Vancouver had elections on Saturday, today Toronto had their elections. And as opposed to Vancouver, Toronto has wards. Which makes things more fun, as we can look at census data for each ward to understand how people voted in the ward. We ran a very similar type of analysis the other day for Vancouver, so this is an easy add.
The Toronto Open Data catalogue has data for the ward boundaries and a custom tab with census data.
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.
The other day the New Your Times did a really fun story on buildings in the US, and I was chatting about that with someone at the VPL last night. Which reminded me that I wanted to replicate that for Vancouver. So here we go.
There are several datasets for building data, and we have worked quite a bit with the City of Vancouver LIDAR generated data of 2009. We have mapped this on several occasions in the past, for example to show building heights, or just residential buildings to map building values, and have used the building heights data in Vancouver and Toronto to make building heights profiles by distance from downtown.
I haven’t taken time yet to dive into the council candidate’s data game, Christopher Porter has been tearing it up with great posts, one on candidate location, several on their position on various housing issues and a compilation of endorsements.
Dmitry Shkolnik has been running some analysis on candidate’s tweets.
Nathan Lauster dove into the urbanist / preservationist divide first crowdsourced by the Cambie report.
Better late than never, I decided to jump in and look at candidate’s neighbourhoods.
We are getting close the end of the STR grace period ending August 31st, so it’s time to take a look at compliance of the STR operators. For today we will just look at Airbnb, which is the largest STR listings platform. Other larger listings platforms are VRBO or Craiglist.
How did we get here? The concern over short term rentals is a fairly new phenomenon. As recently as 2013 a local columnist praised the benefits of Airbnb in generating higher incomes and side-stepping the resiential tenancy act.
