Tag Archives: Vancouver

Ideal Living for Senior Citizens in Vancouver

Final Project: Analysis of ideal living areas for the Vancouver elderly population according to select areas’ accessibility to needed and preferred public service facilities; areas found using ArcGIS and data from Vancouver data catalogue.

Our goal for this project was to find areas within Vancouver that would be considered ideal living for the local elderly population that are either financially or physically unable to use mobile vehicles. We defined these “convenience areas” as those accessible to general public service facilities, and therefore by their proximity to these facilities. Our GIS analysis would then find these convenience areas within the buffer zones of all facilities. To depict a range of convenience areas, we defined those of “highest convenience” to be those areas within the proximity of all facilities whereas “low convenience” areas were those within the proximity of just (any) one of the select facilities.

Seeing as this project assumes a general audience (i.e. the elderly), our definition of convenience areas is subjective and can thus seem too narrow of a criteria to define the needs and preferences of the elderly regarding their ideal living space. Although this was also part of our original goal, it was understood that more data was needed to provide a more in depth analysis on the matter. As mentioned in the report linked below, data on the needs and preferences of senior living homes, as well as the current and projected financial capabilities and options of the elderly population would benefit further analysis on this topic.

Our method of analysis required multiple steps, as described on the project report below, such that all group members had to work on the map together as opposed to dividing the tasks and working on parts of the map separately.

Project Report attached gives a description of the project, the study area, the methods of our group analysis, results, and a discussion on further research that could improve our method of finding areas that would be ideal living for a range of physically able senior citizens in Vancouver.

Attached below is a flowchart that outlines the procedures of our analysis for finding these ideal living areas through ArcGIS.

Flowchart

Attached below is a map of the areas that we would recommend for senior citizens to live in Vancouver. As described in the report linked above, we define areas of convenience to be those within an 800 to 1000 meter radial proximity of select public service facilities such as parks, community centers, libraries, schools, transit stations, and hospitals.

Map_CRAVP

Accomplishment/s:
Examined ideal living areas for the Vancouver elderly by their accessibility and/or proximity to select public service facilities

Vancouver-Ottawa Housing Affordability

Lab 4: Comparing Vancouver and Ottawa Housing Affordability according to housing cost and household income

Affordability shows a visual comparison of Vancouver-Ottawa housing affordability using the manual breaks classification method. As opposed to displaying housing cost, which includes price information alone, ‘affordability’ refers to the ability of a single or cumulative income to purchase a house of some cost. This makes it a better indicator of housing affordability than housing cost as it integrates income and cost information. As determined by the 12th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey 2016 (Wendell Cox Consultancy & Performance Urban Planning: Christchurch, New Zealand), housing affordability rating categories range from a median multiple of under 3.0 being ‘affordable’ to over 5.0 being ‘severely unaffordable.’ This makes ‘affordability’ a potentially good indicator of a city’s ‘livability.’ It is worth noting also, that housing affordability analyses may only give information on single detached housing whereas a city’s livability refers to multiple residential types such as single detached housing, multiplex housing, apartments, condominiums, lane housing, and school housing.

Accomplishment/s:
Analyzed interregional housing affordability according to quantitative survey census tracts

Organized and displayed findings according to differential break classification methods

Quantitative Data Classification for Vancouver Housing Affordability

Lab 4: Spatial Analysis of Vancouver Housing Affordability (using census tracts)

dataclass shows examples of maps utilizing four classification methods in representing housing affordability with Vancouver Census Tracts.

These four classification methods (Natural Break, Standard Deviation, Equal Interval, and Manual Break) help GIS users to display large amounts of complex data simply, as maps. Ultimately, their goal is to relay information in a simple and concise way that caters to the needs and interests of their audience. This could mean withholding information deemed to be unimportant or distracting to the viewers and therefore, GIS users must keep in mind the  different interpretations, complications, and ethical consequences that may arise when organizing data and displaying information in this way. In the case of Vancouver housing affordability, there is a difference between representing the spatial distribution of Vancouver housing affordability as a journalist versus a real estate agent.
A journalist would likely display a map that uses a standard deviation classification method to show average, above-average, and below-average Vancouver housing cost. Since a journalist’s audience would include people other than prospective house buyers, a general idea of average, relatively expensive, and relatively cheap housing would be sufficient and specific prices might not be needed. The ethical implications that arise, however, would be the suggestion of socio-economic exclusion relative to the location of one’s home. A real estate agent, however, would likely opt for a map that uses the natural break classification method so as to be able to relay specific price ranges along with the spatial distribution of similarly priced housing in Vancouver to prospective buyers.