District wide enrolment in VSB schools has been on a steady decline for over a decade. At the same time there are areas within the VSB that have seen strong growth in children requiring new schools to get built.
Looking at a couple of time series for the VSB District we can see where the problem lies. The children aged 5-17 living in the VSB District is estimated by BC Stats based on a number of data sources, and the number has been declining over the years.
In the last post we compared international city density patterns. While travelling and reading Alain Bertaud’s excellent book Order without Design I decided to slightly expand on the initial images and add bar graphs showing radial density to get an aggregate understanding of density patterns, as well as adding timelines to show how densities have developed over time. I am getting increasingly interested in modelling urban economics, and understanding and quantifying urban densities is a part of that.
I saw the tanaka package fly by on twitter, and in particular liked the application to the world population grid. Cities are interesting beasts, and I like exploring the extent of cities free from political boundaries. I am travelling right now, but I like looking at different ways to calculate and visualize density and could not resist running some inter-city density comparisons.
For this, we only show areas with at least 4 people per hectare (or about 1000 people per square mile, the cutoff used by US Census to designate areas as urban), and pick some population density cutoffs above that to show grades of population density.
About half a year ago I did a post on Airbnb data back when enforcement of the Short Term Rental (STR) regulation came into full effect starting September 2018 and have not really writing things up since then. Probably time for an update post. What has happened since, and what have we learned?
Overview Let’s take a look how listings evolved.
After the initial purge of listings before the start of enforcement, not much changed.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
BC has introduced the Speculation and Vacancy Tax and instructions for filling out the declarations are in the mail. The tax targets homes in major urban centres that are left empty, or that are owned by “foreign and domestic speculators” that “don’t pay [income] taxes” in BC. The tax rate is 0.5% of the assessed value in 2018. From 2019 onward rates increase to 2% for foreigners (not permanent residents nor Canadian citizens) as well as citizens or permanent residents that are deemed members of “satellite families.
