Abstract
The lower mainland is a vast region with many liveable regions, which makes buying a new home a tedious process. However, this project aims at creating general guides that will help home-buyers locate key regions that will ideally ease this stressful process. This project works to evaluate communities within Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond for relative liveability for three distinct demographic groups: families with young children, families with children age 13 to 18 and Seniors/empty nesters. Through this analysis we have created three maps that exhibit the highest degree of accessibility for each demographic group based on public transit, schools, community centers, and parks/sports fields.
Introduction
For homebuyers there are numerous factors that come into consideration when making such a large investment. Most homebuyers will take into account not only monetary investment factors but also factors that affect their family's well-being and lifestyle. For this project we intend focus on three main groups of buyers: the young family, families with kids in high school and the elderly. This project will investigate the factors that would have an effect on each group of homebuyers. We are not going to take into consideration of monetary factors because those are more clearly defined. Rather we intend to explore other factors that would affect a families well-being and lifestyles choices.
Because these three groups are in different places in their lives and have different priorities, choosing common factors is difficult and restrictive. However, we have chosen to include elementary schools, high school, community centers, park space, transit stops, and libraries to gauge the desire of each age group for different communities. These amenities provide basic services that are required by all people within these groups (with the exception of schools for the elderly).
We have chosen to restrict our analysis to Burnaby, Vancouver, and Richmond because these cities are in a central location in the lower mainland. The communities within would allow families to stay close to the downtown core while providing a range of income groups to select from.
With this said, we intend to find the ideal neighborhoods for each of our age groups to buy into based on their family needs.