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Housing Prices in British Columbia: Quantifying the Zoning Effect

2025· article· en· W4408257907 on OpenAlexaffvenueabout
Nathan Zemp

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Planning and Policy / Aménagement et politique au Canada · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHousing Market and Economics
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZoningGeographyAgricultural economicsEconomicsCivil engineeringEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

British Columbia (B.C.)’s housing prices have increased dramatically in recent times, and one potential explanation is municipal zoning bylaws limiting housing supply. However, the effect of zoning on housing prices in aggregate has not yet been studied in B.C. In this study, I use a regression analysis, adapted from an Australian study, to estimate the “zoning effect”: the extent to which zoning controls increase the sale prices of dwellings. I calculate this effect for detached homes in 30 of B.C.’s largest cities and towns, and for apartments in the Metro Vancouver region. I look at how home prices changed between 2016 and 2022, and the extent to which the zoning effect influenced this trend. Finally, I evaluate the potential of government initiatives aimed at decreasing the cost of housing through the lens of the zoning effect, and suggest possible future courses of action.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.019
Threshold uncertainty score0.134

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.007
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.246
Teacher spread0.228 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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