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Originally Posted by someone123
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.
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I just added up all the peninsula census tracts, and the growth indicated by the 2016 census was small, but it did grow, by about 300 and some people. I feel as if the peninsula may be overrepresented among areas that were undercounted as well.
More importantly, five years ago, single-family home starts were around 1,000 annually. The last two years they've barely been 400, while peninsula multi-units have spiked, even as the residential vacancy rate has remained low, and in fact is lower on the peninsula than elsewhere. So that indicates accelerating population growth.