Housing Affordability in Vancouver VS. Ottawa
—> Comparing housing affordability in both cities using manual breaks, equal interval, and standard deviation.
Data for presenting maps can easily misguide its audience if the person creating the map does not question the ethics of using factual data for his or her own interest.
Someone who is merely trying to present the most authentic information in the most authentic way, as a journalist would, would probably opt for the natural breaks for assessing the values of housing cost. On the other hand, someone who earns a living from the housing market such as most partakers in the real estate business, they might implement their own manual breaks to portray the city of Vancouver as more affordable in the ritzy neighborhoods. The interpretation is definitely misguided when you manipulate the software to break the data at the points you wish to present; but it is not always a bad thing either.
Comparing housing affordability in both cities is best conveyed with the manual breaks map. Housing affordability encompasses
the cost of dwellings, relative to the cost of living in a city.
The map below demonstrates how unaffordable nearly all of Vancouver is in comparison to Canada’s capital. The red indicates extremely unaffordable and as the gradient approaches the more orange and yellowish tones, it becomes affordable.
Therefore, neither city possesses homes which can be considered affordable when factoring in the average income people are making.
The numbers we used to implement the manual breaks are not arbitrary but recommended by Housing Affordability Survey. Since it has been used by a number of world organizations, it is reliable.
I believe affordability is a necessary indicator of the livability of a city, however, other factors are also necessary to deem a city as a good quality of life. Right now, focuses from surveyors of city livability are geared towards things like infrastructure, education, healthcare, economic stability, etc. But as we can
see, a city like Vancouver excels in all of those categories and is therefore considered highly ‘livable’, but affordability makes it virtually impossible for newcomers to drop all belongings and start a new life in Vancouver because of the average dwelling cost that exceeds $1million.
Accomplishment Statement:
Capable of gathering public data to perform quantitative data classifications.