Vancouver Rental and Housing Affordability

This year I has the opportunity to participate in the ECCE App challenge! As a student associate I have loves exploring Esri’s various technologies, and withe this being my second year in the program, my teammates and I wanted to push ourselves to create an app that serves a community here in Canada that is personally important to us.

As the Mustangs for Housing Equity (Nick Chen, Angelica Simone, Samantha Sharp), our team aimed to create accessible and digestible content for the general public in order to be able to understand and even reproduce GIS products. We therefore exclusively used open-source data so that all of our sources could be verified or applied by viewers without requesting permission from data owners. Despite the complexity of the analysis techniques that we used, we ensured that the completed product was available as a dashboard with toggles and explanations for each layer and function of the map. The general public can become informed of issues on housing affordability. By using our app, they are able to navigate which neighborhoods may be sustainably affordable based on their income. Governments and NGOs may also navigate through the vacancy rates in the Metro Vancouver Regional District area to identify where housing development may be required. Ultimately, by having open-source data and making an accessible final app, our team will be actively supporting awareness and understanding of the Vancouver housing market, and broadly GIS products.

As seen below, our dashboard allows users to select by region below to discover the area! Each region of greater Vancouver has its own unique physical and social features, making it an ideal area to rent in. By exploring the rent pop ups and selecting regions here to learn more, we hope that you learn more about and feel informed regarding where you want may want to move next!

App Dashboard
Zoom to a Specific Region

Link to App

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/ca07db1060dd4b2194d91109e3c41840

Link to Story Map

https://arcg.is/X5fmP1

I would like to say a big thank you to our ECCE coordinator Kathy Tang for all of her support, as well as the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Western Ontario! Nick, Angelica, and I had an amazing experience and are extremely grateful for the leaning opportunities that we have been provided.