Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
Looked at that way, downtown Toronto is also insignificant in terms of population. Moreso, even. But it's still where the primary regional medical services are located. It's nice to serve the surrounding communities, but what about serving THIS community?
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I don't think the peninsula is losing population, and one major (the biggest?) regional planning goal is to increase the amount of development there in the future to reduce servicing costs and generally make the city work a lot better. It wouldn't be hard to get the peninsula up to 90,000 people or more just by developing underused land. Because of the bridges and population densities the peninsula is quite central.
I think we may need to wait for undercount-corrected 2016 census numbers to accurately compare but the 0009.00 downtown census tract (below the Citadel from around Cornwallis to Sackville) for example went from 1,984 people in 2011 to 2,357 in the 2016 census. This is comparable to the growth happening in the fastest growing suburban parts of Halifax. I am guessing this growth is going to increase from 2016-2021 rather than slow down.
There seem to be a lot of people, mostly older, who have made up their minds that suburbia is "the future". But for the most part it's not really what younger people want or can afford, and it has been tried out and hasn't worked well. It's not 1974.