Jens von Bergmann

@jensvb.bsky.social

9755 Followers 612 Following

Data, analysis, visualization, #CensusMapper, transportation cyclist. đź“ŤVancouver, BC

Open Letter to Vancouver Council on the "Villages Plan" Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan Dear Mayor and Council, I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan. Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units. This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people—more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000. At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.
Right-sized fire truck
View from the 8th house from the bottom
Some building that looks like stacked houses
Small kids playing at a water feature
Steam clock tourist trap
unemployment_stats <- get_pumf("LFS",refresh="auto") |> filter(LFSSTAT !="Not in labour force") |> filter(AGE_12 %in% c("25 to 29 years","30 to 34 years", "35 to 39 years")) |> mutate(jd=case_when(is.na(DURJLESS) ~ "Not applicable", DURJLESS<12 ~ "Less than one year", TRUE ~ "One year or more")) |> add_lfs_SURVDATE() |> summarize(Count=sum(FINALWT),.by=c(SURVDATE,jd,AGE_12)) |> mutate(Share=Count/sum(Count),.by=c(SURVDATE,AGE_12)) |> filter(jd!="Not applicable") unemployment_stats |> ggplot(aes(x=SURVDATE,y=Share,colour=AGE_12)) + geom_line() + facet_wrap(~jd) + scale_y_continuous(labels=scales::percent_format()) + labs(title="Unemployment by duration of unemployment", y="Unemployment rate",x=NULL, colour="Age group", caption="StatCan LFS (PUMF)")
TL;DR PUMF data is a valuable piece of StatCan’s data products. But it’s mostly ungoverned and comes in a large variety of formats, encodings, and lack of machine-readable metadata. Sometimes people get caught up in arguments whether data like this qualifies as open data or merely available data, but the space between to two can be bridged to a large extent from the outside by creating metadata out of the bits that are available and parsing the data into a useful form. The canpumf package is such a bridge, it sieves through the messiness of PUMF data, creates machine-readable metadata, and provides it in a highly structured and efficient analysis-ready form to users.
What problem does canpumf solve? StatCan PUMF data is extremely messy. It comes in a wide variety of formats and in most cases without clean machine-readable metadata. Modern reproducible and adaptable workflows using the data are nearly impossible, severely curtailing the usability of the data. The canpumf package aims to provide a unified interface to StatCan PUMF data to acquire, parse, structure, and work with the data in modern data analysis pipelines.
Fable struggling with non-breaking space
BC gross inter-provincial and international migration
Quebec gross inter-provincial migration
Alebrta gross inter-provincial migration
BC gross inter-provincial migration
Components of NPR over time
Makeup of the NPR population in Canada
Non-permanent residents as a share of the total population in Canada
external migration for Canada
unit tests churning along
Tower 1 of Sen̓áḵw with balcony furniture on some balconies.
US-Canada land border crossing by traveller type and country of residency
The rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada and transnational property ownership patterns We consider how housing acts as a potential realm where perception of crisis can activate reactionary nationalism, investigating how it differs from and interacts with other realms (e.g. jobs and wages, crime, and social welfare). We argue that housing produces distinct triggers for reactionary responses, and potentially results in different media framing, politics, and policy trajectories. We detail the rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada, following its spread from British Columbia, where we find that flexible framing of foreign threat often borrowed from other realms. By contrast, pinning Housing Nationalism to policy generally required more tractable definitions of foreignness, tied to surveillance and the application of penalties. We examine the roll out of policy responses associated with Housing Nationalism and lay out potential harms in terms of challenges to liberal ideals, including Canadian multinationalism, immigrant incorporation, and transnational ties. Finally we provide a baseline of Canadian transnational property ownership patterns, demonstrating that within the provinces where Housing Nationalism became most dominant, Canadian residents generally own far more properties abroad than the number of properties owned in Canada by residents elsewhere. Overall, the Canadian case demonstrates the utility of considering housing as a distinct realm motivating the rise of reactionary nationalism.
The solution, we were told, was to largely bypass the tradition of neighbourhood planning, a tradition that brought fame to the city, and impose a generic one size fits all development plan, ending resident comment on most new development. But wait! If simply adding new housing units within existing neighbourhoods were by itself enough to lower housing prices,
Metro Vancouver household composition by bedroom type
Dogwood trees in bloom
The Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory[1][2][3] academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are of questionable quality.[4][5][6] As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.[7]
Under current conditions in most locations, with some reasonable assumptions, it seems like we can say that property taxes are land value taxes. We already have de facto Georgist tax policy. We just need to raise the rates and make them more universal and equitable.
One important shift has been that young adults are living with their parents for longer. That shift is longstanding, gradual and common across larger cities. This steady shift cannot simply be attributed to more recent affordability challenges in some of Canada’s largest cities. Later family formation and longer educational careers, partly associated with life stretching, have likely played into this phenomenon, as have distinctive cultural patterns across different demographic groups.
On May the fourth, the census awakens Complete the questionnaire, your household must!
Welcome to the 2026 Census The Census of Population and Census of Agriculture will take place across Canada this May! There are 3 days until the 2026 Census.
Dogwood trees flowering
Non-late flowering cherry trees in Vancouver
Late flowering cherry tree species in Vancouver
Average commute duration for main mode public transit
Cherry, Plum and Magnolia trees in Vancouver
Interactive tree map for Vancouver
Stained glass window depicting early Canadian settlers converting First Nations people right about the confession box
Makeup of NPR population in Canada
Ontario gross inter-provincial migration flows
Immigration inflows and net NPR in Canada
Gross interprovincial migration flows for BC
It’s not reasonable to live in a growing city and believe your neighbourhood will never change.
Demo of interactive tree map for Vancouver
That's especially the case in Kitsilano, he said, which has an active citizenry and has been the beneficiary of what he refers to as "precious" RT zoning, which encourages the preservation or renovation of older dwellings.
Sen̓áḵw crane at third tower almost dismantled
Douglas Todd: Jarring 18-storey tower on leafy Vancouver street a sign of the out-of-scale times About 10 steel-and-glass highrises, much like the one proposed for Yukon and 14th, are set to arise among character homes within the Broadway plan zone. https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-18-storey-tower-vancouver-out-scale-times