Scenario for the fourth assignment:
You are currently employed by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, as a data journalist and need to compile some maps to accompany an article on cost of housing and housing affordability, which is one of the ‘livable’ city indicators. There are many indices used to measure ‘livability’ and Vancouver is thought to be one of the most ‘livable’ cities in the world. However, when looking at one metric of livability, housing affordability, Vancouver is one of the two or three most unaffordable cities in the world. You will calculate housing affordability (a ratio of household income to cost of owner dwelling) for Vancouver and Montreal.
Methods of Classification (sorting data into groups):
Natural Breaks – Looks for natural groupings in the data to come up with a classification based on the number of classes that you specify. For example the breaks could be assigned based on size from largest to smallest data sets.
Equal Intervals -Divides data into groups with equal range of values
Standard Deviation – Places the breaks above and below the mean value until all the data is contained within the classes
Manual Breaks – Manually assigning how the data should be divided.
Click the links to see the maps:
- Vancouver: VancouverAffordability
- Montreal: MontrealAffordability
Comparison using Natural Breaks: Vancouver vs Montreal
As a journalist I would choose to use the Natural Break map because I would want to show that both of these cities are expensive, but Vancouver is relatively more expensive in comparison to Montreal. If I was a real estate agent I would prefer to use the Equal Interval Maps to show that prices of houses around UBC are relatively inexpensive. Because convincing people that prices are not expensive would allow me to sell more houses. There are ethical implications because we can create altered perceptions of the data. If I were to sell houses, ethically it would mean I am choosing to shape the buyers perceptions of the data one way, without showing them other methods of approach.
Affordability measures household income to the cost of the property people own. It is a good indicator of housing affordability because income gives us a clear indicator of how much money the person can spend on their house. However affordability is not a good indicator of a city’s ‘livability’ because it does not include recreational locations that impact the hospitality of a person. Some of the indicators of livability could be access to education, accessible market and leisure regions.
Accomplishment Statements:
- Learned how to work with tables, joins, classifications, normalization and visualization in order to map census data on housing affordability of Vancouver and Montreal.
- Learned to access and acquire Canadian census data.