zoning

New Premier New Housing Policy

Checking in on household suppression in Canada using 2021 data.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

20 minute read

(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) In this post, we take a moment to appreciate the first housing policy announcements from BC’s new Premier, offered up just days into his term. David Eby comes to the post fresh from his joint roles as Attorney General and Minister Responsible for Housing. In these roles, he was central to fashioning the teeth behind BC’s housing policy. Initially these teeth were directed at the private sector, with a special focus on rooting out the “toxic demand” thought to be leaving too many dwellings empty.

Nanaimo Station

Vancouver has been squandering opportunities around existing Skytrain stations. We take a closer look at the Nanaimo Station area.

Jens von Bergmann

9 minute read

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.

On Broadway

The Broadway Plan is coming before council, time for a review of what's being proposed, which parts are good and which might need work, and how that fits into the historical context.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

13 minute read

(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.

Children are good, actually

Cities are changing, how do we know if we are headed in the right direction? Looking at the change in children gives us a simple uncontroversial metric to assess that, most people can agree that children are good for cities.

Jens von Bergmann

16 minute read

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.

Planning for scarcity

Vancouver's planning regime is set up to reinforce housing scarcity A closer look how Vancouver plans for growth, what's wrong with it, and some ideas how to fix it.

Jens von Bergmann Nathan Lauster

8 minute read

(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.