The other day the New Your Times did a really fun story on buildings in the US, and I was chatting about that with someone at the VPL last night. Which reminded me that I wanted to replicate that for Vancouver. So here we go.
There are several datasets for building data, and we have worked quite a bit with the City of Vancouver LIDAR generated data of 2009. We have mapped this on several occasions in the past, for example to show building heights, or just residential buildings to map building values, and have used the building heights data in Vancouver and Toronto to make building heights profiles by distance from downtown.
I haven’t taken time yet to dive into the council candidate’s data game, Christopher Porter has been tearing it up with great posts, one on candidate location, several on their position on various housing issues and a compilation of endorsements.
Dmitry Shkolnik has been running some analysis on candidate’s tweets.
Nathan Lauster dove into the urbanist / preservationist divide first crowdsourced by the Cambie report.
Better late than never, I decided to jump in and look at candidate’s neighbourhoods.
We are getting close the end of the STR grace period ending August 31st, so it’s time to take a look at compliance of the STR operators. For today we will just look at Airbnb, which is the largest STR listings platform. Other larger listings platforms are VRBO or Craiglist.
How did we get here? The concern over short term rentals is a fairly new phenomenon. As recently as 2013 a local columnist praised the benefits of Airbnb in generating higher incomes and side-stepping the resiential tenancy act.
We have spent much digital ink on the myth of fleeing Millenials, and related misconceptions around the difference between changing sizes of age groups and net migration. And one of our favourite CensusMapper maps visualizes net-migration across Canada.
Today we want to take a slightly different angle and take a quick look at gross migration, that is look separately at in- and out-migration. More specifically, we are interested in separating out interprovincial and intraprovincial in- and out-migrants, as well as external in-migrants.
Vancouver has low property taxes and high income taxes. Seattle is the opposite. What would it look like if British Columbia was more like Washington State? If we got rid of personal provincial income tax and recovered the revenue by raising the provincial portion of the residential property tax, a.k.a. the “school tax”.
The tax policy of British Columbia, when compared to Washington, is sending the message that it’s a great place to come and invest in property with it’s low property tax rate, but not such a great place to live and work with it’s higher income tax rate.
