I’d be curious to find out if these stats take into account the prevalence of secondary (or even tertiary) suites, especially the unofficial ones. Officially the place I live in is a single family home, originally designed for a family of 4. My family of 3 lives in about 700sqft and there’s another family of 4 living in about 1000sqft upstairs. Do the stats count us as 1 household? I’ve never been sent a census form to fill out, I don’t have a legally distinct address or seperate utilities. I know many people in similar living arrangements, how are we counted in the statistics?
It’s StatsCan, so a household is defined as all the people living in a single unit together. It usually comes down to, if you share a kitchen with the other people, you’re considered 1 household. If you have separate kitchens, you get a separate census to fill out. Five roommates in a house next to a university would be 1 household for the purposes of the census which is completed every 5 years.
Right, but I guess my point is how would statscan know if a house has 1, 2, 3, or 4 units if they all share the same official address? Tax data? Driver’s licence/service cards? And as for the census, how is it accurate if only one of the households in a multi unit house gets one?
Either way it’s irrelevant to this discussion, because the article you linked didn’t use statscan data:
Most data was curated from a select number of sources: Japan Statistical Yearbook, European Housing 2002, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canadian Home Builders Association, Infometrics, US Census.
As you said it doesn’t really matter. Number of rooms isn’t a census question. Neither is the population.
Census households generally report accurately because the data isn’t reported to anyone else so there’s no downside to being truthful. It’s also correlated with other data to double check the validity.
The discussion is are there enough rooms for everyone? The answer is overwhelmingly yes. Our distribution is just absolutely fucked up.
I’d be curious to find out if these stats take into account the prevalence of secondary (or even tertiary) suites, especially the unofficial ones. Officially the place I live in is a single family home, originally designed for a family of 4. My family of 3 lives in about 700sqft and there’s another family of 4 living in about 1000sqft upstairs. Do the stats count us as 1 household? I’ve never been sent a census form to fill out, I don’t have a legally distinct address or seperate utilities. I know many people in similar living arrangements, how are we counted in the statistics?
It’s StatsCan, so a household is defined as all the people living in a single unit together. It usually comes down to, if you share a kitchen with the other people, you’re considered 1 household. If you have separate kitchens, you get a separate census to fill out. Five roommates in a house next to a university would be 1 household for the purposes of the census which is completed every 5 years.
Right, but I guess my point is how would statscan know if a house has 1, 2, 3, or 4 units if they all share the same official address? Tax data? Driver’s licence/service cards? And as for the census, how is it accurate if only one of the households in a multi unit house gets one?
Either way it’s irrelevant to this discussion, because the article you linked didn’t use statscan data:
As you said it doesn’t really matter. Number of rooms isn’t a census question. Neither is the population.
Census households generally report accurately because the data isn’t reported to anyone else so there’s no downside to being truthful. It’s also correlated with other data to double check the validity.
The discussion is are there enough rooms for everyone? The answer is overwhelmingly yes. Our distribution is just absolutely fucked up.