Cancensus
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.
The neighbourhood level custom tab the City of Vancouver pulls for every census has arrived on the open data portal today. We have not worked much with that data because the 2011 dataset excluded the NHS, but it’s worth revisiting with the 2016 data now available. (Hopefully the 2011 NHS data will get retroactively added, it’s a bit of a shame that it’s missing and CoV return rates were quite reasonable.
One of the constructive outcome of the “Supply Myth” discussion was the spotlight it shone on secondary suites. While we have already touched on this topic, it is wroth to fully flesh this out. With the perpetual empty home discussion in Vancouver one would have thought that the numbers by structural type of dwelling would have percolated through to the empty home hive mind.
According to the 2011 census, which structural type of dwelling had the highest rate of unoccupied dwelling units in Metro Vancouver?
Nathan Lauster just opened up an interesting way to look at CHSP data – by folding in the SFS. I have played with SFS data in the past but it clearly is time to revisit this and reproduce Lauster’s numbers. Let’s also fold in census estimates for that to see how these numbers match up. I have nothing to add to the excellent commentary from Lauster’s original post, so please head over there for good context of these estimates.
Smarter people than I have already responded to the recent furor about John Rose’s working paper, which is (part of?) the result of one year of research on affordability by the author, arguing that Vancouver has no supply problem. Most notably Nathan Lauster in a series of blog posts taking a look at the theoretical framework and methods used and running some numbers himself. I don’t have much to add to the first post, which took the time to highlight some of the useful demand measures that are either already implemented or currently under discussion and makes the point that the idea that we have enough housing in Vancouver, especially enough rental housing, requires an extraordinarily strong argument in the face of sub 1% rental vacancy rates.
