Toronto
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) We know transnational ownership of properties is real. But how should we define it? And how many properties are owned by who where?
First to definitions. We’re primarily interested in ownership of dwellings, where we can define ownership of properties in terms of titles and – in the relatively rare case of corporate ownership – in terms of beneficial ownership. Given this start, we can define transnational ownership of properties in at least two ways, the key distinction being how we locate property owners.
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.
The long awaited first batch of data from the Canadian Housing Survey came out yesterday. The Canadian Housing Survey (CHS) is a new survey that aims give a better idea of well housing needs of Canadians are met.
Right now there are four tables publicly available, and we will give a quick tour of what’s out there, with a focus on Metro Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Calgary.
This post is meant as a quick overview of what’s available right now, the code is available on GitHub for anyone that wants to explore this further.
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).
(Cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Condominium apartments are fascinating! At their heart lies a relatively recent legal innovation enabling individual ownership of units in multi-unit developments. Since their arrival, condominium apartments have become places to build homes, sources of rental income, sites of speculative real estate investment, and experiments in private democratic government. They’re also in the middle of many on-going debates about housing and the future of cities in Canada and around the world.
