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.

Teaching Areas:

Built Environment, Urban Sociology, Life Course, Research Methods, Population, Community & Demography.

Affiliations

Housing Studies (Int’l Ed. Adv. Board)
Pacific Housing Research Network
UBC Housing Research Collaborative
Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative

Research Interests and Projects

Housing; Home; Urban; Immigration; Population; Family; Environment; Health; Methods

Metro Vancouver Zoning Project

I am the Principle Investigator (with Jens von Bergmann) of the CMHC-funded Metro Vancouver Zoning Project, attempting to gather, systematize, map, and make publicly accessible the zoning codes for the 21+ municipal governments of Metro Vancouver. Our project has been cited in multiple reports, including this one we co-authored for the province on the likely outcomes of zoning reform. Check the project website for more details!

The Sanctity of Home / Finders and Keepers / Residential Clutter Projects

Through the UBC Centre for Collaborative Research on Hoarding, I am working with UBC Clinical Psychology Professor Sheila Woody and a team of students and other faculty (including Christiana Bratiotis of Portland State University) to better understand severe cases of residential clutter, the relationship between clutter and hoarding disorder, outcomes for those with hoarding, and urban and related regulatory responses to clutter. Projects are being funded by both Hampton and SSHRC grants, with additional help from UBC HSS grants.

Making Housing Home: Place and Everyday Routines in Vancouver and Nunavut

As PI on this project, I worked with Prof. Frank Tester and a team of students on inventing and integrating new ways of tracing people’s activities through their days and linking the stability of their routines to housing.  My research team produced the booklet below (click to download), organizing the photos and their descriptions that many of our youth participants in Vancouver and Arviat used to tell us about their experiences of home, based upon a public exhibit with the same theme from 2015.

2016. At Home Looks Like…A photovoice project about housing, ‘at homeness’, and young people in Arviat, Nunavut an Vancouver, BC. Vancouver, BC: the Making Housing Home Project (PI: N. Lauster) & Karina Czyzewski.

Working with PhD Student Jing Zhao, the research has also incorporated a study of Chinese immigrants to Canada, attempting to better understand their experiences of place, resulting in a a BC Metropolis Working Paper and a paper in Social Problems. This project builds on SSHRC grant funding, and began with help from Hampton and Metropolis BC funding  (see more on project).

Books and Edited Volumes

2016. The Death and Life of the Single Family House: Lessons from Vancouver on Building a Livable City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Winner of 2017 John Porter Book Award from the CSA. See recent Reviews and Media Coverage of the book.

2012. The End of Children? Changing Trends in Childbearing and Childhood. co-edited with Graham Allan. Vancouver: UBC Press.

2010. Special issue of Housing Studies 25(4) on Housing and the Family. co-edited with Clara Mulder. Including our Introduction to the Issue

Other Selected Recent Publications

(cIRcle) = link to pre- & post-print

2023. Lauster, Nathanael & Jens von Bergmann. The rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada and transnational property ownership patterns. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies published first on-line. (cIRcle) Supporting [GitHub Codebase Link including Pre-Print Version Here].

2020. Nesbitt, Lorien, Cecil Konijnendijk, Nathanael Lauster, Hyeone Park. Intercultural learning in contested space: The biocultural realities of global cities through the lens of Vancouver, Canada. In Ed. M. Cocks & C. Shackleton. Urban Nature: Enriching Belonging, Wellbeing and Bioculture. Routledge. Pp. 179-198. ISBN 9780367427573.

2020. Woody, Sheila, Peter Lenkic, Christiana Bratiotis, Kate Kysow, May Luu, Jesse Edsell-Vetter, Randy Frost, Nathanael Lauster, Gail Steketee, David Tolin. How Well Do Hoarding Research Samples Represent Cases that Rise to Community Attention? Behaviour Research & Therapy 126: 103555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2020.103555

2020. Kysow, Kate, Christiana Bratiotis, Nathanael Lauster, Sheila Woody. How Can Cities Tackle Hoarding? Explaining an Intervention Program Bringing Together Fire and Health Authorities in Vancouver. Health & Social Care in the Community 28(4): 1160-1169. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.12948

2019. Lauster, Nathanael. What’s Livable? Comparing Concepts and Metrics for Housing and Livability. In A Research Agenda for Housing. Ed. Markus Moos. Cheltenham & Camberley: Edward Elgar. ISBN: 978 1 78811 650 3

2018. Luu, May, Nathanael Lauster, Christiana Bratiotis, Jesse Edsell-Vetter, & Sheila Woody. Squalor in community-referred hoarded homes. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders 19: 66-71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocrd.2018.08.005

2018. Bratiotis, Christiana, Nathanael Lauster, Sheila Woody. Coordinated Community-Based Hoarding Interventions: Evidence of Case Management Practices. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services 100(1): 93-105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1044389418802450

2018. Kwok, Navio, Christiana Bratiotis, May Luu, Nathanael Lauster, Kate Kysow, Sheila Woody. Examining the Role of Fire Prevention on Hoarding Response Teams: Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services as a Case Study. In Press. Fire Technology 54: 57-73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-017-0672-0

2017. Lauster, Nathanael & Jing Zhao. Labor Migration and the Missing Work of Home-making: Three Forms of Settling for Chinese-Canadian Migrants. Social Problems 64(4): 497–512. (Access Link Here) [Pre-Print Full Version Here]

Read Globe & Mail (Sept 5th, 2016) coverage of our paper.

2016. Lauster, Nathanael, Alina McKay, Navio Kwok, Jennifer Yip, & Sheila Woody. How Much of Too Much? What Inspections Data say about Residential Clutter as a Housing Problem. Housing Studies 31(6): 519-539. (cIRcle)

Read CBC (July 27th, 2016) and Province (July 27th, 2016) coverage of our paper

2014. Lauster, Nathanael & Frank Tester.  Homelessness and Health in the Crowded Canadian Arctic: Inuit Experiences.  in Homelessness and Health in Canada.  Ed. M. Guirguis-Younger, S. Hwang, & R. McNeil.  Ottawa: U. Ottawa Press.  Pp. 87-110.  (Open-Access Link Here)

2014.  Berggren, Caroline & Nathanael Lauster. The motherhood penalty and the professional credential: Inequality in career development for those with professional degrees.  International Studies in Sociology of Education 24(1): 44-64.

2013. Lauster, Nathanael. ‘Kinda Just a Home I Guess’: Toward Theorizing the Making of Home in Vancouver. in Home: International Perspectives on Culture, Identity, and Belonging. Co-edited by M. Kusenbach & K. Paulsen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

2011.  Lauster, Nathanael & Adam Easterbrook. No Room for New Families?  A Field Experiment Measuring Rental Discrimination against Same-Sex Couples and Single Parents.  Social Problems.  58.3: 389-409. (cIRcle)

Read Metro News (Oct 6th, 2016), CBC (Aug 27th, 2011), Globe & Mail (Aug 26th, 2011), CTV-News (Aug 26th, 2011), and Tyee (Aug 26th, 2011) coverage of our paper. See also influence in terms of relevant legal briefs (Westcoastleaf) and follow-up HUD studies in the USA.

2011. Black, Jennifer, Richard Carpiano, Stuart Fleming & Nathanael Lauster. Exploring the Distribution of Grocery Stores in British Columbia: Associations with Neighbourhood Socio-Demographic Factors and Urban Form. Health and Place 17: 961-970.

Read Vancouver Sun (Oct 26th, 2011) coverage of our paper.

2010. Lauster, Nathanael. Housing and the Proper Performance of American Motherhood, 1940-2005.  Housing Studies 25(4): 543-557. (cIRcle)

2010.  Lauster, Nathanael & Frank Tester. Culture as a Problem in Linking Material Inequality to Health: On Residential Crowding in the Arctic. Health and Place 16: 523-530. (cIRcle)

2010. Lauster, Nathanael. A Room to Grow: The Residential Density-Dependence of Childbearing in Europe and the United States Canadian Studies in Population (Open Access) 37(3-4): 475-496.

2008.  Lauster, Nathanael. Better Homes and Families: Housing Markets and Young Couple Stability in Sweden.  Journal of Marriage and Family 70.4: 891-903.

See CV for more publications in these and other venues, including: Population & Environment, International Migration Review, Population Research and Policy Review.

Abbreviated C.V. (Jan, 2020)