Hi, I'm Jiakang Zhang — I study how platforms like Airbnb shape rental markets and cities.

I'm a graduate researcher in sociology focusing on housing economics, rent control policy, and the spatial impacts of short‑term rentals in Canadian cities (with an emphasis on Toronto). I blend quantitative methods (GIS, econometrics) with critical social theory.

Read my work CV (PDF) Data & Code

Research focus

I investigate the housing system as a socio‑technical assemblage: market dynamics, policy, and platform infrastructures together produce uneven urban outcomes. Current strands include:

Airbnb & rental markets

Measuring how listings, regulation, and hotel co‑listing interact with rents, filtering, and neighbourhood change.

Rent control & tenure

Ontario/Canada policy history and effects; links to investment strategies, vacancy, and tenant stability.

Spatial & causal methods

Geocoding pipelines, tract‑level panels, IV strategies, robustness to spatial spillovers and policy timing.

Publications & works in progress

Airbnb and Toronto Rents After Platform Regulation
Working paper, 2025
With tract‑level panel from InsideAirbnb; diff‑in‑diff and IV specifications.
PDF Code Data
Rent Control in Ontario: Policy History, Exemptions, and Market Responses
Research note, 2024
Synthesis of legislative changes and implications for tenure security.
PDF
Platforms as Urban Infrastructure: Methods for Studying Digital Housing Markets
Conference talk, 2023
Bridging econometric identification with STS perspectives on platforms and rentiership.
Slides

Selected projects

InsideAirbnb Geocoding Pipeline

Python/ArcGIS flow to geocode and spatially join 6k+ listings to census tracts with rate‑limited open geocoders.

Repo Docs

Hotel Co‑Listing Tracker

Measuring hotel distribution across Airbnb and the interaction with local STR caps.

Methods note

Guelph Housing Survey

Mixed‑methods study on housing trajectories and choices in a tourism‑migration context.

Report

Data & code

Open materials for reproducibility. Where licensing allows, I share cleaned datasets and scripts.

Toronto STR Panel (2018–2025)

Monthly listing counts, host types, and occupancy proxies aggregated to census tracts.

Download Codebook

Geoprocessing Scripts

Reproducible pipeline with geopandas, shapely, rtree, and ArcGIS.

GitHub

Teaching & mentoring

Quantitative Methods for Urban Studies (TA)

Intro to spatial joins, causal diagrams, and basic panel models in R/Python.

Office hours & student projects

Happy to advise projects on housing policy, platforms, and urban data ethics.

Contact

Best by email. I also keep profiles here:

Email

you@university.ca

Profiles

Google Scholar · ORCID · GitHub · LinkedIn

Office / Dept

Department of Sociology, University of Guelph (Canada)