Housing cost in Vancouver: Which classification method would you choose for your audience and why? What if you are a real estate agent preparing a presentation for prospective home buyers near UBC?
If I were a journalist putting housing costs in Vancouver together I would use the Natural Breaks method because I would want to show the variation in costs throughout the city. This would make the map look interesting in a way because some areas would have extremely high prices and others would be more affordable. If I was a real estate agent trying to sell homes around the UBC area I would use the Equal Interval Classification because this shows a map where the pricing of houses are more ‘equal’ and not that unaffordable. As an agent you would want to use this approach because it attracts buyers because when looking at the map it looks as though the housing prices near UBC are not that expensive.
I don’t think we should be using data from 2011 because there have been dramatic changes in the housing market in the past couple of years that would cause the 2011 data to have inaccurate information.
Housing affordability
What is affordability measuring and why is it a better indicator of housing affordability than housing cost alone?
Housing affordability is method used in order to see how much houses cost compared to how much individuals incomes are. It is better to compare affordability than just housing costs because it takes into account someone’s ability of buying a house. It was important to find the average income in order to standardize the data. By doing this standardization we were able to compare Vancouver and London. Affordability was measured by obtaining the ratio of the median income to housing costs.
What are the housing affordability rating categories? Who determined them and are they to be ‘trusted’?
The 13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey provided us with the rating categories that follow:
5.1 & Over – Seriously Unaffordable
4.1 to 5.0 – Moderately Unaffordable
3.1 to 4.0 – Affordable 3.0 & Under
These ratings allow affordability to be monitored and it also informs policy makers of significant decreases in affordability. The International Housing Affordability Survey can be trusted because it covers 92 major metropolitan markets and 406 metropolitan housing markets in nine countries. The World Bank and United Nations also recommended this survey for assessing affordability.
Is affordability a good indicator of a city’s ‘livability’?
I think affordability gives a good sense of how one may expect livability in terms of where they can afford to stay but I do not think that affordability explicitly is a good indicator of livability as a whole. A place that is livable takes into consideration housing, employment availability, and access to health care, education opportunities and poverty rates.
Works Cited
“Census Dictionary – Definitions by topic.” Census Program. N.p., 27 Nov. 2015. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.