This lab was centered around housing affordability, and required retrieval of Canadian census data from reliable online sources.
The learning objectives were as follows:
- Develop a working knowledge of Canadian Census Data:
- Downloading Spatial and Tabular Census Data
- Join tabular data to spatial layers
- Visualizing housing data
- Terms of Canadian Census Data collection
- Understand quantitative data classification, and creating a map to illustrate the difference between four methods of classification:
- Natural breaks,
- Equal interval,
- Standard deviation; and
- Manual breaks
- Work with ratios to compare datasets, and normalizing data to determine housing affordability.
- Create maps of GIS analyses results.
What does affordability measure?
Affordability is calculated as a ratio of household income to the cost of an item, and is thus a measure of an individual’s ability to purchase a specific item, such as a house, relative to their income. As such, affordability provides a much better indicator of housing affordability than looking at housing cost alone. For example, while a house may be affordable to an individual who makes a good living every month, that same house may be very unaffordable to an individual with a lower salary. Housing affordability is directly relative to income. In Vancouver, for example, most homes are unaffordable, due to the fact that the average individual’s income does not match the high prices of homes.
Housing affordability rating categories:
The various housing affordability rating categories, as set forth by the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey are:
- Severely unaffordable
- Seriously unaffordable
- Moderately unaffordable
- Affordable
In order to assess housing affordability, this survey uses the “Median Multiple”, which is the median house price divided by gross annual median household income. The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey assesses the housing affordability rating categories in combination with the median multiple values. The affordability of housing in a specific region can thus be quantified as follows:
- Severely unaffordable (Median Multiple of 5.1 and over)
- Seriously unaffordable (Median Multiple of 4.1 to 5.0)
- Moderately unaffordable (Median Multiple of 3.1 to 4.0)
- Affordable (Median Multiple of 3.0 and under)
With a Median Multiple value of 3.0, the median house price is two times more than median household incomes, which is considered affordable. With a Mean Multiple value of 5.0, for example, the median house price is five times more than median household incomes, which is considered seriously unaffordable. The higher the Median Multiple value, the less affordable a house is relative to income.
One of the maps I created for this lab compares the housing affordability of Vancouver and Ottawa. As can be seen on the map, the affordability varies considerably.
Affordability as an indicator of a city’s liveability:
Looking at housing affordability alone does not provide a sufficient indication of a city’s liveability, as there are many other factors to be taken into consideration. Liveability encompasses social and environmental factors as well as economic, for example, and other indicators such as safety/crime, international connectivity, climate, quality of infrastructure, urban design, business conditions and opportunity, tolerance, public transportation, walkability, and access to nature are also important to consider when looking at the liveability of a city. Furthermore, affordability does not provide any indication of the quality of a home. In Vancouver, for example, there are many houses of very poor quality, but due to their location, they are still very expensive because of the land and city they are situated in alone. Affordability does hold significance when considering the liveability of a city, but should be looked at in conjunction with these numerous and varied environmental and social indicators, as the liveability of a city ultimately entails the total quality of life that an individual will experience living in a certain place.