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Back in 2014, everyone knew whose side they were on in the Vancouver election.

There was the Non-Partisan Association on the right of the political spectrum, and the Coalition of Progressive Electors on the left. Vision, on its way to a third council majority, continued to chart something of a middle path, with attention to social issues on one hand, but support for continued real estate development on the other. Vancouver politics continued to unfold much as it had for decades.

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By 2018, something strange had happened. That old left-right story no longer seemed to fully explain things. Voters and candidates on both sides of the spectrum found themselves disagreeing with former allies on the crucial question of housing in the midst of an ongoing crisis, and finding some surprising common ground with assumed adversaries.

In a study I co-authored with Ian Bushfield of the Vancouver politics podcast The Cambie Report, we argue it was the relatively sudden and widespread perception of a housing “crisis” that triggered a period of change akin to what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould describes as moment of “punctuated equilibrium,” when disruption to a stable ecosystem causes a sudden explosion of new species to evolve.