Physical SFH Form Over Time
Digging into the data of SFH.

I was curious how the physical parameters of Single Family Houses changed over time.
Using the assessment dataset merged with the land use dataset allows to fairly accurately pick out single family houses, and also holds the age of most properies. Together with the City of Vancouver LIDAR-generated building dataset that I have played with before we can look at physical building parameters.
The city dataset is a little coarse, it only contains the main building and does not map things like garages. It’s a little rough and should probably be interpreted cautiously on an individual building level. One could spend the time and derive the building data directly from the raw LIDAR dataset optimized for this purpose, but for some overview statistics the building dataset that was derived by the city is just fine. The LIDAR was taken in 2009, so we only consider houses built before that time.
Site coverage
One question is how the site coverage of the buildings have changed over time. We simply line up the buildings by the year they were built, compute the site coverage of the main building relative to the parcel size and graph the quintiles for each year. For good measure, we throw in the 10 and 90 percentile whiskers.Building Height
The next obvious point of analysis is how building height, in meters, changed over time.
Building Volumes
Now let’s look at how “massive” the buildings are, measured by volume in cubic metres.
Roof Type
Lastly we see how the roof type changes over time, plotting the number of buildings with given roof type for each year.
Length to Width Ratio (Update)
A question about a regulation change in 1938 came up on Twitter, so I thought I should check into the length-to-width ratio to see if anything can be seen there. A ratio of 1 would mean a square footprint, a ratio of 2 means the house is twice as long as wide.
Next Steps
After starting to see what kind of data can be derived from LIDAR data we can start to explore different questions. The graphs open a small window into the physical parameters of single family homes over time and are only of limited general interest.
For more serious analysis we would most likely have to start from the raw LIDAR data, which takes a little bit of effort.
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