“I am not against density but it has to look like houses”

Induced demand, but for simple water play features

🚨 Eye candy alert 🚨 How do we add more homes to our existing leafy, quiet, 50'-wide residential lots? @lanefab.com has a gorgeous idea.

It's funny how Victoria staff are recommending "Transportation Demand Management" plans to encourage non-car options... while also recommending charging THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS to developers who want to build 1 fewer parking spot

Steam clock, one of the other ones.

See our new set of #maps illustrating how many people in each host city can travel to their #soccer stadium by #PublicTransit and within an hour - sortable by stadium, population reached, and percentage of population within a 25 km radius https://ow.ly/beKJ50ZeZNs#maps

canpumf is now on CRAN. StatCan PUMF data is very valuable, but it's ungoverned. The canpumf package resolves the encoding and metadata issues to enable effective and reproducible analysis with StatCan PUMF data. This is a substantial rework of the package, give it a whirl.

Absolutely loving high-density small-lot development. So many reasons why this makes cities better. Some people dislike the stark contrast in height to neighbouring buildings this produces, I think of it as adding resiliency and adaptability.

Fable struggling with the same StatCan shenanigans that have tripped me up in the past. There is a special place in hell for the people who sneak non-breaking white spaces (U+00A0) into data column names and labels.

I think it is cool that a bunch of people are now committed to “Jamelle hates black people and loves gentrification” because I was trying to have a good faith conversation about how to improve low income black neighborhoods without displacement or gentrification.

The 1901 Canadian census was the first to enumerate earnings for an entire employed population. Shari Eli, Nicholas Li & Janki Shah review the strengths & limits of these newly available data alongside other historical status indicators with particular attention to the social position of farmers.

We have way too many of these things menacing our streets, even here in Vancouver. They're not safe. Ban. Tax into oblivion. Up licensing requirements. And open up international trade to welcome safer competition. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Really interesting research, great thread. Consumers don't know how much more dangerous SUVs are to people outside cars; but even when informed, they don't care. It's going to take regulation, not education, to solve this.

🎉 Announcing Calepin 🎉 A new tool to create computational notebooks and static websites, built on Typst. Write code and prose directly in your .typ files, then publish them as documents or as a full website. vincentarelbundock.github.io/calepin/ 1/6 🧵 #Rstats #Pydata #Typst

Congrats to all of the people who have worked so hard to brand Vancouver as "towers full of vacant luxury condominiums" I guess. Anyway, here's the map from 2025's Empty Homes Tax report. Once again, very little empty, with the mansion hoods in the SW leading the pack. vancouver.ca/files/cov/20...

I wrote a bit about the *huge* amounts of money and time that Unite Here is investing to influence the upcoming Vancouver election: www.reillywood.com/blog/unite-h...

I firmly believe that making data more accessible is unconditionally good. But I have to admit that seeing cranks vaguely gesticulating at data products like this as “support” for their crackpot theories gives me pause, and it’s part of the reason I have been lazy in keeping this map up to date.

And another international news publication reporting on Sen̓áḵw. There are several reasons this project continues to capture international attention. The history of the land, and the stark contrast in land use enabled by the Squamish Nation compared to surrounding Vancouver are probably the top two.

A look at gross inter-provincial migration. Which provinces gained or lost population to other provinces? Starting with BC, where more people left to Alberta than came from Alberta in recent quarters, but this was more than made up for by a net inflow from other provinces.

New quarterly population and migration estimates out today, another quarter of negative net external migration for Canada. (And net population loss, not shown here.) Immigration saw a slight reduction, this is driven by a net outflow of non-permanent residents.

Did someone say Nanaimo Station?

Current status: unittestmaxxing as I work on getting a very valuable but *extremely* messy batch of Canadian data systematically organized so it's easy and efficient to use.

Good episode focused on transportation impacts of (transit-oriented) density. And more generally talks a lot about how increasing density rarely causes displacement of low-income populations. We looked into this for Canada some years back and found the same.

Signs of life, balcony furniture spotted on tower 1 of Sen̓áḵw.

May 2026 data is out today, showing a slight rebound in year over year travel of Canadian residents to the US across land borders. Most of the Trump effect is sticking, but there is slight slippage, both for same day and multi-day trips.

New asking rent data out today, here 2-bedroom rents across several metro areas. canviz.mountainmath.ca/plot?v=16754...

Give a nerd a chart or a map and they will waste a day. Teach a nerd how to make charts and maps and they will waste the rest of their life.

Passenger plane, designed by North American city planners and city councils. (Also, economy seats pay an extra surcharge and take 4x as long to book)

Who lives in new housing? I built this dashboard showing the share of people who moved in the past year who came from another metro, >100 miles away, etc. The main takeaway: People moving longer distances aren't attracted by new housing. Read more here: domainexpansion.substack.com/p/the-call-i...

“Vox pivoted its message away from immigrants taking jobs and toward immigrants taking homes. Its leaders began blaming the country’s housing crisis on foreigners” — That’s how Housing Nationalism operates, as a platform to activate reactionary nationalism as @lausterna.bsky.social and I explained.

Also a good reminder that Empty Homes Tax data offers a useful view into unadorned inventory. (As does the Speculation and Vacancy Tax data, but the 2025 municipal breakdown is not out yet.)

“The lesson for me is that scarcity is the ultimate gift to the far right,” Galindo said. “When there isn’t enough housing or public transit or health-care services for everyone, it’s so much easier to point a finger at immigrants than to address the actual causes of that shortage.”

TongFen v0.3.7 is now on CRAN. TongFen solves the problem of making data across different but congruent geographies comparable. Prime examples are fine geography census data from different years, or polling districts across election cycles. Thanks to @dshkol.bsky.social for performance improvements.

Across the world in Edmonton, we have our own townhouse story that's just getting started. jacobdawang.com/blog/2026/q1...

Another good one from the 1957 Atlas of Canada - Vancouver land use and urban growth 1956 commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:At...

Think about people when you talk about housing or you will one day push your neighbour into the sea to lower home prices. medium.com/@AdamMongrai...

Your regular reminder that this is not an argument about housing, it’s an argument about exclusion. Allowing multiplexes expands housing choice, it allows more sizes. But it reduces exclusion, and this is arguing that CoV hoods should be able to set higher levels of exclusion than multiplex.

Good round-up on "how to leverage upzonings to generate substantial new housing supply." But I'd add: 4—The details matter Which is a point made in the write-up, but worth emphasizing, and also allows me to link to our study of the same title. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Details on how moving chains interact with bedrooms will depend on housing stock and household composition. Here is the Metro Vancouver breakdown, lots of opportunity for households in 3+ bedrooms to split up or downsize into 1 or 2 bedroom homes.

Now it’s the yellow-ish dogwood’s turn. Vancouver spring never disappoints. mountainmath.ca/vantrees

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.