Skills Acquired:

• Calculated housing affordability in Vancouver and Ottawa
• Experimented with varying methods of reclassification for housing affordability data (natural breaks, equal interval, standard deviation, manual breaks)
• Classified Vancouver and Ottawa into affordability zones, ranging from “affordable” to “severely unaffordable”
• Learned about rules governing the delineation of Census Tracts (CTs) in Canada

Classifying Housing Affordability: A Good Proxy for Livability?

• What are the housing affordability rating categories? Who determined them and are they to be ‘trusted’? (You have seen in the previous map how different classification breaks produce very different visual impressions).
• Is affordability a good indicator of a city’s ‘livability’?

affordability

Housing affordability is defined as the mean housing price divided by household income within a Census Tract (CT). As opposed to the mean housing price in isolation (an absolute measure), affordability normalizes by the average household income, and is therefore a relative measure. Insofar as the affordability of shelter is constrained by the amount of money one possesses (for which annual household serves as a proxy), affordability is a better indicator for housing affordability than just housing cost because it provides a control for economic class; the fact that a million dollar home could be perfectly reasonable to one family, while being simultaneously ridiculously unaffordable for another.

The housing affordability rating categories each correspond to a range of this ratio: affordable zones are defined as those for whom the average price of housing is less than 3 times the average household income in a given CT. Moderately unaffordable zones are those with a ratio of 3-4, seriously unaffordable with a ratio of 4-5, and severely unaffordable with a ratio greater than 5. The description and classification of this ratio is, for the purpose of this work, determined by pages 7-9 of a report by Demographia. Such classification schemes are in my opinion, however, inevitably arbitrary, particularly in light of the fact that changes to the scheme result in dramatically different visual representations of the data (see dataclass for visual example of how dramatically affordability appears to differ when different affordability ‘thresholds’ are employed).

Affordability is inevitably, of course, only one dimension of the ‘liveability’ that cities such as Vancouver are much touted for (Vancouver is ranked 3rd on The Economist’s 2016 Liveability List) , albeit, in my view, the metric that should receive the largest weighting in any such calculation. The Economist’s liveavility metric employs Stability, Healthcare, Culture and environment, Education, and Infrastructure as its primary factors. But if too many of a city’s inhabitants are unable to afford housing in regions reasonably connected to the concentration of jobs, then even such enviable factors as culture, environment, healthcare, education, and infrastructure seem immaterial in comparison. I am thus of the belief that affordability is large, if not the largest, determinant of liveability – without which a region will not for the majority of its inhabitants be a truly livable one.