politics

Housing is a Housing Problem

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath.

The main housing problem in Canada is that there is not enough of it. We can see this by looking at prices and rents, but also by looking at people’s living arrangements and rates of doubling up. Doubling up is a direct measure of housing hardship that should get tracked on a regular basis. It also serves as an important compliment to traditional affordability metrics used in Canada that suffer from collider bias that makes it difficult to use them to track progress in solving housing problems. We also develop long timelines to track household formation and doubling up in Canada over the past 80 years to demonstrate the rapid undoubling during the first half of that time period, followed by a reversal to increased doubling up in most of Canada over the latter half.

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Analyzing Ballot Composition in Vancouver

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

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

So we recently had an election in the City of Vancouver. Citizens elected a new mayor, ten council members, park board and school board, giving a majority to the centre-right leaning new ABC (A Better City) Party candidates for each (full results posted by the City). There are a variety of narratives out there about how it all went down. Here we’re interested in examining a couple of them in further detail using the recently released individual ballot data (all ballots remain anonymous, of course). Of note, the mayoral vote is straight-forward, each voter got to vote for one mayoral candidate. The council votes are more interesting. There voters could choose up to 10 candidates. For this post we will focus on council votes, but we’ll return to examining how they relate to mayoral votes.

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New Premier New Housing Policy

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

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

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. The Speculation and Vacancy Tax (SVT) remains the most visible legacy of this approach, as we’ve written about before and we provide a brief update of SVT results based upon the latest release in our appendix below. But other legacies include things like BC’s beneficial ownership registry, insuring better transparency for private corporations.

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Acting Locally on Housing

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

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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Human Rights YIMBYism

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 3 Comments

TLDR: I attempt to articulate a Human Rights YIMBYism, rooted in supporting (and sometimes balancing) a set of key human rights and freedoms (housing, movement, association, property) within the city. While both push back against NIMBYism, broad Human Rights YIMBYism offers a different, and I argue more successful and ethical guide to action and coalition building than narrower Property YIMBYism.

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BC Housing Platforms!

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

It’s election time in BC! And housing is back on the agenda, even if not quite as centrally as in past elections. Here I want to provide a quick basis for comparing each party platform, adding in a short bit of my own analysis. My quick take is that when it comes to housing there are things to like in each platform, and I hope the parties work together to keep housing on the agenda!

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Vancouver’s Crime Pandemic! That wasn’t.

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

We now have over six months of pandemic conditions in Vancouver and crime data to (roughly) match. We also have all kinds of claims about crime flying around, sometimes pushed by the police (VPD) themselves, only heightened by click-seeking reporters and the vote-seeking politicians. So we should probably check into the data. Long story short: there’s scant evidence of a crime wave showing up in the VPD crime data.

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