One of the news things the updated CensusMapper gained is bivariate maps. Here is an example looking at studio and 1 bedroom homes vs 1-person households. This mostly falls along the diagonal, but it also allows to explore areas where there are more of one vs the other.

The inevitable consequence of cities setting aside so much room for vehicles and so little room for housing is once again in the news I see. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/u...

Even amid Vancouver’s soaring condominiums and natural surroundings, Sen̓áḵw is a showstopper. But one of its most radical technological innovations is almost entirely buried underground. @novakovicto.bsky.social on the energy revolution shaping its development: www.begiant.ca/stories/idea...

Here are some of my favourite Lexis plots. 1. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 2. ourworldindata.org/causes-of-de... 3. www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol3...

it's actually worse than that; i don't think the authors actually wrote their own article

This is great. We need more human story explanations like this. Just pointing at data and research fails to reach a lot of people.

Loving seeing the treemap in action. I also keep checking random trees that I notice. (It’s probably time to remove the extra spring flower highlights/filter.)

I am proud to accept the endorsement of the Vancouver and District Labour Council. Every single Vancouverite deserves an affordable home, strong public services, a good job, and a living wage. We’ll return respect for workers to City Hall when we retake the Mayor’s Office on October 17 #vanpoli

Timmy was a performance artist who orchestrated the degenerative dance of influencers, charlatans, conspiracy theorists and clickbait media to drag all onlookers down with him.

An older but still relevant CensusMapper map is net migration by age group. This shows the generational pulse of cities, where kids kids who are born in central areas move outward. And then stream back to the centre around age 20, leaving again in their 30s.

Loving all these new tools to view StatCan data, all tailored to slightly different use cases.

And equally important, after it became clear that it is working Edmonton (for the most part) did not give in to the inevitable NIMBY backlash. Unlike some other cities. (Big thanks to @jacobdawang.com for carefully documenting how all these changes in Edmonton play out on the ground.)

AI monocultures and the collapse of knowledge, from @jevinwest.bsky.social and Damian Hodel. archive.ph/OWJ12

Ahoy housing wonks in Alaska and BC! Sightline is hiring part-time contributors to help advance housing abundance in these two corners of Cascadia. Please spread the word! www.sightline.org/about/careers/

Senakw Whale

Land value taxes are elegant and pure and make for endless high-brow party conversations. But if you want to make society and housing function better just do what @kevinerdmann.bsky.social says: Raise the [property tax] rates and make them more universal and equitable.

What an absolute gift from @chittimarco.bsky.social Go read it now: tpa.transitcosts.com/journey/speed

Preparing last minute for a presentation tomorrow and StatCan servers are bonking. I swear, the only reason why data resellers like Haver Analytics or Bloomberg exist in Canada is because of StatCan's inability to run a reliable web service.

Never ignore Lindsay.

This brilliant map points back toward the early Chicago School obsession with "mobility" in defining The City & also its pathologization, e.g. langurbansociology.wordpress.com/wp-content/u... Pathologizing mobility still inflects a lot of academic treatments, even though most moves are happy ones!

Another fun map, share of population who lived at a different address 5 years prior. We too often think of neighbourhoods as being fixed, but even in places where the physical structure does not change, the people do. Tact with lowest share in CoV was Champlain Heights area at 25%. CoV average 45%.

On census day 2026 I want to highlight one of my favourite CensusMapper maps. Adjusted after-tax family income distribution. It shows the geographic distribution of the population by income, highlighting areas where people segregate by income, and areas where people of different incomes mix.

This is a good example of what it was like at the time. The first-wave gentrifiers of Mount Pleasant were screaming, MPs and MLAs wrote letters opposing it, this one building was *the* most controversial thing in local politics. And now it's just a nice place to live scoutmagazine.ca/on-rize-or-f...

There is CensusMapper and CanViz for easy visualization, the cancensus, cansim, and cmhc packages for getting data for analysis. Tongfen to make census (and other) data comparable across time, canpumf for PUMF data, canbank for Bank of Canada data, and more… Making Canadian data more accessible.

The “developers purposefully leave stuff vacant” narrative used to be quite common in Vancouver too. But fortunately the discussion has moved past this. Slow progress. (Or maybe I just got better at curating my feed?)

Good Saturday morning read.

I wanted to take a moment to say a few things as directly as I could. Wanting to legalize apartments in the West Side of Vancouver isn't radical. A status quo built on exclusion is. If we want to move the needle at all, we'll need councillors committed to big ideas and real change.

Good to see StatCan pay attention to household formation and changing living arrangements. This piece looks at changes in homeownership and does also try to pay some attention to select changes in household formation.

Good peice by Joseph Heath (odd title aside) on the issues with a government grocery store and the failures to learn from the past. josephheath.substack.com/p/naomi-klei...

Lot's of ways to interpret "pluralist". To put some data to it, here is linguistic diversity, the probability that any two people randomly meeting on the street have different mother tongues. For Toronto (both CMA or City) it's 74%. (Or flipside, 26% chance they share the same mother tongue.)

Short form. Again. As always. More proof that the world isn’t fair.

It's 2026 Census Week, and to celebrate we put the refreshed CensusMapper live. It's got a fresh look and feel and advanced map-making capabilities for everyone. Check it out! Read about what changed in our blog post:

StatCan is not on bsky, so cross-posting their LinkedIn message here.

Yes. If you base your measure of social or economic health on households, and those measures impact household formation, you are inviting substantial collider bias.

Good post by @garymarcus.bsky.social. LLMs have shown us that our language around concepts like intelligence are far too crude to make appropriately precise arguments. And some philosophers, the very people who should be help lead the effort to advance our thought on this, are failing miserably.

in hour of the Census (in Two Days!) here's a map of Canadian Population Centres scaled by population and coloured by 2016-2021 growth (red positive, blue negative)

Three days!

Strong leadership means listening, learning, and working with experts and communities alike. I’ve spent years learning from the best in the field to ensure my housing policies are grounded in real-world solutions. I'm grateful to have the support of @tomdavidoff.bsky.social!

It's happening. #CensusMappers is 11 years old now and showing it. We have been working on a shiny new version with lots of improvements and are putting it live in the coming days. In the meantime, we apologize for some short service interruptions here and there as we are testing and transitioning.

Are cars getting too big? Is there any reason for it? We crashed the Vancouver Auto Show to try and talk to some automotive reps and find out first hand! www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJp3...

Some of the dogwood trees are flowering now as Vancouver’s spring progresses… mountainmath.ca/vantrees

Check out my latest opinion piece! Public transit can save someone up to $15,000 per year. There is no other cost saving tool at any government’s disposal as powerful as public transit. @movementyvr.bsky.social

Current status: Vibe-coding an auth workflow across backend and front-end. Set up a process where Claude codes it and Codex reviews it and hands it back to Claude for fixing. Currently on iteration 4, AMA. Borrowing language from economists I am calling this simply "Doubly-Robust coding".

My takeaways from the SSMUH legislation is that if you are going to force municipalities to allow housing you should not give them the opportunity to water it down and nerf the requirements. Otherwise munis will do just that, either from the get-go or after learning from neighbouring munis.

I like this representation so I made one for Canada

New video from Nic is always great, and the Crescent 200 is just such a joyful event all around.

Fun episode. From a BC perspective, land value taxes would be relatively easy to implement. But the bigger obstacle is that Vancouver property taxes are really low. For comparison, the effective tax rate here is comparable to that of a home bought in the 70s and protected by Prop13 in California.

Unfunded IZ presupposes a permenant housing shortage: the moment rents fall too low to cross-subsidize the unfunded mandate, development stops until rents rise again. It's housing policy pseudoscience.

It's done! Writing a textbook takes a really long time. Thanks to my coauthors and all the 🇨🇦 economists that offered input and resources along the way. www.mheducation.ca/product/labo...

Great analysis from Jacob (as usual) on the continuing success of Edmonton to create an environment where it’s easy to build the housing people want.