To determine the census tract poverty rate based on Statistics Canada 2016 Census of Population data, which metric do I reference?
Prevalence of low income based on the Low-income measure; after tax (LIM-AT) (%)
or
Prevalence of low income based on the Low-income cut-offs; after tax (LICO-AT) (%)
or
some other metric?
or
is either the LIM-AT or LICO-AT an acceptable metric to reference?
Claudia Mezey
Consultant, Built EcologyWSP USA
LEEDuser Expert
14 thumbs up
June 28, 2022 - 6:21 pm
Hi Jennifer! Good question. From my understanding, LIM-AT (%) is more of an informal poverty level metric. The official poverty line is measured by the "Market Basket Measure", which isn't readily extracted from Statistics Canada. Another option to try is documenting via household income...
I'd recommend using Statistics Canada's data viewer for the 2016 Census here.
First, I've filtered the "Geographic Level" as "Province or territory"; the "Census Year" as 2016; and the "Indicator" as "Median total income of households in 2015 ($)". Find the territory with your project, and record the median income. Multiply this by 80% to get your Area Median Income (AMI).
Now, you'll need to compare this to the average income of the census tract where your project is located. Change your "Geographic Level" filter to "Census division". Find the median income of your project's census tract, and confirm that it's below the 80% AMI calculated above. Include in your credit form "Special Circumstances" (and, to be safe, via LEED Coach prior) a note that, because Canada's statisics bureau does not publish "average" household income metrics in its income data tables, only median, that even though the credit language reads that you compare the "average household income" for your project's census tract to AMI, you used median household income for your project's census tract because of data availability. If you do contact LEED Coach, please do share out their reply, given average and median are different metrics, and can differ substantially with the data distribution, so will be useful to hear their take on comparability.