CANSIM
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
TLDR: Combining our two major sources of data on the “foreignness” of property owners suggests at least half of those owning property in high demand parts of BC but living outside of Canada are Canadian citizens or permanent residents.
How Foreign Are You?
BC housing discussions have often focused on various aspects of “foreignness” – foreign buyers, foreign owners, non-resident owners, foreign capital, home owners with non-anglicized last names, out of province buyers, buyers on 10-year entry program, foreign landlords – the list goes on in bewildering variety, and each category comes with it’s own range of interpretations and definitions.
We have previously look at T1FF tax data which is an extremely rich annual administrative data source. The cansim tables have a range of variables to inform about incomes of individuals, families (sliced by number of children, including zero children), low income statistics, and just statistics about the number of taxfilers and dependants by age.
It’s available on cansim for Canada overall, the provinces and CMAs/CAs. That’s great, but sometimes it’s nice to have finer geographic detail.
Today StatCan released four more tables of data from the Canadian Housing Survey, all around the concept of Core Housing Need. Core housing need aims to measure housing stress based on affordability, suitability (crowding) and adequacy (disrepair). It applies to all households with shelter-cost-to-income ratio less than 100%, excluding non-family student-lead households, that aren’t able to afford an adequate and suitable home in their region.
We want to give a quick overview what’s in the new data release.
At the end of June StatCan released an interesting census tract level metric, dubbed the D-index, measuring how much the income distribution in each census tract differs from the metro-wide distribution, and we decided to take it for a test drive.
We are a bit of a sucker for this kind of fine-geography index. Condensing our wealth of information into a single number is an interesting exercise that involves lots of attention to detail.
I was browsing the Canadian Perspectives Survey Series 3 on Resuming Economic and Social Activities During COVID-19 and thought that some of the results were interesting. I don’t have time to do a detailed post on this, but thought that others might enjoy a quick series of graphs highlighting some of the result. The survey is only released as microdata, and I have not seen much uptake or reporting other than the high-level results put out by StatCan in The Daily.
