A first look at STR license data
In the City of Vancouver operators of short term rentals now need to obtain a license from the city to legally operate. There are restrictions on what units can be rented out short term. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but here is the main point. Licenses are only available for people that want to rent out their primary residence, that is the place where they reside at least half a year.
Analysing the impact of Vancouver's teardown cycle on carbon emissions.
Last year we took a detailed look at Single Family teardowns in Vancouver, that is houses in RS or “Single Family” zoning that got torn down. We focused exclusively on those homes in RS zoning because these have to be replaced by another, often bigger, Single Family home. Using historical data we build a probabilistic model to predict future teardowns in Vancouver. If you haven’t taken the time yet to read through the data story, you probably should do that right now.
Building heights by distance from city centre.
Jim has been using the Copernicus building height data for select European cities to understand the height profiles of cities. Building heights by distance from city centre in London and Paris, from 2012 EU Copernicus data. On average, buildings in Paris are taller throughout. pic.twitter.com/rtGiiBC7pd — Jim Gleeson (@geographyjim) May 11, 2018 We thought these were pretty cool. Sadly we don’t have a dataset like this for Canadian metro areas, but we can hack together something similar using LIDAR survey data.
Looking into the school tax outrage.
We have written about the extra school tax before, but in the meantime the discussion about the extra school tax has heated up considerably, cumulating in David Eby cancelling his town hall today. Over the years I also have been spending some time thinking about how people got to the privilege of paying the extra school tax, for example here and here. There is a slight dissonance with people claiming that their homes should not be taxed because they are their homes and not their investment.
Frontages for commercial zoned properties in Vancouver.
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.
Too much data, too little time.
Mountain Doodles is an insomnia driven MountainMath side project, born out of random questions, trying to give partial answers through data.