CANSIM

Still Short: Suppressed Households in 2021

Checking in on household suppression in Canada using 2021 data.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

13 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) In May we estimated suppressed household formation across Canada using what we called the Montréal Method, finding strong evidence for suppression across many parts of Canada. As a reminder, we designed the Montréal Method to estimate housing shortfalls related to constraints upon current residents who might wish to form independent households but are forced to share by local housing markets. Now that we’ve got 2021 Census data out, it’s time to update our estimates.

Where did all the cheap rents go?

An investigation into the 320k "lost" units renting below $750.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

22 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) It can be really useful to count things, but sometimes numbers end up causing confusion and misunderstanding rather than helping. Often this has to do with how the number is presented and attached to claims. Other times it has to do with problematic procedures used to obtain the number. Here we want to explore these problems more in detail concerning a claim that “Canada lost 322,000 affordable homes” between 2011 and 2016.

Rent growth in GDP

People in BC spend a lot of money on rent (and imputed rent), and that's a problem. The way to decrease this "Real Estate Industry" share of GDP is to build more housing.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

5 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) Every now and then the topic of the GDP share of the “Real Estate Industry” comes up, often linked to the suggestion that an economy has become too dependent upon real estate. But this usually involves a fundamental misreading of the data. As people who pay attention know, the NAICS sector [53] “Real Estate Industry” of the expenditure based GDP produced by StatCan is mostly just rent and imputed rent.

Tumbling turnover

Digging deeper into Canadian residential mobility, tracking changes in mobility over time, and comparing data sources.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

15 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) We’re increasingly gathering lots of different measures of residential mobility in Canada. Which is great! Especially insofar as we want up-to-date information about demographic response through the pandemic. Here we want to add the CMHC Rental Market Survey (RMS) to the mix, comparing to Census and CHS (Housing Survey) results. Adding it in reveals a general decline in tenant mobility only recently (and partially) reversed.

Children are good, actually

Cities are changing, how do we know if we are headed in the right direction? Looking at the change in children gives us a simple uncontroversial metric to assess that, most people can agree that children are good for cities.

Jens von Bergmann

16 minute read

There are many useful metrics to understand neighbourhood change, change in the income distribution, change in the share of population in low income and change in dwelling units, change in households who rent, or just overall population change and how that relates to zoning. All these tell us something about how neighbourhoods change, the metric we want to focus on in this post is the number of children under 15.