People move. That includes people who end up getting counted as homeless. How should we interpret what homeless counts tell us about these people?
To an important extent, this question brings us back to fundamental interpretations of who gets counted. Is being counted as “homeless” interpreted as a social problem: the lack of enough accessible housing? Or is it being interpreted as a person problem: identifying the “homeless” as fundamentally different from housed people?
co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at mountainmath
Do people select cities from diverse alternatives? Or do cities select residents from diverse flows of people?
The answer is pretty much: both. Continue reading
So, what’s happening at the airport these days?
Here in Vancouver (or more specifically, Richmond), I discovered that YVR actually posts some of their data. This is great! I’m going to look at their recent passenger data to get a sense of two things. First, how much air travel into and through Vancouver has grown in recent years. Hello globalization! Second, how much air travel into and through Vancouver has shrunk in recent months. Hi there world-wide pandemic! Continue reading
I’m currently enjoying Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain. It’s a fascinating book on how British real estate was transformed from estates granted and traded in private transactions bound by custom (think of landed nobility but also the Commons pre-enclosure) into something that could be bought and sold at auction and described in terms of a market, mostly over the course of the late 18th and 19th Centuries.
I was curious about this book for lots of reasons, not least because it seemed British property practices often spread to colonies, as in Canada. But as described by Fitz-Gibbon, this was actually a two-way street, and experiences in real estate at the peripheries of Empire also often informed practices back in England. Continue reading
Why do people move? I’ve taken up this question in a series of recent posts (some co-authored), and though the available data to address the question remains sparse, it’s getting richer all the time. Today I want to compare three different sources of information, highlighting how much it matters just how we ask people about their reasons for moving. Continue reading
Sometimes we talk about cities as if they’re settlements, where people become fixed to place. But in fact, if you track movements of people, cities look more like rivers. People churn through the urban landscape. Net migration numbers are really useful in some contexts, but also obscure the full extent of this churning. Fortunately, BC Stats has numbers that attempt to break down actual flows of people through regions. We can break out Metro Vancouver (a.k.a. Greater Vancouver) and see just how many people we think might be flowing through. Here’s a little graphic I made to highlight this churn, while I continue playing around with the best way to present it. Continue reading
jointly authored with Jens von Bergmann at MountainMath
When people want to live in your city, how many should you let in? On the one hand, this is a moral question. Do you have an obligation to people who don’t already live here? On the other hand, it’s a moot question. At least in Canada, cities don’t have the power to control migration. Continue reading
co-authored with Jens von Bergmann & cross-posted over at MountainMath
In our previous post on COVID mortality in context, we tried to place COVID deaths, as recorded so far this year, in the context of expected deaths from previous years. There have been a lot more developments since that post. And unfortunately a lot more deaths too. Continue reading
We’re rolling around to property tax time, and municipalities are about to feel the COVID-19 crunch. The Mayors of Metro Vancouver have been leading an ask of the province to backstop municipal finances given that many residents and businesses may fail to pay their property taxes. Indeed, the City of Vancouver recently commissioned a survey indicating that due to job and income losses, some 25% of home owners in the city would be paying less than half of their 2020 property tax bills. Continue reading
BC has been lauded for rolling out an assistance program for renters, unlike basically every other province. At the same time, BC’s also been criticized for the perceived inadequacy of that rental assistance program, as well as the fact that it literally goes straight to landlords. In conjunction with the temporary eviction moratorium, it would appear that the BC Temporary Rental Supplement (BC-TRS) is really aimed at supporting landlord incomes and easing tenant-landlord relations to avoid a rash of evictions once the moratorium has been lifted. Continue reading
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