CensusMapper
Geographic data often comes on different geographic breakdowns. A prime example is census data, where the underlying census geographies can change from census year to census year. This makes it difficult to compare census data across censuses. But comparing census data across censuses at fine geographies is important for many applications.
There are two main ways how people deal with this problem. 1. Estimate data for one of the two geographies by (usually at some point) relying on area-weighted interpolation.
Recently we added a cross-tabulation of Structural type by Document type to CensusMapper for mapping and API use, including in our {cancensus} R package. Today we added another datasets to this.
Taxfiler data at the census tract level for tax years 2000 through 2017 Both of these datasets come through a project we are currently doing with CMHC, and we are excited to be able to turn these into open data, free for anyone to use.
To help deal with the response effort in the recent Newfoundland and Labrador show storm, StatCan created vulnerability maps of the most affected areas. It’s great to see StatCan putting their data to use. After seeing this fly by on twitter and then flagged by Simon on Linkedin I had some thoughts on this that might be worth a quick blog post.
I am biased in how I think of these kind of disaster response maps via the tools that I have developed for working with StatCan census data, namely CensusMapper interactive mapping platform and the the cancensus R package.
It’s been over two years now since the news media reported on John Rose claiming that Vancouver has a surplus of housing and Rose shared his Working Paper, Version 1 detailing his claims of some mythical oversupply of housing in Vancouver.
We have written about this on several occasions, but we were missing a piece of data that can greatly simplify our arguments: Cross-tabulations of structural type by document type (whether a dwelling was occupied by usual residents, or occupied by temporarily present persons, or unoccupied) for the censuses 2001-2016.
Cities like Vancouver and Toronto talk a lot about unoccupied dwellings. We have a whole category for empty homes themed posts on this blog. Do we need one more? Probably not, except that we were able to open up an empty-homes related cross-tabulation that we needed through current work for CMHC. Yay, and big thanks to CMHC for making this available to the general public. Open data FTW!
Possibly more useful is the classification of the entire building stock by structural type that this data contains, when in the past many have used the classification of the stock occupied by usual residents as a proxy that comes with the standard release census data.
