Planning for shrinking cities

[Doady]

No one wants to live in Toronto. Only immigrants are stupid enough to want to move there. Without immigration, Toronto is doomed.

[EspionNoir]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I should add. I don't necessarily think that megacities offer the highest quality of life. I think they are quite simply a function of the economic age we live in and national competitiveness means that governments will favour boosting those megacities, often at the expense of smaller cities. We see this, for example, in how Toronto gets billions in transit funding in Ontario, as I discussed in another thread. This is reality. It's why I find it so bizarre that people seem to think that we're going to have a huge problem with abandoned suburbs. We won't. A far bigger problem is the collapse of rural Canada and the possibility that even more small towns will become economically unviable after this downturn.

I bet it’s already a challenge in rural Manitoba. It’s what happens when over 60% of Manitobans live in the provincial capital. According a research study article written in the early 2000s, Winnipeg had been the only city in the province which was heavily advertised for tourism, Brandon is the second largest city (meaningless ranking) and got had got none.

It first puzzled me when I learned that last year immigration to Winnipeg was the highest it has even been (20k-25k as far as I remember) when at the same time Manitoba had its largest interprovincial loss. It’s hard for places other than Winnipeg in MB to be allocated important resources. For aspiring people in rural Manitoba, they either have to move to Winnipeg or leave the province. I guess this is a downside of Winnipeg having no real competition in the province, but it surely seems that this focus on Winnipeg made it possible to become the 7th largest city with growing amenities again.

Winnipeggers saying in cute voice “in 10 years we will have close to 1 million people” while people in rural Manitoba say “where’s our share?”.

[Spocket]

Why would immigration fall so dramatically? It won't. It won't because Canada doesn't have replacement level natural population growth. As soon as the panic is over, the immigration rate will rise dramatically. It probably won't be as high as it was in 2019 but it will return to those levels within a relatively short period of time. It hardly seems like the sky is falling.

[Spocket]

Originally Posted by logan5

Top economists predict never before seen job growth for the latter half of this year. A wave of immigration is sure to follow...

I think that that's great news but I haven't heard this. Can you link a source, please?

[wave46]

Originally Posted by Spocket

Why would immigration fall so dramatically? It won't. It won't because Canada doesn't have replacement level natural population growth. As soon as the panic is over, the immigration rate will rise dramatically. It probably won't be as high as it was in 2019 but it will return to those levels within a relatively short period of time. It hardly seems like the sky is falling.

Canada still has a natural change of +80,000 people per year. That's declining due to our increasing death rate and falling birth rate.

That being said, the idea that immigration will fall is due to the (potential) recession COVID-19 induces. If the unemployment rate is high enough, the government would be hard pressed to justify taking in 300,000 new immigrants per year under those conditions.

It remains to be seen if this is true. There are a lot of ingrained reasons why the powers that be would like to keep immigration high (high labour supply = depressed wages, longstanding cultural mantra of 'Immigration is a good thing!') and anger at high unemployment will initially be smothered by generous dollops of government money.

However, should the recession be long or severe, the powers that be may find their support for immigration is suddenly tested by an angry populace.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by EspionNoir

I bet it’s already a challenge in rural Manitoba. It’s what happens when over 60% of Manitobans live in the provincial capital. According a research study article written in the early 2000s, Winnipeg had been the only city in the province which was heavily advertised for tourism, Brandon is the second largest city (meaningless ranking) and got had got none.

It first puzzled me when I learned that last year immigration to Winnipeg was the highest it has even been (20k-25k as far as I remember) when at the same time Manitoba had its largest interprovincial loss. It’s hard for places other than Winnipeg in MB to be allocated important resources. For aspiring people in rural Manitoba, they either have to move to Winnipeg or leave the province. I guess this is a downside of Winnipeg having no real competition in the province, but it surely seems that this focus on Winnipeg made it possible to become the 7th largest city with growing amenities again.

This is a great example. And similar dynamics are playing out in every province, regionally and nationally.

Here's my prediction: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver coming out of this even more dominant in the country. It will be interesting to see where Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton end up. Calgary was quickly becoming the fourth addition to TMV even with depressed oil prices. Curious to see if they get surpassed by Ottawa.

[SignalHillHiker]

St. John's apparently shrank a little recently. It's hard to gauge whether it's noticeable given the pandemic, but... boo. There are limits to my ability to raise a smile and enjoy life here. The percentage of the city I enjoy (downtown, rowhouse core, scenic countryside) is small and broken up by among the worst form of suburbia I've ever seen anywhere. I love the language, art and culture, humour, and sense of belonging that comes from living in an old city that created your people... but it's already a sacrafice to live here dealing with the relatively small population, poor weather much of the year, aging demographics, struggling economy, etc. If I could happily live away from here, I gladly would - Montreal, Dublin, London, Berlin, anywhere like that. But I just get debilitating homesickness after a few months or years, which inevitably degrades into a genuine depression that I never want to live through again. If St. John's got any smaller, maybe there wouldn't be much left to miss.

[Truenorth00]

In my experience, the smaller cities in Canada have some of the worst sprawl. Sure the GTA is sprawlicious. But it has 7 million people, a ton of industrial activity and several town/city centres. Compare that to say Ottawa where the commuter shed is easily 70km in every direction and that's 1.3M people.

[goodgrowth]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

In my experience, the smaller cities in Canada have some of the worst sprawl. Sure the GTA is sprawlicious. But it has 7 million people, a ton of industrial activity and several town/city centres. Compare that to say Ottawa where the commuter shed is easily 70km in every direction and that's 1.3M people.

*cough cough* greenbelt *cough cough*

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Spocket

Why would immigration fall so dramatically? It won't. It won't because Canada doesn't have replacement level natural population growth. As soon as the panic is over, the immigration rate will rise dramatically. It probably won't be as high as it was in 2019 but it will return to those levels within a relatively short period of time. It hardly seems like the sky is falling.

As I understand it, the essence of immigration is to maintain a steady or growing labour force, and not population level, per se.

By itself, a growing population is not a metric to cling to. What matters is growing, or at least maintaining, the pool of people who contribute to economic productivity and government revenues. For example, Israel's population is growing thanks to the extremely high birthrates among Ultra-Orthodox Jews who neither work, pay taxes nor serve in the military. On the other hand, the population of secular or, at least, non-Ultra Orthodox Jews who pay the bills seems to be flat - and, given the high numbers of talented, young Israelis who seem to have moved to many cities across the West in recent years - may even be declining. I would not envy Israel in this case.

Anyway, I would agree with you that immigration is not going to go down after Covid. This is a temporary setback of between 6-18 months.

[Spocket]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

As I understand it, the essence of immigration is to maintain a steady or growing labour force, and not population level, per se.

By itself, a growing population is not a metric to cling to. What matters is growing, or at least maintaining, the pool of people who contribute to economic productivity and government revenues. For example, Israel's population is growing thanks to the extremely high birthrates among Ultra-Orthodox Jews who neither work, pay taxes nor serve in the military. On the other hand, the population of secular or, at least, non-Ultra Orthodox Jews who pay the bills seems to be flat - and, given the high numbers of talented, young Israelis who seem to have moved to many cities across the West in recent years - may even be declining. I would not envy Israel in this case.

Anyway, I would agree with you that immigration is not going to go down after Covid. This is a temporary setback of between 6-18 months.

But that's my point. There's no reason to think that this will result in some policy change.

And I don't claim that a growing population is a metric for that many things. However, while we've gained a certain number of births due to natural increase, that doesn't mean we've actually gained working population. We know for a fact that Canada's birth rate doesn't equal replacement level. Our fertility rate is among the lowest in the world. That means that while we may be adding people, there are fewer and fewer working age people available in Canada every year. In other words, without immigration, our population would definitely be falling eventually and our working age population would already be seeing declines. Even if the effects of COVID-19 are prolonged, eventually we'll pass through and out of it into a normal economy. There's no reason to think we won't, anyway. The idea that our cities are going to suddenly start shrinking is...well, it's paranoid.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Spocket

The idea that our cities are going to suddenly start shrinking is...well, it's paranoid.

It's not just paranoid. It's laughably lunatic.

Let's say we stopped all immigration tomorrow. Our population would go down maybe 200k a year? That would crater the housing market. But a 200k drop on 38 million will not be leading to abandoned suburbs. This is a drop of 1 in 200. Imagine a street of 200 homes. Imagine 1 home per year being abandoned. I would suggest it would take a very long time to declare that neighbourhood failed. We could stop immigration for a full decade and not see a single failed suburb.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Spocket

But that's my point. There's no reason to think that this will result in some policy change.

And I don't claim that a growing population is a metric for that many things. However, while we've gained a certain number of births due to natural increase, that doesn't mean we've actually gained working population. We know for a fact that Canada's birth rate doesn't equal replacement level. Our fertility rate is among the lowest in the world. That means that while we may be adding people, there are fewer and fewer working age people available in Canada every year. In other words, without immigration, our population would definitely be falling eventually and our working age population would already be seeing declines. Even if the effects of COVID-19 are prolonged, eventually we'll pass through and out of it into a normal economy. There's no reason to think we won't, anyway. The idea that our cities are going to suddenly start shrinking is...well, it's paranoid.

As someone said, births still outnumber deaths in Canada. By about 80,000 a year. Though it's true that will no longer be the case in the not too distant future.

[Jammon]

Originally Posted by EspionNoir

I bet it’s already a challenge in rural Manitoba. It’s what happens when over 60% of Manitobans live in the provincial capital. According a research study article written in the early 2000s, Winnipeg had been the only city in the province which was heavily advertised for tourism, Brandon is the second largest city (meaningless ranking) and got had got none.

It first puzzled me when I learned that last year immigration to Winnipeg was the highest it has even been (20k-25k as far as I remember) when at the same time Manitoba had its largest interprovincial loss. It’s hard for places other than Winnipeg in MB to be allocated important resources. For aspiring people in rural Manitoba, they either have to move to Winnipeg or leave the province. I guess this is a downside of Winnipeg having no real competition in the province, but it surely seems that this focus on Winnipeg made it possible to become the 7th largest city with growing amenities again.

Winnipeggers saying in cute voice “in 10 years we will have close to 1 million people” while people in rural Manitoba say “where’s our share?”.

Actually, I have to disagree with this statement. I get the immigration statistics for this province and they do a lot of matching for immigrants outside the Winnipeg region. Smaller communities like Steinbach and Morden/Winkler and Brandon have benefitted from the provincial program. And the statistics I have seen have shown that once people are matched with the appropriate community, they stay.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by EspionNoir

I bet it’s already a challenge in rural Manitoba. It’s what happens when over 60% of Manitobans live in the provincial capital. According a research study article written in the early 2000s, Winnipeg had been the only city in the province which was heavily advertised for tourism, Brandon is the second largest city (meaningless ranking) and got had got none.

This is interesting because in Nova Scotia it's traditionally been the opposite. There can be tourism ads 100% focused on rural areas, and it's common to hear people perform rhetorical acrobatics to imply that there are a bunch of different parts of the province that should all get roughly equal investment. NS has invested a lot in white elephant projects in rural areas that never panned out.

The demographic proportions are a bit different than Manitoba on paper but the reality is that about 2/3 of NSians live within a 1 hour radius of the city and benefit directly from the amenities and jobs there. There is the central part of NS and then there's everywhere else.

My opinion is that the provinces should basically follow the path of least resistance and invest in areas that will be productive. Sometimes this means rural tourism promotion in areas like PEI or Cape Breton, or supporting resource boom towns. But most of the time it's going to mean building infrastructure in growing areas where demand is rising, while simply maintaining infrastructure in places where the population is fixed.

[ssiguy]

When I began this thread, I did not say this was doom & gloom scenario. Shrinking or stagnating cities can be a good thing just as fast growing ones can be bad and it all comes down to planning.

I'm detecting a lot of hypocrisy by some of these comments. The same people that are demanding our planet lower it's GHG emissions and a stop of the depletion of our environmental resources seem to also be the ones that want rapid population growth.

Slow growing cities offer much more affordable housing meaning people can live where they want to as opposed to where they have to. This means people will actually be able to afford to live near where they work reducing travel and hence pollution. It means less sprawl and hence maintaining our green spaces and agricultural land allowing us to buy more locally produced food. It can mean more parkland in the inner cities or local gardens to grow ones own food as cities will no longer have to accomodate ever soaring populations and hence every square foot going towards housing or commercial development. It can mean a higher level of maintaining our historic neighbourhoods as opposed to razing them to the ground for their land value.

Have we come to the point where we want high immigration and hence high poopulation growth strictly for the sake of it? Just ask any women...........bigger doesn't neccessarily mean better but rather how you use what you got.

[SaskOttaLoo]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

A staggering 80% of all our population growth is due to immigration. What's worse is that our immigrants disproportionately account for our fertility rates as they tend to be younger than the Canadian average.

While I agree that immigration levels will take a big hit, do you have evidence that immigration fertility rates are higher? What I've seen elsewhere is that counterintuitively they're actually lower than that of the rest of the Canadian population! I can dig up the source data with a bit of time.

As a side comment, COVID has really exposed just how crappy the foundation has become for the Canadian economy. Our main drivers have been exporting raw materials (primarily oil), speculating on real estate in our biggest cities, and fueling consumption of primarily foreign-made consumer goods via expanding household debt levels. All while our sectors associated with durable economic development and manufacturing largely collapsed (Bombardier, the move of auto production outside of Canada, Nortel, RIM).

High population growth helps to mask a lot of these effects, as the growth in total GDP increases even though GDP per capita grows comparatively much more slowly.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

As I understand it, the essence of immigration is to maintain a steady or growing labour force, and not population level, per se.

In the Maritimes the argument for immigration is that there is a mismatch between the labour force and demand, with too many people with blue collar skills living in rural areas and not enough entrepreneurship. The blue collar workers are the ones who tend to move to Fort McMurray, not Halifax or Moncton or Charlottetown.

I am skeptical of businesses that argue there's a shortage of workers; a lot of them just want to drive wages down. However, I am regularly impressed by the types of successful businesses that immigrants create. I think you can have places that are stuck in low-energy ruts where there are lots of latent opportunities that locals aren't taking advantage of.

There was a clearly-defined experiment with raising immigration caps in the Maritimes. Job creation rose along with immigration and unemployment fell while wages rose. It's unlikely immigration was unrelated or negative and just happened to coincide. You rarely get clearer public policy outcomes than what happened in this case. My opinion is that when it comes to the Maritimes, the Conservative-era immigration policy was wrong and the Liberal-era policy was right.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

When I began this thread, I did not say this was doom & gloom scenario. Shrinking or stagnating cities can be a good thing just as fast growing ones can be bad and it all comes down to planning.

I'm detecting a lot of hypocrisy by some of these comments. The same people that are demanding our planet lower it's GHG emissions and a stop of the depletion of our environmental resources seem to also be the ones that want rapid population growth.

First, our population growth in this country is not "rapid" by any measure.

Next, plenty of folks would disagree with your premise that emissions can't be cut while the population grows. In facts there's plenty of countries that can provide the data to dispute this point.

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Slow growing cities offer much more affordable housing meaning people can live where they want to as opposed to where they have to. This means people will actually be able to afford to live near where they work reducing travel and hence pollution. It means less sprawl and hence maintaining our green spaces and agricultural land allowing us to buy more locally produced food. It can mean more parkland in the inner cities or local gardens to grow ones own food as cities will no longer have to accomodate ever soaring populations and hence every square foot going towards housing or commercial development. It can mean a higher level of maintaining our historic neighbourhoods as opposed to razing them to the ground for their land value.

Because all of this happening in our smaller cities now or happened in our larger metros when they were smaller? Our urban form is a function of planning. And Canadians are decidedly in favour of sprawl. That has absolutely nothing to do with population growth. Reduce the population today and tomorrow we'll have developers advertising half acre lots minutes outside downtown.

What I always find really interesting in these discussions is how xenophobic real estate has made Canadians. And even more revealing is how entitled many are. It's not just that they feel entitled to own a home. But of course, they are entitled to own a home within a stone's throw of the downtown cores of the largest cities in the country. So now, any rush and excuse to cut immigration. Because some poor immigrant is what's holding you from that Yorkville condo or Point Grey mansion.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by someone123

Old census rankings:

150 years ago: Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Halifax, Saint John

100 years ago: Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Hamilton

50 years ago: Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary

We need to realize that Montreal's been in that #1 spot since the beginning. That's our Alpha city and it's unrealistic to think this might ever change.

In all seriousness though, of course nobody thinks Lethbridge will be the commercial centre of Canada. My larger point is that I think Canada's economic life is fairly distributed and I think we might even see more of that in the future. In recent years we have seen immigration transition from being a big-city phenomenon in Canada to being more evenly distributed, and we have become more focused on global trade. Lethbridge seems to be doing OK even though it's just a small town far away from Canada's most Alpha cities.

Good post and agree on all fronts. There's always a proportion of people who can only see/process what's right in front of them. If Toronto is dominant today they can't comprehend a world where that's not the case. If there's one constant in the world, it's change. Toronto may very well be the dominant city in Canada a century from now or we might enter a period in Canadian history where we have 3-4 very powerful cities.

The idea that Canada can only have 1 such city is odd. Another bizarre mindset is that in order for one city to prosper, another must fail. Not only can Canada produce lots of alpha cities going forward but it's in our national interest that this happen. And on a side note, Toronto is big enough to compete globally with any city. You don't need 20 million people to do that.

Like you mentioned, Lethbridge is doing fine. A more probable candidate lies further west. I suspect that swath of Vancouver Island from Parksville to Victoria will develop into a major urban corridor over the long term. It's already home to 600,000 people and experiencing spill over from Vancouver.


Parksville - Nanaimo - Duncan - Victoria

In this latest Statistics Canada release there were 596,972 in these 4 places. That doesn't include smaller places along this 149.6 km corridor. There's another 59,268 in Courtenay 74.6km north of Parksville.