CANSIM
Today the new CMHC Rental Market Survey data came out, which is a good opportunity to refine my musings on the rental vacancy rate and rent increases. I view this as the renter version of the relationship between months of inventory and changes in resale prices in the for sale market.
CMHC surveys purpose-built (market) rental apartments every October and reports on a variety of metrics, including statistics about the total stock, median and average rents, vacancy rates, and fixed-sample average rent change among others.
When trying to understand the income makeup of regions in Canada we need to take the income distribution and simplify in a way that is accessible. This is no easy task. Simplification is an essential part of this, but we need to take care not to over-simplify but instead still retain the essential parts.
How to measure income? To start we have to select an income measure. Partially this is constrained by data availability, but there are choices.
Down south of the border, a politician who shall remain nameless campaigned on “draining the swamp” of Washington D.C., trafficked in countless conspiracies, and lied his way into office. His lies painted a picture of a United States turned dark, corrupt and menacing. He promised to fix it, Making American Great Again, mostly by shutting down globalization and kicking out the immigrants.
In Canada, we like to think we’re immune to this kind of rhetoric.
In the past weeks I got interested in several news stories on aboriginal youth admissions to correctional services, adult incarceration rates and frequency of getting carded. I have this habit that when something interests me I go grab the original data and take a look myself. Having done this three times on related issues within a fairly short timeframe I decided to throw my code snippets together into a blog post.
CANSIM switched over to the New Dissemination Model (NDM) this past weekend. What this means is that we now have better organized CANSIM data. Yay. But it also broke my R package to easily access and process cansim data. Not so yay. Luckily it was an easy fix to switch things over to the NDM, and the cleaning of data gets even easier. And I also build in functionality to access tables through the old trusty cansim numbers.
