Cancensus
City of Vancouver council rejected the development application for 21 purpose-built rental townhouses in Vancouver’s exclusive enclave of Shaughnessy last week, and the owner is now proceeding with building a mansion on that lot instead.
Councillors gave a variety of reasons for the rejection. Some were voicing concerns of about the compatibility of hospice use with the 3 ½ storey townhouse development next door, which seems far fetched as a quick look at St John’s hospice at UBC (the low building on the right in the picture here) shows.
Another “working paper” on Vancouver’s real estate woes came out, this one by Josh Gordon. We have been contemplating for a week now if it is worth responding to, but after seeing one too many obviously false statements about what the working paper supposedly shows making the rounds, we felt the benefits of addressing this might outweigh the costs of further entrenching the camps in Vancouver’s real estate debates with this post.
Canadian census data is freely available, alas not in a very convenient format for older data. Census data back to 1991 are available from Statistics Canada with an open data licence, digital geographic data is only available back to 2001. Older census data is available in digital format via paid subscription services from private entities with restrictive licences. But all data is available for free as open data in paper format.
Two days ago I gave an example using the new (to CensusMapper) 2001 census data to mix with 2006 data on a common geography based on dissemination areas. A question came up if this works for several censuses, not just for two. Yes, the TongFen package was built with exactly that in mind. Time for a quick demo.
For this we will look at the households spending between 30% and 100% of income on housing in the City of Toronto.
CensusMapper now has 2001 census data, the changes are live and functional and available for mapping and via the data API. We ran some basic verification of the import, and set the metadata for the variables. There may still be some quirks in need of getting ironed out, feedback is appreciated if anyone finds anything that does not look right.
At the same time we finally updated my TongFen package to also include DA level TongFen out of the box, in addition to the CT level that has been working for a while.
