newsfail
Zombie attack! Zombies fleeing Vancouver want to eat your brain… drain… or something.
A couple of weeks ago The Canadian Press reported a story asserting that young professionals were leaving Vancouver because of the high cost of housing. This fits in with a common zombie refrain that we hear from the media. It’s a story that just won’t die, no matter how many times it’s proven wrong: Millennials, or young people, or boomers, or people important for some other reason are leaving Vancouver because of housing.
Now three people have asked me about the purported explosion of Canadians 18 and over in Downtown Vancouver, and in particular the claim that eligible voters in the Downtown and West End grew by a combined 70%. And I had to explain three times that while that population grew strongly, it grew by much less than reported. In fact, the number of Canadian citizens 18 years and older in the downtown peninsula only grew by 17.
Down south of the border, a politician who shall remain nameless campaigned on “draining the swamp” of Washington D.C., trafficked in countless conspiracies, and lied his way into office. His lies painted a picture of a United States turned dark, corrupt and menacing. He promised to fix it, Making American Great Again, mostly by shutting down globalization and kicking out the immigrants.
In Canada, we like to think we’re immune to this kind of rhetoric.
Density in Vancouver has been one of the recurring themese on this blog, and there are many different ways to come at it. We have looked at density in terms of land use to understand how much land is devoted to what purpose in Metro Vancouver and it’s municipalities. We have looked at density in terms of tax density to understand how property tax revenue depends on land use and zoning.
Catching up with my local news reading last night I stumbled about another new report on millennials.
The notion that millennials are fleeing Vancouver is a recurring theme in the Vancouver press, and we have addressed some of the problems in the data used to support that claim before.
Sadly, this new article’s use of data is no less problematic, and the topic, as well as the data misrepresentations, are serious enough that I felt they need addressing so as not do distract from the actual real problems that millennials are facing.
