Tessera
Folgen

Jens von Bergmann

@jensvb.bsky.social

Data, analysis, visualization, #CensusMapper, transportation cyclist. 📍Vancouver, BC

2481 Posts9771 Follower612 Folgt
Jacob Loo Dawang@jacobdawang.com · yesterday

🧵 NEW POST: Edmonton’s $15M infill property tax dividend Matching permits to assessment data shows that small-scale infill from just 2024-26 will grow the tax base by $1.8B, and revenues by $15M. That's equivalent to a 0.7% property tax rate increase! #yegcc www.jacobdawang.com/blog/2026/pr...

Edmonton’s $15M infill property tax dividend – Jacob Dawang

Every single-detached home that becomes a rowhome, plex, or backyard home multiplies its assessed value. Matching 2024–2026 building permits to City assessment data, I measure that uplift directly, al...

jacobdawang.com

Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · yesterday

Can’t get this story out of my head. The delays aren’t unusual, the cost comes out at $100k per unit or ~$400/month rent for those non-market homes. Same issues come up for market housing, developers could keep building at lower rents if munis did not impose those delays and uncertainty.

Ryan Jabs@ryanjabs.bsky.social · 2d ago

Another window into why even non-profit housing is so expensive. Saanich delays led to an extra $9milliom (!!) in costs. No one in Saanich is held accountable so they keep dragging their feet and increasing costs. bcbusiness.ca/real-estate/...

Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · 2d ago

Congrats to NY on this new affordable housing development. And congrats on having a mayor who really gets it. Exceptional framing, positioning the non-market housing announcement sandwiched between two clear pro-housing statements.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · 2d ago

We can't solve a housing crisis without building more housing. Today we broke ground on the Casanova Residence, which will soon be nearly 100 affordable and supportive homes with on-site services for New Yorkers. Every new home is a step toward a City that everyone can afford.

Mayor Mamdani stands at a podium next to Deputy Mayor for Housing Leila Bozorg.
Noah Greifer@noahgreifer.bsky.social · 2d ago

I'm so happy to announce version 2.0.0 of my #Rstats package WeightIt is out on CRAN! New features: censoring weights, multilevel propensity scores, improved weights for continuous treatments, bias-reduced ordinal and multinomial models, M-estimation in subgroups Check out the website below!

Weighting for Covariate Balance in Observational Studies

Generates balancing weights for causal effect estimation in observational studies with binary, multi-category, or continuous point or longitudinal treatments by easing and extending the functionality ...

ngreifer.github.io

GRIDS Vancouver@grids.reillywood.com · 2d ago

Some parallels to how zoning was introduced in North America; I get the impression that there was a lot of demand for the “we will keep apartments and shops away from you” awfulness that Bartholomew was selling

Christof Spieler@christofspieler.bsky.social · 2d ago

I think the conspiracy is comforting to people -- "a few bad guys did this." The reality -- "electeds, planners, and most of the public believed that the car was the future and rail transit was outdated" is actually more unsettling since it raises the question of what we're getting wrong now.

Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · 3d ago

Especially when compared to several of the stations closer to downtown that are still dominated by single family homes, more than 40 years after the station opened. These two extremes aren’t unrelated.

Nanaimo Station – Mountain Doodles

Vancouver has been squandering opportunities around existing Skytrain stations. We take a closer look at the Nanaimo Station area.

doodles.mountainmath.ca

iain@maccoinnich.bsky.social · 3d ago

Whenever I’m in Vancouver BC I’m just in shock at the density around suburban Skytrain stations 10 miles out from the CBD

Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · 5d ago

Another way to get at this, in Canada there are 1.56 non-family individuals for every 1-person household. That's a lot of potential to grow the share of 1-person households, and this stat does not even include adult children living with parents. In Quebec City that ratio is 1.2, In Toronto it's 1.9

Non-family individuals vs 1-person households | CensusMapper

This map shows the ratio of non-family individuals over 1-person households. Non-family individuals is a rough proxy for people who might want to live in a one-person household. This excludes couples,...

censusmapper.ca

Oh The Urbanity!@ohtheurbanity.bsky.social · 5d ago

While only 13% of people live in a 1-person household, 30% of households have 1 person. I think this is part of the reason people underestimate the level of demand for smaller (e.g., 1-bedroom) apartments.

Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · last wk.

Everyone loves large planning exercises like the Vancouver Plan. But when it's time for implementation people get cold feet. Even though the Villages is probably the mildest portion of the overall plan. Will the Vancouver Plan suffer the same fate as City Plan in the 1990s and just fizzle?

Abundant Housing Vancouver@ahvancouver.bsky.social · last wk.

The Villages Plan is not that controversial & Council should approve all 17 villages. There was not that much opposition considering most complaints were poorly founded & the result of NIMBY fear-mongering. For comparison, consider 1805 Larch, ONE 5-storey apartment building.

Apartment at 2nd and Larch, 1805 Larch Street
Shane Phillips@shanedphillips.bsky.social · last wk.

I was intrigued enough by this measure to do some further analysis, including looking at national data going back to 1940 and at a bunch of metro areas since 2005. I wrote about it here: domainexpansion.substack.com/p/an-easy-an...

An Easy and Useful Way to Measure Housing Supply Shortages

How many homes are there per single adult and adult couple? The ratio has been declining nationally since 1980, suggesting that Americans aren't forming new households like they could in the past.

domainexpansion.substack.com

Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 2w ago

I'm actually astonished at how clean this graph looks as a diagnostic for our housing ills. Note how close it is to 1 at the start. Houses per single adult or married couple.

Houses per (population over 25 - married couples) Subtracting married couples prevents them from being counted twice, since a married couple doesn't need 2 homes, but 2 single people (ideally) do.
Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · last wk.

Mini-thread on the Vancouver vacancy tax (and resulting study). The tax is Vancouver's 2017 empty homes tax; the study from CD Howe looks at its impact. The study claims the tax had large impacts on vacancies and minimal impacts on prices. As I'll discuss, I think there are problems with the study.

Ripple Effects: The Impact of an Empty-Homes Tax on the Housing Market

The Canadian housing market is experiencing an unprecedented crisis. One solution being explored is the adoption of demand-side measures like Vancouver’s 2017 empty-homes tax. This E-Brief evaluates t...

cdhowe.org

Mauricio Drelichman@mdrelichman.bsky.social · 2w ago

New article in early view at RHE-JILAEH! Together with David González-Agudo and Valentina Ramírez, we reconstruct the cost of housing in Toledo between 1489 and 1810. This is one of the longest such series in existence anywhere in the world. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The cost of housing in the very long run: Toledo, 1489–1810 | Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History | Cambridge Core

The cost of housing in the very long run: Toledo, 1489–1810

cambridge.org

GRIDS Vancouver@grids.reillywood.com · 2w ago

Vancouver council last night, where the hotel union president is asked yes/no if she asked Americans to call in again: "Well, first of all, I'm not under the court of law. I'm not under oath, and you have no legal, judicial responsibility. So I do not respond to questions with malicious intent."

Bild
Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · 2w ago

You almost have to feel sorry for him. Numbers totally detached from reality trying to anchor an unhinged arguments put on UBC letterhead in a desperate attempt to establish authority.

Open Letter to Vancouver Council on the "Villages Plan" Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan Dear Mayor and Council, I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan. Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units. This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people—more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000. At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.
Paul (parking reform) Barter@paulbarter.bsky.social · 3w ago

Tokyo's bike culture and its mostly informal network of safe routes for cycling are under threat from the April 2026 update of Japan’s Road Traffic Act. More from @wrirosscities.bsky.social ... thecityfix.com/blog/protect...

Protecting Tokyo’s Cyclists Is a Gender Equity Issue |

Women commute through Tokyo, Japan. As primary caregivers, women make up the majority of cyclists in Japan. The country ranks 118th on the Global Gender Gap Index. Photo: Alison Sant Despite a lack of...

thecityfix.com