded project on the return of purpose built rental housing in Canadian cities.
Dr. Craig E. Jones received his Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia and is currently the research coordinator for the UBC Housing Research Collaborative.
Dr. Paul Kershaw is a tenured University of BC professor, public speaker, regular media contributor and Founder of Generation Squeeze – a voice for younger Canadians in politics and the market supported by cutting-edge research.
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
Case Western Reserve University
Amy Khare’s research focuses on urban poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on community development, housing and politics. She is particularly interested in strategies that promote inclusion, equity and justice within cities and communities. Khare’s methodological training is as an urban ethnographer, and her professional experiences working in social justice endeavors lay the foundation of her scholarly interests.
Sociologist and sometime demographer who primarily studies housing, home, households, and cities. Award-winning author of The Death and Life of the Single Family House: Lessons from Vancouver on Building a Livable City. Principle Investigator (with Jens von Bergmann) of the CMHC-funded Metro Vancouver Zoning Project. Also runs the blog Home: Free Sociology.
Nemoy Lewis is an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning. He received his PhD in human geography from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Lewis earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in geography at the University of Toronto. For his doctoral research, Lewis analyzed the ongoing foreclosure crisis in the United States and its effects on Black people and low-income communities in Chicago, Illinois and in Jacksonville, Florida.
Dr. Luka's interests in both research and professional practice encompass major themes that are familiar to most architects, landscape architects, planners, and geographers: housing, infrastructure, public space, cultural landscapes, urban design, and deliberative democracy. He typically does work that is inductive in a ‘constructivist’ orientation; while not an historian, he is especially intrigued by narrative, representations, text, and discourse as they apply to the work of architecture, urban design, and urban planning.
Julie Mah is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough in the Department of Human Geography – City Studies Program.
Dr. Markus Moos is a Registered Professional Planner and Associate Professor in the School of Planning, Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of British Columbia (2012), a M.PL Urban and Regional Planning from Queen's University (2006), and BES Joint Honours Environment and Resources Studies and Economics from the University of Waterloo (2004). Dr. Moos’ research is on the changing economy and social structure of cities, particularly generational change, Millennials and the youthification of central cities.
Maged Senbel's research focuses on public engagement in long term neighbourhood planning. He strives to make planning more accessible to both expert and non-expert audiences. His publications include research on neighbourhood scale energy performance and comparative GHG emissions analysis, municipal climate change planning, youth engagement in climate change planning, leadership in sustainability planning, and different approaches to spatial thinking for people new to design.
David Wachsmuth is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance at McGill University, where he is also an Assistant Professor in the School of Urban Planning and an Associate Member in the Department of Geography. He directs UPGo, the Urban Politics and Governance research group at McGill, where he leads a team of researchers investigating pressing urban governance problems related to economic development, environmental sustainability, and housing markets.
Alan Walks’ research is concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of urban social and political inequality in the cities of the developed world, particularly those in Canada. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles and book chapters, and has examined the implications of predominant patterns of suburban growth for the trajectory of urban policy and national politics, as well as effects of changing urban policy on gentrification and concentration of poverty, among other things.
He studies the relations between market processes and state policy in producing and reinforcing urban social inequalities. His approach blends elements of critical social theory, legal and policy analysis, and multivariate quantitative methods designed to engage state and corporate institutions on their own terrain, with their own data. Current and recent research projects focus on class, racial, and gender discrimination in housing finance in the U.S.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Andy Yan has extensively worked in the non-profit and private urban planning sectors with projects in the metropolitan regions of Vancouver, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. He specializes in the fields of urban regeneration, applied demographics, Geographic Information Systems, neighborhood development, public outreach, social media and quantitative research.