The value of stable geographies.
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.
What we have learned from the "Supply Myth" debate.
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?
Creative uses of non-resident owner data.
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.
The never ending discussion.
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.
What kind of households does Vancouver have?
Recently there has been a lot of talk about households, and how they match up with dwelling units. So it’s probably a good idea to take a closer look at what a household is. Apart from better understanding what a household is, I want to also dig deeper into how people live in households. Part of my motivation is to start to understand latent demand in our housing market, some of which may come from suppressed household formation.
Too much data, too little time.
Mountain Doodles is an insomnia driven MountainMath side project, born out of random questions, trying to give partial answers through data.