cancensus

Tumbling turnover

Digging deeper into Canadian residential mobility, tracking changes in mobility over time, and comparing data sources.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

15 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) We’re increasingly gathering lots of different measures of residential mobility in Canada. Which is great! Especially insofar as we want up-to-date information about demographic response through the pandemic. Here we want to add the CMHC Rental Market Survey (RMS) to the mix, comparing to Census and CHS (Housing Survey) results. Adding it in reveals a general decline in tenant mobility only recently (and partially) reversed.

Residential mobility in Canada

Residential mobility is essential for family formation, accommodating life changes, and the economy. A look at residential mobility in Canada over time.

Jens von Bergmann

8 minute read

This excellent NYTimes article on mobility in the US coming out today nudged me into doing a quick post on residential mobility in Canada. While there are lots of similarities between Canada and the US, there are some important differences when it comes to residential mobility. A while back Nathan Lauster compared residential mobility between the two countries and noticed that the declining trend in US residential mobility is much more muted in Canada, and may have reversed by the 2016 census, the last year for which we currently have data in Canada.

Nanaimo Station

Vancouver has been squandering opportunities around existing Skytrain stations. We take a closer look at the Nanaimo Station area.

Jens von Bergmann

9 minute read

With a new redevelopment proposal around Vancouver’s Nanaimo Skytrain station hitting the news, and a local journalist feigning ignorance about zoning around skytrain stations, maybe it’s time for a quick post on zoning and population growth around the Nanaimo Station. To start out, let’s take a look at the zoning around Nanaimo Station. We marked the Nanaimo Station at the centre and the 29th Avenue station to the south-east just outside of the 800m radius circle.

Children are good, actually

Cities are changing, how do we know if we are headed in the right direction? Looking at the change in children gives us a simple uncontroversial metric to assess that, most people can agree that children are good for cities.

Jens von Bergmann

16 minute read

There are many useful metrics to understand neighbourhood change, change in the income distribution, change in the share of population in low income and change in dwelling units, change in households who rent, or just overall population change and how that relates to zoning. All these tell us something about how neighbourhoods change, the metric we want to focus on in this post is the number of children under 15.

Estimating Suppressed Household Formation

Household formation is a complex process that is impacted by many factors. We explore the variation in household maintainer rates across Canada to estimate the CMA-level effects on household maintainer rates and suppressed household formation using Montréal as a counterfactual, paying attention to differences in age structure and cultural aspects.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

24 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) TL;DR We develop and elaborate a Montréal Method for estimating housing shortfalls related to constraints upon current residents who might wish to form independent households but are forced to share by local housing markets. Applying simple versions of the Montréal Method to Metro Areas across Canada suggests that Toronto has the biggest shortfall, which we estimate at 250,000 to 400,000 dwellings, depending upon assumptions.