Disclaimer Apologies up front, this is a bit of a hodge podge of a blog post. I have about half a dozen stubs on rental data and affordability that I looked at at some point while trying to understand some aspect of rental affordability. But it’s a large and complex topic, and I never took the time to distill out coherent storylines. Rather than keep pushing things off I decided to grab a couple of relevant pieces and put them together in a short blog post.
The City of Vancouver made individual ballot data available. So the vote choice on each individual ballot. It’s been out for a couple of days now, and I have been quietly hoping someone else would write something up. But I got too curious, so here is a super-fast write-up. We focus on mayor and council votes only. There were 21 candidates for mayor and 71 for council to choose from, and each voter was allowed to vote for (at most) one mayoral candidate and up to ten council candidates on their ballot.
Zombie attack! Zombies fleeing Vancouver want to eat your brain… drain… or something.
A couple of weeks ago The Canadian Press reported a story asserting that young professionals were leaving Vancouver because of the high cost of housing. This fits in with a common zombie refrain that we hear from the media. It’s a story that just won’t die, no matter how many times it’s proven wrong: Millennials, or young people, or boomers, or people important for some other reason are leaving Vancouver because of housing.
A couple of days ago the New York Times published an opinion documenting several aspects of how US Millenials are getting fleeced. Generation Squeeze has been doing a good job of highlighting what has changed for millennials compared to people their age in the past. The NYT article had some interesting data, and two charts in particular drew my interest, the change in median income by age group and the change in median net worth.
High-value homes frequently make the news in Vancouver, most recently in the wake of the extra school tax for homes valued over $3M. The province will have looked at the data before introducing the legislation, but none of this seems to have filtered out to the general public. So maybe there is a need to take a closer look using Census data.
The census is a couple of years old now, and things have changed a bit since then.
