Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath Are people liquids or solids? Trick question: they’re kind of both. This matters in terms of how we track people and project their location forward in time. There are basic demographic methods that effectively take people as solids. We can see where they are now. We Continue reading The Trouble with Municipal-level Population…
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath Residential floor space offers a common denominator for trying to standardize across a range of housing metrics (e.g. price per square foot). Unfortunately we don’t have it in the Census in Canada, but we can play around with rooms to get some pretty similar results. Here we Continue reading Age Disparity in Shelter Cost per Room
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath Many Canadian municipalities are implementing reforms to allow multiplexes in formerly single family areas. These initiatives are driven by provincial reforms and federal incentives to increase housing supply. We review the findings from our recent paper studying the outcomes of multiplex reforms in Kelowna and Coquitlam Continue…
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath. What if zoning was responsive to underlying demand to live in an area? That is, rather than reserving parts of the landscape for the exclusive use of those who can afford an entire underlying lot, what if we instead allow people to build enough residential floor Continue reading Demand based zoning
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath. The main housing problem in Canada is that there is not enough of it. We can see this by looking at prices and rents, but also by looking at people’s living arrangements and rates of doubling up. Doubling up is a direct measure of housing hardship Continue reading Housing is a Housing Problem
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath. Housing demand from external migration receives outsized attention in the public discussion. We take a recent Statistics Canada report on housing consumption by immigrants and non-permanent residents as an opportunity to clarify underlying concepts. We also broaden the scope to decompose housing demand in Canada into Continue…
Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath. In our new paper “The new rules: housing shortage as an explanation for family and household change across large metro areas in Canada, 1981-2021” (Lauster von Bergmann 2025) (preprint and replication code) we estimate the impacts of housing shortage on the substantial variation we see Continue reading Housing shortage as an…
Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted on MountainMath. Evidence suggests a clear correlation between rents and rates of homelessness in the USA. The simplest interpretation is that housing shortages drive rents higher and leave more people falling through the cracks of our systems for distributing housing. That is, homelessness is a housing problem. Do Continue reading Homelessness…
Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted on MountainMath. Today the Globe and Mail published an opinion piece about continued flows of “foreign money” in B.C. real estate. Broadly this is a topic that has been discussed in BC for over a decade now and regularly pops up in the news. We’ve written extensively about Continue reading No spike in foreign buying
Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath Who would benefit from dramatically expanding the supply of housing in the market? How would such an expansion address housing need? What non-market interventions would still be required to meet remaining need? How would it influence household formation and migration? This post is picking up where Continue reading Distributional…