# Building Permits

Trawling through permit data.

The City of Vancouver has put up building permit data yesterday, and Aaron Licker swiftly took a look at the data and teased out some interesting bits.

We have been asking for this data for quite a while, so we had to take a look too. We wrapped the nasty download, geocoding and general data wrangling into convenience functions, so importing the data into a tidy data frame is pretty simple now. The complete code that made this post is, as always, available on GitHub.

# Vancouver City Outline
vancouver <- get_census(dataset='CA16', regions=list(CSD="5915022"), labels="detailed",
geo_format='sf', level='Regions')
# Grab Zoning data and clip to outline

# Neighbourhoods

Another way to look at the data is to follow Aaron’s lead and compare demolitions to the existing building stock. We will take CoV neighbourhoods as our base geography and only look at Single Family lots. For the census we restrict ourselves to occupied units for convenience since the CoV custom tabulation did not pull information on the total building stock. From that we estimate the number of SFH lots in each region by taking the number of single-detached units plus half the number of duplex units. As we have explained above, that’s only a rough estimate and could be off by a bit in either direction, but it’s good enough for our purposes. We will compare this to SFH demolition permit data.

Interested in taking this further or explore different aspects of the data? The complete code that made this post is available on GitHub, just grab it and modify as you see fit.