CensusMapper
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.
Just came across this excellent flow map tool that takes a google sheet and turns it into an interactive flow map. It’s super-easy to use, here is a quick demo.
We are using the commuting flow data between census subdivisions from the 2016 census. First we load the required libraries
library(tidyverse) library(cancensus) #remotes::install_github("mountainmath/statcanXtabs") library(statcanXtabs) library(sf) library(googlesheets4) Next we create the google sheet for our flow map. It comes with three sheets, one defining overall properties, one defining the locations and one for the flows.
Metro Vancouver is growing, both in terms of population and jobs. That means the number of people commuting to work is growing and putting a strain on our transportation system. The nature of that strain depends to a large extent on how people are getting to and from work. The Canadian census started collecting data on how people get to work in 1996, which allows us to see how commuters and commute choice have changed over time.
