Canada is a large country, with some reasonably densely populated regions, and large areas that are sparsely populated. That makes it hard to map things. CensusMapper, our project to flexibly map Canadian census data, struggles with that. The choropleth maps can be quite misleading. The same problem comes up when mapping Canadian election data.
This map makes it virtually impossible to get a good reading of the distribution of votes.
Following up on our previous post on rents and vacancy rates there is another rental stat originating from City of Vancouver documents that is making the rounds and that is misleading. Again, our housing crisis is fundamentally a rental crisis, so it’s important to keep the numbers straight so that we can better focus our energy and resources. This one is a bit more serious, but still has been making the rounds quite broadly on social media.
This post responds to a misconception about rental housing that has been making the rounds. Our housing crisis is fundamentally a rental crisis, so it’s important to keep the numbers straight so that we can better focus our energy and resources.
The misconception originate from the 2019 Vancouver Housing Data Book. The data book is a huge effort to compile and has a host of valuable information. Vancouver has been doing this for the second year now, and it is successively getting better.
These days I run a fair bit of spatial analysis. And there are three problems that regularly come up:
Getting data on compatible geographies Ecological fallacy Spatial autocorrelation None of these problems is insurmountable, but they are all annoying to various degrees. Often I might ignore them on my first analysis run, but these problems need to be dealt with sooner or later. Which can eat up significant amounts of time.
A number I have been watching fairly closely is the job vacancy rate. It comes from StatCan’s Job Vacancy and Wage Survey (JVWS), and is updated quarterly. It is one of several surveys that complement the Labour Force Survey (LFS) that tends to receive a lot of attention. But the LFS is missing some important aspects of the labour market. I have been pushing JVWS data on numerous occasions, so I wanted to do a quick post to add a little more context.
