The Hunt for Housing Data at Ratio.City: How we get you all the information you need in one place

The Housing Development Data Problem 

The amount of information required to develop a property successfully is extensive and rapidly changing. Acquiring all the relevant documents can prolong the whole development process; there are a multitude of plans and by-laws that may impact development including heritage and environmental protection, area-specific design guidelines, or transit station density bonuses. When applying for a new development, all these different concerns must be addressed in a discussion between developers, planners, lawyers, architects, and municipal staff. This is a desperately important conversation if we want to create thriving communities that can house Canada’s growing and aging population. Still, it can be long and more convoluted than necessary.    

For example, in Toronto, a pre-application meeting involves reviewers, at minimum, from Community Planning, Urban Design, Transportation Planning, Engineering & Construction Services, Transportation Services, Parks Planning, and Urban Forestry (and may include representatives from Heritage Planning, Strategic Initiatives Policy & Analysis, Economic Development & Culture etc).

When submitting an application for a major development in Vancouver, a development must conform with (and this list is not comprehensive) the Protection of Trees By- law, View Protection Guidelines, the Heritage By-law, any Area Specific Plans as well as Zoning and the Official Plan. 

Getting ahold of all this information to assess whether a development is viable takes effort, and we need to find ways to approve and build housing faster in Canada. At Ratio.City we are endeavoring to have all this information in one easy-to-access place. 

How do we pull data together for our platform? 

The Data Team at Ratio.City works hard to gather, clean and consolidate information from a variety of sources.  

Data Sourcing and Freshness 

First and foremost, we ensure that we are completely transparent about where our data is coming from. Every layer on our platform has links to the authoritative original source so that you can go check it out yourself. 

Where possible, our preferred type of data source is an open data portal set up by a municipality (like Open Hamilton or the City of Winnipeg's Open Data Portal). The Geofoundation Exchange and Community Maps of Canada team has also created partnerships with multiple municipalities to create a wonderful database of parcels and building data that we pull from occasionally.  

When we can’t find the information we want on a data portal, we read through Official Plans, bylaws and other documents and digitize relevant maps into geospatial data. For example, in Toronto, we have digitized multiple Official Plan Amendment maps including Inclusionary Zoning areas, Midtown Character Areas, Sun Protected Parks etc. This process takes us up to a week depending on the complexity of the map! 

Once information is in our system, we are also constantly working to make sure it is as up-to-date as possible. Currently, all ~800 or so layers on our platform are checked at a minimum quarterly during a full data audit, and any that are sourced through Esri FeatureServers are checked more frequently, typically on a bi-weekly basis. And we are actively working on further improving data freshness on our platform by automating our data-check process. Shortly, any of our layers that come from Esri FeatureServers will be checked daily and automatically updated on the platform! 

Cleaning, field mapping and adding other useful info 

While we try not to modify data from the original source and upload it to our platform ‘as is’, occasionally we need to clean or add information to make it more useful to our clients. During upload to our platform, we ‘field map’ (standardize) datasets so that information is presented the same way across multiple municipalities. Practically speaking, this means that all park data is displayed the same way, all land use maps are consistent etc. 

When adding information, the most common modification we perform is adding links to PDFs in datasets that outline areas where specific policies are applicable.  For example, there are 6 Community Plans in Vancouver which have now been digitized into one layer with direct links to each policy text. The links to these documents also get checked during our data audit so users don’t have to go hunting around for a weblink that got moved.   

Minimum data requirements 

The whole Ratio.City platform is structured to not only allow users to view the data but to also make assessments through Locate and Develop Mode. So, it’s critical that we have the types of data available on our platform that allow these tools to function correctly.  

Key datasets include parcel boundaries, building footprints (or even better building envelopes), zoning and land use information, and address points. This lets users select housing sites by size, zoning criteria, building coverage etc. using our Locate Tool. Because of this, we strongly advocate for open data at Ratio.City, open data helps improve the collaboration between housing suppliers and cities.  

We also provide information on parks and protected areas, heritage buildings, community and emergency services (schools, fire stations etc), active development and building permits, transit infrastructure, and of course, as much policy information as possible. This way users can both select sites for development based on comprehensive data (in the Locate Tool) and get contextual reports on sites they’ve selected (through the Report generation our platform provides). We’re always happy to add more data based on requests from clients.  

What are our upcoming plans? 

The team at Ratio.City is working hard to put up more information on our platform every day.

This year so far, we’ve added 8 new municipalities and over 150 new layers! We’re always adding more cities and more types of data.  

What would you like to see on our platform?