density
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
How did early planners envision Vancouver’s future growth? Fortunately for us, they left a prediction in dot-density map form! Here we compare their prediction to a dot-density map from today. Let’s check out how our dot destiny unfolded!
Vancouver grew rapidly from its incorporation in 1886 right up to the great crash of 1913, followed by WWI and a raging influenza epidemic (which we all know way too much about now).
Canada’s metropolitan areas are growing, which means we need to add housing. But adding housing often faces stiff oppositions. There are many reasons people don’t like to add housing, this post is trying to look at one particular one. That adding housing causes displacement of the low-income population.
Adding new housing to a neighbourhood has two opposing effects.
The gentrification effect starts from the observation that new housing is more expensive than old housing (all else being equal).
After our recent posts on multi-census comparisons I was pointed to a semi-custom tabulation for census timelines back to 1971 for Vancouver and Toronto. That’s data for the 1971, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011 censuses on a common 2016 DA geography for the two CMAs. This is really cool, not just that it eliminates the need to tongfen the geographies, but in particular because Statistics Canada does not even haven publicly available geographic boundary files for censuses before 2001.
Canadian census data is freely available, alas not in a very convenient format for older data. Census data back to 1991 are available from Statistics Canada with an open data licence, digital geographic data is only available back to 2001. Older census data is available in digital format via paid subscription services from private entities with restrictive licences. But all data is available for free as open data in paper format.
We are big fans of measuring different densities, and conceptualizing density in different ways. From tax density, tax density in 3D, plus an animated version, lot level density of single detached homes over time, estimating FSR from LIDAR data, density treemaps, dot-density maps, comparing Vancouver and Vieanna densities, building height profiles, renter density and net dwelling density, city density patterns and city density timelines.
When I saw the following tweet and linked blog post, I of course could not resist to reproduce some of the graphs and explore population-weighted densities.
