Unfunded IZ presupposes a permenant housing shortage: the moment rents fall too low to cross-subsidize the unfunded mandate, development stops until rents rise again. It's housing policy pseudoscience.
The SMS are annoying anyway, the app has push notifications and that’s plenty. It’s annoying that SMS notifications are on by default, but they can be disabled.
Not the accelerated path, took over a year from DP application to BP issuance. And I think you are right, that does not conform to the pre-approved designs.
Do you know what the address is for that project?
Is that one of those fast-tracked designs? I have noticed that these 2+2 projects get to building permit in about 5 months as opposed to the 13 months average for multiplexes overall.
It's done! Writing a textbook takes a really long time. Thanks to my coauthors and all the 🇨🇦 economists that offered input and resources along the way.
www.mheducation.ca/product/labo...
No, thank you! Great work. It's really valuable to have people who understand the local particularities do this work.
Great analysis from Jacob (as usual) on the continuing success of Edmonton to create an environment where it’s easy to build the housing people want.
It’s kind of endearing though. You can just see this scene play out where a business asks a random foreigner to romanize their business name. And then put that unholy mashup in big letters on their store. And years later it becomes a global brand. Like DinTaiFung
High-density infill improves the lifecycle balance of property tax to servicing costs.
“Growth pays for growth” implies that high-density infill should pay negative development fees.
Looks like this is converging on German pedelec definition to regulate e-bikes there. Which works well. No need to reinvent the wheel, just copy Germany’s regulation.
That’s mostly a question about getting that data into CensusMapper, which is the API server for cancensus. CensusMapper is getting a deep revamp right now, and that will also make it easier to more flexibly add other datasets. For 2026 census we will have that, and we might also backfill for 2021.
{cancensus} v0.6.0 is now on CRAN. This version includes a long list of performance improvements as well as a new feature to help visualize census variable hierarchies in the console. Big thanks to @dshkol.bsky.social for leading the work on this release!
Having something like "Taiwanese romanization" would already be a huge improvement over the status quo, in practice there are still several competing systems in us in Taiwan right now.
It’s kind of funny actually. I did not read that paper in detail, but a lot of it just seems to recast standard spatial analysis in the unit root language economists are familiar with from working with temporal (so 1D) autocorrelation.
on the one hand, it's dope to see spatial analysis win Econometrica's best paper (!)
on the other, it's so deeply troubling that this statement is news to economists in 2026
Interesting. No idea why.
I got mixed feelings about this. Density is a fraught metric, and population weighted density fixes some of these. But it comes with problems of its own. Starting from the fact that it’s ill-defined, it critically depends on the geographic partition used to calculate it.
Non-late flowering cherry trees in Vancouver
Compare that to all the other cherry trees, many of which will by now have lost their flowers and start to show leaves:
You can filter which specific trees are shown. For example species that generally flower later during cherry season. (That is now)
KWANZAN FLOWERING CHERRY
SHIROFUGEN CHERRY
PINK PERFECTION CHERRY
(Someone with more knowledge about cherry trees and Vancouver climate can likely refine this.)
Or as broken down by Uytae in more entertaining form.
Looks like someone has been getting high on (highly questionable) StatCan population projections...
This is bananas. Even worse is that governments have systematically undermined Vancouver as the region’s centre.
“Downtown Surrey” is 100% the result of arbitrary policy choices that have choked Vancouver.
With March data in, year over year change in travel to the US has been mostly stable. Curious to see where this goes, but for now this is consistent with changes in travel patterns to the US after the 51st state crazy-talk being here to stay.
I think Starter Parks have been one of the best ways to grow the conversation on smarter, better cities here on @bsky.app. This was my 1st (I have several you should check out). Please consider following the accounts on them, and share with your followers who love cities & want them to be better!
Really struggling to understand the game plan here. A hotel union spending member dues to oppose hotels. Unless it's some rand plot to capture city hall as additional lever, but that seems very far fetched.
Screenshot of my photo roll, showing 15 pictures of bright pink cherry blossoms.
I am just a simple Vancouverite in the springtime this year, and I will absolutely not apologize for it.
TIRED: zoning exists to protect residential land uses from industrial encroachment
WIRED: zoning exists to protect industrial land uses from residential encroachment
INSPIRED: zoning exists to protect industrial land uses from God
(Metro Vancouver Policy: metrovancouver.org/services/reg... )
What if instead we trash the bungalow and bury some toxic waste in the backyard. That turns the $600k bungalow into at $500k bungalow and voila - it’s more affordable.
And if we do that at scale the whole city becomes affordable!