Over the past years several people have asked me questions about street frontage of city properties. When I needed similar data for a work project, and Scot Hein asked me a question about frontages of commercial properties for his Urbanarium debate, I decided to finally pull the numbers. The answer to that question is not as straight forward as it might seem, mostly because properties aren’t necessarily square. There are a couple of algorithm that can solve this problem, but in this case we can keep things reasonably simple as the City of Vancouver has property frontages listed on VanMap and make the data available on their Open Data Portal.
The other day I was catching a bus home later at night, which made me acutely aware that I should not take the frequent daytime transit in Vancouver for granted. On the ride home I decided to dig into this and grab some transit data. We have played with transit data before, but since this was going to be the second time it was high time for a quick R package to standardize our efforts and simplify things for the next time around.
The new BC provincial budget had lots of interesting changes. One of them is the additional school tax on residential properties, charged at a rate of 2 basis points (0.002) of the assessed value above $3M and an additional 2 basis points of the assessed value above $4M.
After some initial confusion the province clarified that this tax will not to apply to purpose built rental buildings, each of which is typically one single taxable property, which can easily breach the $3M threshold for multi-unit buildings.
Vancouver pushed out a heatmap of dwelling units that have so far failed to declare their empty homes tax status. With everyone eagerly awaiting data on the empty homes tax declaration we wonder what can be learned from the map.
Turns out not much, the city did not normalize by the number of dwelling units subject to the tax. So to first order, this is just a heatmap of where people live, which xkcd coined pet peeve #208.
The City of Vancouver has put up building permit data yesterday, and Aaron Licker swiftly took a look at the data and teased out some interesting bits. @VanOpenData @vb_jens @LausterNa Thanks CoV for the new building and demo permit data. There is clearly a pattern with regards to the pace of residential (re)development (ie demolitions) in the City pic.twitter.com/TMdex1OkIc
— Aaron Licker (@LGeospatial) February 22, 2018 We have been asking for this data for quite a while, so we had to take a look too.
