zoning
With a new redevelopment proposal around Vancouver’s Nanaimo Skytrain station hitting the news, and a local journalist feigning ignorance about zoning around skytrain stations, maybe it’s time for a quick post on zoning and population growth around the Nanaimo Station.
To start out, let’s take a look at the zoning around Nanaimo Station.
We marked the Nanaimo Station at the centre and the 29th Avenue station to the south-east just outside of the 800m radius circle.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
We have finally found some time to take a closer look at the Broadway Plan. There are many good things to say about the plan, it adds housing in an amenity and job rich area about to get a new subway line. It promises to not just undo the downzoning the city imposed on parts of the area in the 1970s but enables a bit more housing to make up for lost time.
There are many useful metrics to understand neighbourhood change, change in the income distribution, change in the share of population in low income and change in dwelling units, change in households who rent, or just overall population change and how that relates to zoning. All these tell us something about how neighbourhoods change, the metric we want to focus on in this post is the number of children under 15.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
This is the first in a series of posts where we will explore what’s gone wrong with planning for growth, how misguided planning and policy-making has exacerbated our housing shortage, and ways to start fixing things.
The second post in this series tries to estimate suppressed household formation.
Planning vs controlling Growth mostly happens along the intersection between markets and regulation. We are all for ramping up non-market housing, which is badly needed, but most housing creation and exchange in Canada occurs within market contexts.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
New parking proposal just dropped! As Vancouver City Council once again discusses parking it seems like a good time to give a brief overview of the trade-offs involved, with special focus on the progressivity of parking permit fees. Vancouver proposed to introduce a city-wide parking permit program, requiring residents to buy a $45/year parking permit to park their vehicles on city streets (reduced to $5 for people with low incomes), or pay a $3 overnight visitor parking fee.