Final Project: Mapping Potential Affordable Housing Locations in Toronto

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Cartography / Geographic Information Science / Spatial Analysis

Being the largest city in Canada, Toronto has a population of over 2.5 million people, but the housing problems in the city has been worsening gradually. Therefore, we aim to address this social issue by looking for potential sites for new affordable housing in our project. We will be using ArcGIS to map potential locations and conduct spatial analysis on existing data's of current affordable housing including their surrounding environments.

Affordable housing refers to shelters where the total monthly shelter cost is situated at or even below the average market rent by unit type, i.e. houses and apartments. Toronto City is ranked as the second most expensive city with the least affordable housing. The high demands of affordable housings in Toronto is one of the trickiest and most complicated social issues in the community. From 2005-2015, the apartment rents of a bedroom increased by 20%, whereas the Toronto median household income only increased by 5%. A citizen of Toronto, on average, would still need to wait for 10-12 years for an affordable house, as the average housing waitlist includes approximately 97,000 active households.

In this situation, we aim to propose and locate new potential building sites for affordable housing sites in Toronto and the analyses we are planning on doing in this project are:

1. To suggest the potential locations to build new affordable houses in Toronto.

2. To present the relevant criteria’s level of importance for building affordable houses in Toronto, which is not well-documented.

3. To evaluate the reliability and consistency of the results, and to also assess the reasonability and practicability of the results.

Please refer to this link to read more: https://blogs.ubc.ca/trtaffodablehousing/

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Learning Significance

  1. -Multi-Criteria Evaluation is very ideal for suitability mapping as it considers multiple criteria to derive a result.

    -We can combine each criterion with different weighting to highlight the importance of one criterion over the other for decision making.

    -In our case, we want to build affordable housing based on surrounding environments and social factor to ensure that the necessary infrastructure will be accessible to residents living in those affordable housing.

    -We looked at areas with noticeable better access to transportation and mental health centres including adult education.

    -We performed spatial analysis on current affordable housing to learn about the factors that help decide current affordable housing locations. We learned that skill training centre has the highest contribution.