Most economic analysis stops at the city or neighbourhood boundary. Blockonomics begins there — at the scale of the block, the street, the building — where people actually live, spend, and exchange. It is a measurement framework, a data infrastructure, and a policy lens all at once.
Your Block Has an Economy. Nobody's Watching It.
Every city block in Vancouver generates and absorbs economic value every single day. Residents spend money, trade skills, maintain common spaces, and produce social infrastructure that underpins the entire city's functioning. None of it shows up in the official ledger.
Official economic accounts are designed for national GDP, not neighbourhood resilience. The result is a systematic blind spot: the closer you get to where people actually live, the less data exists, the fewer policy tools apply, and the harder it becomes to make the case for investment — even when the need is obvious.
If you can't measure it, you can't defend it. Blockonomics is the measurement system that neighbourhood economies have always needed.
Blockonomics changes this by applying economic analysis at the block scale — Vancouver's 5,806 blocks — and building a data infrastructure that makes neighbourhood-level economic activity legible for the first time. Not as anecdote. As data.
Six Dimensions of Neighbourhood Economic Health
Blockonomics measures economic health across six interconnected dimensions. Together they tell a story no single indicator can: how much value a block generates, how much it retains, and how much leaks away to extractive systems operating outside the community.
Block Budget
Total public spending allocated per block — infrastructure, parks, transit, services. The baseline for understanding what residents are entitled to, and what they actually receive.
BB / blockPrivate Tax Burden
The hidden cost of for-profit service delivery — housing, childcare, energy, insurance — measured in work hours, not dollars. Based on the Time Differential Ratio (TDR) framework.
PTB · TDRLife Efficiency Index
What percentage of a resident's working life is consumed by essential costs — mobility, housing, food, energy — versus liberated for family, community, and meaning?
LTE IndexLabour Exchange
The volume of non-monetary labour circulating within a block — care work, mutual aid, skill-sharing, volunteer maintenance. The invisible economy that holds communities together.
LE · CredytsAsset Commons
The shared physical and natural assets stewardable by a block — micro-plots, green infrastructure, tool libraries, community kitchens. The foundation of a neighbourhood micro-economy.
Micro-AssetsLeakage Rate
The proportion of locally generated spending that exits the neighbourhood to extractive systems — absentee landlords, remote corporations, financialized services. The number that explains everything.
LR%These six dimensions are not independent metrics — they are a system. High private tax burden drives high leakage rate. Low labour exchange correlates with low asset commons. Understanding the interactions is where Blockonomics becomes a policy tool, not just a diagnostic.
5,806 Blocks. One Coherent Picture.
Building a neighbourhood-scale economic framework requires neighbourhood-scale data. Over the past three years, Block Share has developed the infrastructure to make this possible for the first time in Vancouver.
| Dataset | Scale | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Block Budget Map | 5,806 blocks | Per-block public expenditure allocation across 50 Vancouver neighbourhoods, mapped and navigable. |
| Block Budget Data Explorer | v11 | Interactive explorer with non-market housing income attribution, False Creek boundary corrections, and full block prefix/numbering system. |
| LTE Index Calculator | Individual | Life-Time Efficiency calculator measuring the percentage of working life consumed by essential costs. Vancouver baseline: 99.9%. Copenhagen: 63.7%. |
| Community Credyts ABM | Block · Mesa 3.5 | Agent-based model of alternative currency circulation, displacement economics, and community cashout dynamics — stress-tested across all scenarios. |
| Citizens Dashboard | Policy · In progress | Deconstructs official city communications against peer-reviewed evidence. Structured around Defer / Maintain / Renew framework. |
Each dataset is designed to interoperate. The Block Budget Map feeds into the Private Tax analysis. The LTE Index draws from the Mobility for Life Programme cost model. The Community Credyts model stress-tests what happens when the leakage rate falls — and what that means for a block's collective balance sheet.
What Is the Balance, and Who Controls It?
The metaphor at the heart of Blockonomics is deceptively simple: every neighbourhood has a bank account. Public investment goes in. Resident spending goes in. Taxes, productivity, and social infrastructure go in. What comes out — and where it goes — determines whether a community thrives or erodes.
This is what the Blockonomics framework makes visible: not just where public money goes, but where private money goes — and why so little of it circulates back into the neighbourhood that generated it.
The Block Budget Data Explorer quantifies the public side. The Private Tax framework quantifies the extraction side. The Life-Time Efficiency Index quantifies the human cost. Together, they constitute the first coherent account of the neighbourhood economy as a whole system.
Blockonomics research has identified a systematic pattern in Vancouver's civic finances: the deferral of infrastructure maintenance as a budget management strategy — quietly transferring future costs onto residents while current costs are suppressed to maintain political acceptability.
The Citizens Dashboard documents this deferral architecture case by case: aquatic infrastructure, transit extensions, housing. The pattern is consistent. The costs compound. And the residents who will pay them have not been told.
Explore the Blockonomics Toolkit
Blockonomics is not only a theoretical framework — it is a suite of living tools designed for residents, organizers, and policy advocates to use directly. Each tool below is built on the Block Share data infrastructure and is freely accessible.
Block Budget Map
Navigate per-block public spending across all 5,806 Vancouver blocks and 50 neighbourhoods.
Open Map →Block Budget Data Explorer
Drill into budget allocations by block, neighbourhood, and service category. Filter, compare, export.
Open Explorer →Life Efficiency Index
Calculate what percentage of your working life is consumed by essential costs — and how Vancouver compares to cities that have solved it.
Calculate Yours →Private Taxes: The Invisible Hand
The full analytical framework for measuring private extraction in work hours, not dollars. The TDR explained.
Read the Analysis →