August data is in now, trend holds steady.

To realize the Right to Housing we need an effective right to build housing. Unfortunately that's not universally understood. E.g. the City of Vancouver has called on the province to declare housing as a human right, but at the same time it continues to severely restrict the building of housing.

You know where I'll be: with @ahvancouver.bsky.social at Belmont & Blanca at 2 pm for Vancouver's Worst Zoning: The Walking Tour, TODAY!

Wrote about how California needs to get serious about the urban disorder our failure to build housing has created.

I've spent a year trying to get some concrete answers about Township of Langley Mayor Eric Woodward's promise to transfer his real estate holdings to a charity devoted to local causes. The B.C. registrar ordered him to share financial statements with me. He did not: theijf.org/eric-woodwar...

Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs. “Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.” worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

New lit review post: filtering. 1/

LA explaining why state intervention was required in the first place.

Great stuff here trying to bring more housing opportunities (Six Floors and Corner Stores!) to Vancouver's active transportation networks and parks from @lucymaloney.bsky.social and @onecityvan.bsky.social Full motion: council.vancouver.ca/20250917/doc...

IMPORTANT: Here in Vancouver on Sept 17th, City Council will consider a motion by Councillor @lucymaloney.bsky.social directing Staff to look at allowing 6-storey apts & retail at corners along active transport streets & around parks. This idea should have been done 10+ years ago. Please support.

No exaggeration to say there's a sentiment in urban planning that society should be limited to the living standards that were affordable in the 1920s. You don't see this implicit argument in many other areas of social and economic policy.

Vancouver planners spelled out the answer to this very clearly: Allowing larger laneway homes would be valuable for families, and planners believe that creating value is bad. Therefore homes sizes should be capped to be too small to be comfortable for families. council.vancouver.ca/20090616/doc...

The CBC did a story on the NIMBYs fighting the rezoning for the elementary school in the Olympic Village. I'm happy with the quote I got in at the end! youtu.be/Z8j56MEne0c?...

Read this. arachnemag.substack.com/p/the-leviat...

This type of minimum alternative zoning is a really good way to implement state (or provincial) upzoning legislation. It guards against municipalities watering down legislation and encourages municipalities to improve on the minimum zoning to tailor outcomes to local neighbourhood characteristics.

The most frustrating part of these decisions is not that council is working so hard to get fewer homes, but that it’s in total opposition to what staff told this developer (support). How is anyone supposed to know what to build? Total process failure www.timescolonist.com/local-news/e...

Apartments (including rentals and below market homes!) are banned from most of the city's nice side streets. That sucks! @lucymaloney.bsky.social's motion to legalize 6 floor apts by parks and bike routes could help change that. Here's how you can show support: pwaldkirch.ca/2025/09/12/s...

this really should be framed as a policy choice, not as a naturally occurring phenomenon

@ericlombardi.bsky.social of More Neighbours Toronto’s got an op-ed titled: “The condo market is crashing. Here’s how we keep building as prices fall.” The answer is to bring down hard costs to make projects viable at lower prices. Single-stair, elevator, European standards – time for code reform!

1/ The TC published my opinion piece on Victoria's OCP. It's critical that Council pass this. The half-century old decision to stop building small apartments in Victoria, and much of Canada, is behind many of our problems. It's time to start fixing that. #yyj www.timescolonist.com/opinion/comm...

Vacancy trutherism is just an expression of anti-housing sentiments. Add some handwaving about demographics and season with your preferred ideological spice mix and you are all set with some pseudo-scientific anti-housing talking points.

I have followed empty homes tax discussions in places with growing population, interesting to see how discussions and motivations differ in a city where the population is declining.

Worried the proposed four storey school won’t fit the character of the neighbourhood? Adding some office space and housing on top of the school fixes that. Somewhere between 12 and 17 storeys is a good baseline, but to be safe we should add a few extra storeys to future-proof it.

This sounds good, and it follows the playbook in other places where senior levels of government have stepped in to break municipal gridlock and misaligned incentives. Curious how the details play out and how much ability munis retain to nerf and weight down the overrides.

omg some Olympic Village residents are trying to NIMBY the elementary school. They're citing "neighbourhood character" for why four floors is just too much damned school for their neighbourhood

"[T]he idea that immigrants, temporary foreign workers and students are taking jobs from Canadians seems to have entered mainstream thinking and contributed to policy changes..." See also housing, e.g., our Housing Nationalism paper: open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/c... www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

i gave the pro-palestine protests shit for not policing themselves against hamasniks and antisemites. what's good for the goose is good for the gander: if abundance won't police itself against freaks who don't believe in liberal democracy it ain't worth shit publiccomment.blog/p/when-is-a-...

Super great course notes on "Reproducible and Trustworthy Workflows for Data Science" from Tiffany Timbers and colleagues at UBC: ubc-dsci.github.io/reproducible...

CoV planning is a deep cover operation to turn everyone into libertarians.

Really curious what the justification for RT-8 zoning is (duplex zoning in part of Kits). And why council and planning think this area is so precious that basically nothing, not even the most mundane SFH, can get built there without going through a kangaroo court of public opinion.

I have encountered this too, in my experience confronting people with data does not help. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In this context it’s probably worth pointing out the scale of the impact of movements in market rent. It directly impacts all movers, that’s 18% of the population in CoV in a given year.

Great post from @kevinerdmann.bsky.social on the postwar downzonings that made the first round of zoning look super permissive. Bluesky hasn’t seen enough of this chart. kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

New MMI piece! Development charges need to come down. A lot. However, if the federal government is going to compensate municipalities for cutting DCs, it must ensure that it doesn't reward Vancouver and Toronto for making poor decisions.

If you thought there was more traffic this morning compared to last week you probably weren’t wrong. This post is 7 years old now looking at Surrey where traffic loop data is openly available, but unfortunately the phenomenon of school dropoffs/pickups generating traffic is fairly universal.

Two upzonings in British Columbia. Kelowna delivered a big increase in construction but Coquitlam did not. Because Coquitlam also imposed red tape, parking requirements, etc. A reason for setting targets for completions, not theoretical "capacity". www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/3

New post: I read Patrick Condon's book, so you don't have to. 1/

Happy that the paper by @tomdavidoff.bsky.social @lausterna.bsky.social Tsur Somerville and I on the outcomes of the multiplex upzonings in Kelowna and Coquitlam is out. While the two zoning reforms look similar on paper, we detail how their real world outcomes differ. doi.org/10.1016/j.jh...

Multiplexes are coming! But more slowly in some places than others. Why? @jensvb.bsky.social & I highlight our recent (open access) paper w/ Tsur & @tomdavidoff.bsky.social comparing multiplex reforms in Kelowna & Coquitlam & also look at Vancouver so far. homefreesociology.com/2025/08/29/m...

ah yes, vital that we have housing for cars and not people

Tokyo. The world’s biggest city is profoundly shaped by smallness.

Three towers of Sen̓áḵw (phase 1) rising above Kits 6 Reserve as reclaimed by the Squamish Nation near downtown Vancouver. senakw.com/place Here emerging from trees on the Parkview Tower lot at the foot of the Burrard Bridge nearby (also formerly part of Kits 6). 1/

Vancouver’s Integrity Commissioner has found Mayor Ken Sim and ABC councillors broke the code of conduct on multiple occasions for coordinating amendments to controversial motions in separate private online conversations ahead of public council meetings

WATCH & SHARE: This is very good. A prominent youtuber is actually giddy (but also very thorough in covering the joys, advantages, issues and challenges) about how trying biking for transportation in London has changed his life. Easy to watch & more convincing probably than 99% of public campaigns.

Spoilsport! Everyone knows this is Gatorade powder, claiming otherwise is going to confuse all the kids that I have been educating on this over the years.

Welcome to BC, where blowing through a light that's been red for 20 seconds, severely injuring a father, and killing his infant daughter, gets you found "not guilty of driving causing death and dangerous driving causing bodily harm."

Someone just alerted me to an incredibly important release today www.canada.ca/en/immigrati... 🧵 Half of all the new permanent residents in Canada are coming from the ranks of the temporary residents we welcomed to Canada to study and work. That's good news. (Share could and should be higher!)

A new one from me: scoutmagazine.ca/jiangnan-wok...

The provincial housing reforms haven't done nearly enough in the City of Vancouver, the epicentre of the housing crisis. The appointment of Christine Boyle as the new housing minister is a chance for a reset. Read more in my op-ed on the DailyHive: dailyhive.com/vancouver/bc...

{cansim} v0.4.4 is now on CRAN. Mostly a maintenance update with some improvements to handling of local database caching. Related, if you aren’t making use of local caching via parquet you probably should, the get_cansim_connection function makes that a seamless dropin alternative to get_cansim.

New post: a review of Cameron Murray's 'The Great Housing Hijack". On land and housing prices: 1/