This project can be viewed at www.halifaxhousinganalysis.tech.
This project will tackle the analysis of housing prices and gentrification trends for the city of Halifax, NS, with the goal of ultimately making suggestions on how to resolve certain housing crisis issues that have arisen within recent years. This should be done with careful consideration of demographic trends and would ideally prioritize disproportionately affected groups of individuals. To accomplish this, we intend to analyze housing and rental cost trends for areas of Halifax while considering changes through the lens of gentrifications and its varying social impact on various citizens (notably minority and low-income communities). Property taxes for Halifax housing will likely be relevant to this analysis as well. Much of the project focus will involve creating effective visualizations that showcase these trends, and any models that may be applied will prioritize interpretability wherever possible.
We intend to utilize the housing census data to generate interactive visualizations (using plotly.dash) of the distributions of average housing price and rental costs for different areas within Halifax. It will be of interest to include a breakdown of which areas have been gentrified, as well as to analyze which demographics of residents may be disproportionately affected by this.
Depending on data availability, given that the NS Housing Census data is gathered in five-year intervals we may attempt to formulate a regression task for this problem (i.e price prediction based on historical data) to train a machine learning model to predict average housing and rental prices for each Halifax area 5 years from the date of the last released census (2021). Additionally, consideration will be given to a potential classification task for predicting which areas not currently classified as gentrified may become gentrified in the near future. However, consideration will need to be given to likely limitations of such a model such as lack of ability to process historically and socially relevant events and/or factors that may influence gentrification and which cannot easily be represented as features.
TL;DR: Analysis of Halifax (NS) housing trends including costs of housing vs rent, gentrification, and population density.