Author: Nathan Lauster

What’s Up With Squamish?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(Written jointly with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

In our previous post we have outlined the broad problems with the recent UBCM report, in this post we return to one particular one, the comparison of dwelling growth to population growth for “BC Major Census Metropolitan Areas” (Figure 2 in the report), paying particular attention to Squamish as the largest outlier. To start out, let’s take a comprehensive look at how dwelling and population growth play out across BC’s CMAs and CAs.

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Unoccupied Canada

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(Joint with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

TLDR

Canadian Census data on “Dwellings Unoccupied by Usual Residents” are frequently misunderstood. Now that data from 2021 are out, we provide a timely explainer and draw upon a variety of resources, including comparisons with US data, Empty Homes Tax data, and zooming in on census geographies, to help people interpret what we can see.

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No Shortage in Housing BS

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(Joint with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

Say you built a bunch of housing in a cornfield in the middle of rural Iowa. Would people come to live in it? Maybe. But probably not. Let’s imagine the same scenario scooted over to Vancouver. The conditions for our little field of dreams have changed. Here we’re pretty comfortable predicting: if you build it, they will come. Housing limits population growth here in a way it does not in rural Iowa.

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A Brief Data-Based Primer on Mobility and Housing

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As a housing demographer, I’m on the lookout for various ways to explain basic aspects of how people and housing fit together. A recurring theme is that this stuff is not obvious to most people. For example, people tend to associate new housing in a metro area with new people coming to a metro area. In fact, most new housing houses people already living within a metro area. But their moves free up other housing, which often incorporates newcomers.

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Ankh-Morpork Urbanism

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My household has spent a lot of time escaping to Discworld lately. We started visiting during the beginning of the pandemic (I’d long heard good things). We’ve been returning on a regular basis ever since. And fortunately, the borders have stayed open! With only a small wait time occasionally spent in quarantine (waiting for the volumes we really wanted to read to become available).

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First Peek at Population and Household Data During COVID & Caveats

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co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath

In this post we look at the most recent population (and household) estimates to see if we can detect any signals concerning how the COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted how (and where) we live. This is inherently tricky; lots of things changed during COVID times, including how well our normal methods of estimation work. That makes time series less reliable, even as we’re especially concerned with how conditions have changed. So in this post we attempt to pay special attention to what we can and can’t glean from the signals we’re receiving so far.

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Three Years of Speculation and Vacancy Tax Data

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Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath

TL;DR

We now have three years of Speculation and Vacancy Tax data for BC, demonstrating generally less than one percent of properties pay the tax in most municipalities. We play around with the data we scraped from files released by the BC government to show

  • how the federal CHSP program systematically overstates “foreign ownership”
  • how source of revenue estimates shift depending upon definitions and tax rates
  • how properties are moving into rentals and
  • what else we can glean from exemptions and revenue data.

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Acting Locally on Housing

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Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath

It may be a measure of the issue’s importance that in the midst of a major climate disaster (not to mention COVID, breakdowns in reconciliation, and other ongoing crises), the leader of the BC Green Party, Sonia Furstenau, dropped a new op-ed on housing. Timing aside, we see this as promising. As we’ve noted in comparing platforms going into the last election, the BC Greens could use some better planning on housing policy.

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Fixing Parking

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(Joint with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

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. Additionally the City proposes higher annual fees of $500 to $1000 for new gasoline-powered cars built 2023 or later.

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