Late Halloween news, StatCan continues to report long-term declines in paranormal activity in homes across Canada. * * except in Nunavut ** use with extreme caution, StatCan's paranormal activity detector might have gotten itself caught in an infinite paranormal feedback loop

Discretionary zoning is a fertility drug for NIMBYs, AI powered automated objection letters just takes this to the logical conclusion.

Great event put on by @visionzerovancouver.ca

Happy to tour visiting authors & @thewaroncars.bsky.social podcasters @sgoodyear.bsky.social and @brooklynspoke.bsky.social around some key central Vancouver city-building this morning, before their book event with @visionzerovancouver.ca tonight! (some tickets left, apparently) Great conversation!

Canada's provincial economic accounts came out this week—in 2024, all provinces & Nunavut grew! Fastest: Nunavut (6.9%), PEI (3.8%), Nova Scotia (3.1%), Alberta (3%), Saskatchewan (3%) Slowest: Yukon (-2.5%), NW Territories (-0.8%), British Columbia (1.1%), Ontario (1.6%), Manitoba (1.7%)

Fun night out at the Jade Music Fest. Still more shows coming up tomorrow.

Thanks to this bussin new #rstats 📦 by @hadley.nz, you can now yeet rows and vibe_check columns in your data frames, no cap hadley.github.io/genzplyr/

{cancensus} v0.5.10 is now on CRAN. This is a maintenance update focused on some small tweaks and improvements in the documentation.

We are living in a captured economy. Another great must-watch video by @justineunderhill.bsky.social 10/10 youtu.be/_MPE3gIg-nU?...

Sidewalks shouldn’t stop for side streets, pass it on

In Jane Jacobs’s old neighborhood, more heritage rules will mean more exclusion and gentrification. We know how the story ends. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen again. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

New post on inclusionary zoning, for my housing literature review. IZ requires developers to provide subsidized homes in their new apartment buildings. Without providing compensation to developers, this unfunded IZ is just a tax on new housing. 1/

Shari Eli, Nicholas Li & Janki Shah use new complete count data to assess what can & cannot be learned about socio-economic status from the Canadian census 1871-1901. They analyze the non-reporting of earnings despite having an occupation & the characteristics of people at different earning levels.

Great article on the bottlenecks to building better apartments in Canada. If you ask a random Canadian on the street they will tell you they want shorter high-rises, taller low-rises, and more livable apartments with cross-ventilation. Yet politicians and policymakers force the opposite.

🤔

Quebec has significantly better housing outcomes than the rest of Canada. Language barriers might have helped Quebec not to “learn” from anglophone Canada 👍, but also prevent the rest of Canada from learning from Quebec 👎. Nice to see an English language take on housing from the Quebec perspective!

Good writeup of how the Trump administration has used housing as one of the justifications for their deportations, and how that fits into a history of US anti-immigrant housing policy. Someone should write a paper on Housing Nationalism…

@dannyoleksiuk.bsky.social writes for @sightline.org about the potential to bring back small lot apartment buildings. #singlestair code changes can unlock this option for the first time in a century. Let’s go! www.sightline.org/2025/10/28/t...

After a short hiatus, Social Policy Trends is back! This month we describe how the housing crisis impacts the victims of domestic violence and the organizations that provide them with temporary shelter. 1/4 www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/u...

Legalize it!

Is late Monday morning a good time to play around with new housing metrics? Trick question! It's always a good time to play around with new housing metrics. @jensvb.bsky.social and I have a look at Shelter Cost per Room (as opposed to sqft) in relation to age. homefreesociology.com/2025/10/25/a...

Check-in on the latest NRCAN LIDAR-derived 3D building data. Their automatic detection is still quite coarse, some buildings are missing, some get footprint very wrong, other mess up on height. And failure to deal with buildings with sections of different heights. Looking forward to next iteration.

Do young people face higher shelter costs than their older compatriots? @lausterna.bsky.social and I look into this question and the underlying mechanisms that can lead to age disparities in shelter costs.

I have gotten lots of questions over the years for a python version of cancensus. @dshkol.bsky.social has now built a python port! Yet another way to make StatCan census data more accessible.

A key thing that these "nature deserts" analyses often fail to control for is the existence of cities. In this case, first-time buyers tend to be younger, younger people tend to live in cities, cities have less green space per capita, so "first-time buyers are being forced into nature deserts".

Legalize it! All of the ones in this thread.

This story is well-reported and the case is infuriatingly simple.

Great piece from @kehyslop.bsky.social at @thetyee.ca about the pedagogical choices made in bc curriculum resulting in declining math and reading scores. thetyee.ca/News/2025/10...

With StatCan API servers down right now a reminder of the local database capabilities of the {cansim} R📦. `get_cansim_connection()` caches data in parquet format and is a drop-in replacement of `get_cansm()`. It enables offline work and can be set to automatically refresh data (if available).

Today's data: inflation! 📈 Consumer prices in September are up 2.4% compared to Sept 2024. Up from a 1.9% inflation rate in August. What's behind the increase? www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-qu... #cdnecon

In case you were eagerly awaiting the introduction of an internet-connected device to monitor and analyze your human waste, I got good news for you. If not, just carry on and continue to enjoy your sittings without constantly worrying about the firmness or colour of what you are flushing down.

Reminds me of the time the City of Vancouver implemented improvements to the pedestrian experience along Point Grey Road, and multi-million dollar homeowners were throwing a fit because the city was clawing back some of their encroachment into public land so it could widen the sidewalk.

Morning radio talking about people driving down to the Jays game, squinting hard there may have been a slight increase in southbound car traffic at the Peace Arch crossing yesterday compared to weekly patterns in the last couple of weeks.

Why tf does North America allow right turns on red? Was this ever a good idea? So proud of @ardenenglish.bsky.social for his first collaboration with the CBC! www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqDV...

Burnaby started out with a forward-looking implementation of the provincial SSMUH legislation. But after some “feedback from residents” they scaled that back to pretty much the minimum they can get away with under the legislation.

New billboard in town 👀

Quick check-in with Canadian data. Canadian PUMF top-codes at 7+ people in a household, so not quite same metric. (And some caution is advisable when drilling into scenarios like this where coding errors and other data quirks can accumulate. Even when checking across replicate weights.)

“How can you just falsify data?” — Very easily apparently. And UBC does not seem to feel the need to let the public know about this.

Workday morning rush hour for comparison. More bus lines, and more service. (Still missing buses not sending realtime data, as well as sea bus and skytrain which don't show up in the realtime data feed.)

Finally got around to playing with TransLink realtime GTFS data. Kind of fun. Transit in Vancouver is looking pretty good, especially considering this is an hour midday on a holiday weekend, with some lines not running (hello 44) and not all buses reporting real-time information.

Fantastic piece by Don Iveson on what Edmonton is doing right on housing. There are lots of lessons here for other communities.

September data was released today. The drop in absolute number of travellers is a bit lower than in the (higher volume) summer months, but year over year percentage change drop held fairly steady.

One such paper to find: What Proportion of Tax Returns Could the Canada Revenue Agency Complete? (open access) utppublishing.com/doi/full/10....

There are a few other opportunities to catch us this week! www.modacitylife.com/vancouver

I have lived in North America for half my life now but I still get tripped up by how ridiculous some of the regulation here is compared to Europe. (And pretty much all of the rest of the world.)

Can’t believe we are still doing this. RM-7 zoning is designed to generate maximally inaccessible townhouses, because not sinking the first floor a metre below ground level would make the building a metre taller and cast an extra 10mins of shade in some SFH zucchini garden. (Also add elevators!)

YIMBYs (like @ahvancouver.bsky.social) often say, "legalize apartments", or "end the apartment ban". I don't want to speak for anyone else. But when I say that--things like this is what I'm talking about. No street, no neighbourhood, is too good for housing like this. Housing is good!

This is really good to see. It brings predictability to development, not just for developers but also for residents who know what kind of development they can expect to see. Hoping this work will continue and reliance of site-specific zoning will get further reduced.

Great to chat to Dan Fumano @vancouversun.bsky.social about BC's property tax deferment program. My take: "the B.C. model, where significant interest rate subsidies are accessed by those with above-average home values, does not seem to be an effective use of government funds.”