cancensus

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.

What’s up with Squamish?

Squamish's dwelling stock grew faster than their population, what does that mean?

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

7 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) In our previous post we have outlined the broad problems with the recent UBCM report, in this post we return to one particular one, the comparison of dwelling growth to population growth for “BC Major Census Metropolitan Areas” (Figure 2 in the report), paying particular attention to Squamish as the largest outlier. To start out, let’s take a comprehensive look at how dwelling and population growth play out across BC’s CMAs and CAs.

Jens von Bergmann

4 minute read

How much have City of Vancouver neighbourhoods changed 2016-2021? We have our interactive Canada-wide population change map on CensusMapper showing 2016-2021 population change down to the census tract level, and we have looked at finer geography population change using TongFen. But sometimes we don’t want maps but just a list of how city neighbourhoods changed. The city pulls a custom tabulation for city neighbourhood geographies for every census, but that will still take more than year until that arrives.

Unoccupied Canada

The census 'unoccupied by usual residents' metric is often in the news and one of the most frequentliy misrepresnted parts of census data. A quick primer on what does does and does not say.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

13 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) TLDR Canadian Census data on “Dwellings Unoccupied by Usual Residents” are frequently misunderstood. Now that data from 2021 are out, we provide a timely explainer and draw upon a variety of resources, including comparisons with US data, Empty Homes Tax data, and zooming in on census geographies, to help people interpret what we can see. Canada Unoccupied Given that ongoing occupations are so much in the news, let’s turn the channel to talk about those parts of Canada that are unoccupied!

Deadbeat zoning

With the new 2021 census data out it's time for some analysis on how Vancouver has grown. For this time we will examine the role of low-density zoning.

Jens von Bergmann

8 minute read

With the first batch of data from the 2021 census we can start to answer some questions about how Vancouver has grown. One of these is how population growth relates to zoning as Gil Meslin reminded me today. It would be very useful to have a custom tabulation available for that, but it will still take a lot of time before 2021 custom tabulations will become available. In the meantime, we can get a pretty good idea how low-density zoning has or has not contributed to Vancouver’s population growth by following a line of analysis like we did back when the 2016 data came out.