Land use
Over the backdrop of Vancouver’s rising real estate values the exhibition of the “Vienna Model” at the Museum of Vancouver has triggered lots of discussions about what Vancouver could learn from cities like Wien. There are many angles to approach this, one of them that has received a lot of attention is the much larger proportion of government owned subsidized housing in Wien compared to Vancouver. In this post we want to focus on a different angle: land use.
Recently the question around the amount of space taken up (exclusively) by single detached houses has show up on my Twitter feed citing that SFH take up 70%, 66%, and 57%, 56% (timestamp 3:50). I personally have thrown in 34% as a contender. And, just for the fun of it, by the end of this post I will have thrown 33% and 28% and my favorite, 81%, into the mix.
Since I started thinking about tax density, the amount of property taxes collected per area, I always felt that the data presentation in the map fell short.
Property taxes are somewhat insulated from the ups and downs of the real estate market as they are need-based and the mill rate changes to flatten out the crazyness of the market. But what they lack in interesting patterns over time they more than makes up for in interesting patterns in space.
The other day at the SFU’s City Conversations someone asked a question about space dedicated to roads, and how that could be unlocked to aid housing. He mentioned what percentage of space is currently dedicated to roads. I forgot the number, but I thought to myself that I should look that up for all Metro Vancouver communities. So here we go. Actually, it would be interesting to compare how land is allocated to all kinds of land uses across Metro Vancouver, not just roads.
Metro Vancouver has a fairly good land use dataset that I imported quite some time ago so that I could take a good look at it. But then I forgot about it until @HealthyCityMaps reminded me just at the time when the discussions about assessmened values in Vancouver were flaring up again.
So finally I decided to mark up the City of Vancouver assessment dataset with the land use from the Metro Vancouver land use dataset.
