CANSIM switched over to the New Dissemination Model (NDM) this past weekend. What this means is that we now have better organized CANSIM data. Yay. But it also broke my R package to easily access and process cansim data. Not so yay. Luckily it was an easy fix to switch things over to the NDM, and the cleaning of data gets even easier. And I also build in functionality to access tables through the old trusty cansim numbers.
Mitchell Reardon asked me a question about lanes in the City of Vancouver: “Do you happen to have a figure (or quick way to calculate) the number of laneways in Vancouver, and the amount of space they take up?” I have looked at the overall space taken up by roads before using the Metro Vancouver land use dataset, but never looked just at lanes. But that’s easy enough to do thanks to the streets package in Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue.
One thing the extra school tax debate has brought to light is how challenging 8th grade math is for people, especially those living in homes valued over $3M. Journalists also seem to have trouble putting outrageously wrong statements into perspective, so here is a simple calculator on how much extra school tax people will owe depending on their home value, years until home is sold, expected changes in the real estate market, interest rates on deferred (through government program or second mortgage) taxes.
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.
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.
