Residential housing development by access to public transport areas

The scope of analysis included municipalities where housing development location data were recorded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). For the public transit service area boundaries, the analysis included municipalities where a regularly scheduled public transit service was identified and for which geospatial data were available in a reference year.

Data sources, methodology and limitations

The summary data presented in this release rely on the census metropolitan area (CMA) and census agglomeration (CA) concepts (see 2021 Census of Population Dictionary for the full definitions).

The method used to estimate public transit service area boundaries and the housing development counts was as follows:

1) Locations of public transit stops of all kinds (bus, trolley, surface and underground rail, ferry) were obtained from the municipalities' or the local transit authorities' websites or were directly provided by them to Statistics Canada. Complete data coverage was achieved for the municipalities constituting the 41 CMAs. Other municipalities inside CAs and outside of CMAs and CAs were included when a regularly scheduled public transit service was identified and geospatial data were available.

2) Public transit stop locations and the Road Network File data were used to create service areas based on distance and public transit carrying capacity.

3) CMHC data were geoenabled when latitude and longitude coordinates were available.

4) Housing development records without coordinates were geocoded using two geocoders: standard street address-based or the Legal Land Subdivision Description (LLSD)-based. Any housing development records that were missing street address or LLSD information were not geo-codable and were omitted from the scope of the project.

5) CMHC housing development records from small population/rural areas were excluded from the analysis based on the recommendations from the CMHC, where data collection takes place on a sample basis. More specifically, the CMHC webpage "Starts and Completions and Market Absorption" indicates that "Centres with populations below 10,000 are enumerated on a sample basis, also in the last month of each quarter." Due to data filtering, the published denominator estimates might not correspond to the estimates published by the CMHC.

6) Service area boundaries were used to estimate the housing developments counts using the "point-in-polygon" approach.

7) The proportion of the housing developments (starts, under construction, completions) within a service area for each geographic unit in scope was calculated by dividing the estimated counts within a service area by the geographic unit's total number of housing developments for the reference period.