Statistics Canada Reports II

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

They tore down half of downtown Brantford.

This (3 whole blocks)


is gone.

replaced by this:


Sure to be a boon for pedestrian traffic (/sarcasm)

• Video Link

This has gotta be one of the worst before/after streetviews in the country.

2009:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/4skqrSazA1ZncZRs9

2022:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rJxSCLZMbMBAhcis5

[Wigs]

In 2023 approximately 20.7 million Canadians aged 15 and up were employed.
If 5.6% of that group held more than 1 job that means at least 1.15 million Canadians.

On the low end of the job market, part time work seems to be the norm so these Canadians are essentially forced to work more than one job.

If given the opportunity to work one job at full time hours at or approaching 40 hours a week, I don't doubt that most would do that rather than be in a precarious position of working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Part time workers usually do not get any benefits or sick days.

Look at the banking industry, for example. A bank teller used to be a full time position. Now the vast majority are part timers, unless they've been with the bank for years or decades even.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Honestly more than anything it needs to be a cultural shift. Kids need to become "cool", because right now I feel a lot of millennials and Gen Zs are still basing their lives off of the "Friends" and "Sex in the City" model where you don't have kids until you are 35, if at all.

I'm not sure how accurate it is to say that there's been any sort of cultural shift away from having kids, or that they've become "uncool". Birth rates have dropped quite precipitously in just the past 10-15 years; but IIRC, the percentage of childless couples been pretty consistent for several decades. It's just that:

A. Fewer people are "coupled" to begin with; and
B. The couples that do have children are having fewer of them.

The reasons for both of these are of course complex, but B at least is certainly more likely to be a result of economic concern than anything else. Couples are having fewer children than they'd actually like to, in large part because kids (and especially the family-oriented homes needed to house them) are simply expensive, and/or they're delaying starting families until they're more financially stable, and then having fewer of them as a result.

Perhaps the biggest issue that often seems to get overlooked though is work. In the not-too-distant past it was easier for one parent (usually the mother, but not always, as was the case for my dad when I was young) to take a few years off work and/or work part time to have more time for child-rearing. But with today's cost of living it's basically impossible for a household to survive without having two full-time working adults; let alone to do so while also supporting children. Every family I've known with two working parents and multiple young children is just perpetually stressed and burnt out. Can't blame anyone for not finding that appealing.

Further related to the above - as the economic burden of having children has increased, so too have our societal (if not legal, in many cases) expectations of parents. If there's any cultural shift that needs to happen it's to make it acceptable for kids to be on their own and get around without parental supervision again; and not have to worry about losing custody of their children for letting them take the bus or whatever.

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Luckily Stats Canada tracks this!

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/14-28-0001/2024001/article/00002-eng.htm

The rate of multiple job-holders has indeed increased slightly since 1976, but has been largely stable since 1990.



The change in multiple-job holders has gone from 2% of the population to 5.5% of the population since 1976. So 2.5% of people now hold a second job that didn't in 1976. Not exactly an earth-shattering change, and that graph aligns pretty closely with female labour participation rates which makes me suspect the causation has something more to do with that than decreasing incomes and increasingly tough times to make ends meet.

I wonder to what extent this tracks people with side gigs versus just those with multiple "official" employments.

According to this survey for example, 36% of Canadians aged 18 to 44 have a secondary source of income: https://financialpost.com/fp-work/millennials-gen-z-side-hustle-reach-financial-goals

[Wigs]

I don't think any TV shows, nor ones specifically mentioned like Friends or Sex in the City that haven't been relevant for almost 25 years have any bearing on people's decisions on whether to have children at all

Everyone has their own reasons for wanting or not wanting kids. TV really has no pull on that serious of a decision. Most people realize TV and movies are fiction just like most people realized family life was nothing like portrayed in Leave it to Beaver

There's also couples unable to conceive, and some after relentlessly trying IVF treatments and it failing, not wanting to explore adoption. Every person is different.

[Nouvellecosse]

I think it makes perfect sense that birth rates would drop as living standards and affluence increase. We now have far more things that we can do and places that we can go than ever before. More people can travel internationally, more can save up for retirement and those that can't have access to social services like Social Security or the Old Age Pension which are things that didn't always exist. People can still play traditional sports, but there's now a whole plethora of video gaming options which has become very popular despite not existing 50 years ago. So there's less need to have kids to ensure someone can take care of you as you age. And people have more access to education. So a person has so many options to add meaning and fulfillment that having kids just became a less common choice because of all the options it now that it has to compete with.

[GeneralLea]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

This has gotta be one of the worst before/after streetviews in the country.

2009:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/4skqrSazA1ZncZRs9

2022:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rJxSCLZMbMBAhcis5

Brantford looks like Detroit in that second shot. I passed by the town a few days ago, and was wondering why it looked like that....I still don't know why they destroyed their downtown.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by GeneralLea

Brantford looks like Detroit in that second shot. I passed by the town a few days ago, and was wondering why it looked like that....I still don't know why they destroyed their downtown.

It really seems like the local leadership were beholden to a very dated idea of urban renewal--that by destroying old, derelict buildings there would automatically be a transformative effect. In fairness, the old buildings were by all accounts in quite poor shape.

On the other hand, Canada is of formerly derelict buildings and districts that were restored to give new life to urban cores. (for example and example and example.) And even if they did need to be torn down, the replacement is almost the worst-case scenario: they took out 41 commercial/residential buildings, stretching for blocks, and replaced them with a single, mostly blank facade and a bunch of grass and benches.

[Innsertnamehere]

half of what they demolished hasn't been redeveloped yet.

Brantford was deep in a very deep recession and there was no money around to restore the block when it occurred. Still not an excuse - but the buildings had life-safety issues and there was no private capital interested in fixing the issues.

Which is a real shame as Brantford's economy has really turned around over the last decade and is actually quite healthy today - if the same thing was happening today there likely would have been the private investment needed to save the block.

Brantford has probably the worst downtown of any city it's size in Canada. It's not healthy at all and The City struggles with it's identity as a result, I think. It is a fast growing metro area at this point though and has had very strong employment growth over the last decade with investments continuing.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin;1[IMG

https://www.poppianohk.org/sheetjpg/76852.jpg[/IMG]0491077]This has gotta be one of the worst before/after streetviews in the country.

2009:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/4skqrSazA1ZncZRs9

2022:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rJxSCLZMbMBAhcis5

agree 100% but some of our SSP peers obviously did not (see some replies to my posts).

They tore down the skin, the muscle, and the bones. They didn't even leave any tombstones (well, I guess that soul-sucking modern building on the upper left could be a tombstone, upon which is inscribed the epitaph of downtown Brantford).

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

It really seems like the local leadership were beholden to a very dated idea of urban renewal--that by destroying old, derelict buildings there would automatically be a transformative effect. In fairness, the old buildings were by all accounts in quite poor shape.

On the other hand, Canada is of formerly derelict buildings and districts that were restored to give new life to urban cores. (for example and example and example.) And even if they did need to be torn down, the replacement is almost the worst-case scenario: they took out 41 commercial/residential buildings, stretching for blocks, and replaced them with a single, mostly blank facade and a bunch of grass and benches.

yep. There were tons of disused, dilapidated buildings in Old Montreal back in the 60s-80s...those same buildings are now at the heart of one the most dynamic parts of the city.

They just don't build 'em like they used to. And once it's gone....

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

yep. There were tons of disused, dilapidated buildings in Old Montreal back in the 60s-80s...those same buildings are now at the heart of one the most dynamic parts of the city.

They just don't build 'em like they used to. And once it's gone....

Montreal is a prime Canadian example. Only the most truly foregone buildings cannot be saved.

And in the USA, I immediately think of Cincinnati, and the old German neighborhood called OTR/Over the Rhine (they used to have a canal they called the Rhine after the famous river in Germany).

When I first joined SSP it looked to be a wreck. Now 20 years later so many of the old stock 19th century buildings, primarily 3-5 storeys (not unlike southern Ontario Main St. stock in scale) have been rejuvenated and Cincinnati showed growth for the first time in many decades in the 2020 census. Granted, there's still a lot of rejuvenation yet to do but the before and afters are remarkable.

What makes the Brantford case even worse is that the city population was still growing. Even though the city was in a financial crisis it was becoming a suburb/bedroom community for Hamilton and elsewhere.

Brantford population
Census
1991: 81,997
1996: 84,764
2001: 86,417
2006: 90,192
2011: 93,650
2016: 98,563
2021: 104,688
2024 estimate: 120,372

A city that's grown by around 30,000 or roughly 33% in 20 years shouldn't have a downtown in this rough of shape.

I had a friend from Brantford back in the early 2000s. He jokingly referred to Brantford as the teen pregnancy capital of Southern Ontario.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Brantford has probably the worst downtown of any city it's size in Canada. It's not healthy at all and The City struggles with it's identity as a result, I think. It is a fast growing metro area at this point though and has had very strong employment growth over the last decade with investments continuing.

I feel there's a subset of the middle class that doesn't care where they live, as long as they get to live in a house - preferably a new house, and a big house - as cheaply as possible. And by "cheap", I don't mean that it's objectively cheap, or that it's affordable to a broad spectrum of the population, just that it's the cheapest option to get the biggest, newest house in a large region.

For that kind of person, Brantford is the place to go right now in the GTHA.

Look, I'm happy that there's a city out there that caters to this market somewhere in the GTHA. Even if they have to do supercommutes or find other jobs more locally, there are people who care so much about owning a big, new house that they'd make all the sacrifices to do this. In the US, where even more people care about things like this, they're willing to move thousands of miles from their friends and families to achieve this - weather aside, this is basically how Arizona and Florida became such populous states.

On the other hand, thinking about the long term financial prospects for the City of Brantford or the people who have moved there, this may not be a great strategy.

We've all read about how the sprawl model is fiscally unsustainable for municipalities, so I won't elaborate on it.

For the individuals who move there, the kind of people that care about moving to a big, new house that's as cheap as possible aren't typically swimming in money. They're usually highly leveraged, and they need to count on their home appreciating to make it work. But if your city attracts other people who are highly leveraged and want the biggest, newest house, then your home may actually depreciate (all else being equal) as it gets older and newer homes get built further out.

This is not a perfect example, but this 2,000ft2 new house is listed for $975k. This 2,000ft2 house, which looks like it's about 20 years old, is about 1km away, and is built to roughly the same quality, is $799k.

This isn't a car, or even a $300k house. These are million dollar homes behaving like depreciating assets.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by whatnext

Healthier bodies but not necessarily minds. Following on the recent Robert Munsch news, MAID needs to be made more easily available and discussed for those facing dementia. How much money is spent cruelly warehousing people who have no idea where and who they are?

Ask yourself, when you reach an age appropriately enough to be called a senior by younger generations, if you would like to die then. I suspect that your attitude towards it will have changed greatly by then.

Having dealt with a relative with dementia, I can say that she enjoyed every day she was alive, the dementia just meant that she lived in the moment. She may not have remembered what she did that morning, but every moment she lived, she was happy to be alive. Maybe you might want to actually think about what you are posting, before you post it.

It's a shame that it always seems so easy to push "others" off the edge, when it doesn't affect you, personally. Such crap.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

I mean say what you want but that's just heresay. I'm using actual hard data measured consistently across decades. People work less than they used to - full stop.

You can still do the same things you could in 1976 if you live a lifestyle like those did in 1976. Live in an 1,100sf home, drive an old car, rarely go on vacation or out for dinner, do not enroll your kids in any activities other than maybe hockey rec league with hand-me-down furniture, clothes, and sports equipment..

The meme of "declining quality of life", beyond real estate costs in the largest cities (primarily Toronto and Vancouver) - is a myth. People work less and consume more than they did 50 years ago across basically every measurable metric. People live in larger homes with less people per home, own homes at higher rates, work less hours, retire earlier, own more things, spend more on entertainment, drive nicer vehicles, travel more, basically everything, again, excluding housing affordability in Toronto and Vancouver which have extenuating circumstances driving down living standards in those areas.

People struggled in 1976 just like they do today, and people did well in 1976 just like they do today. There is just slightly less people struggling today than back then.

Believe it or not, Boomers struggled when they were young too. Everyone does and always has. It's a part of life, you get wealthier as you get older and accumulate wealth.

Thank you for posting that. It's objective, and it's true.

Anecdotally, from somebody who was actually alive in 1976, I can say that for most people I knew, including my own family, a "vacation" didn't consist of flying to Europe for a few weeks of fun and frolic. It usually consisted of a car trip, where you pile your family and luggage into a car, and head off to a neighbouring province, of if we were to have an exotic vacation, to the nearest state, to enjoy the different experience and products of the grand old U. S. of A. (back then we liked them mostly). On less extravagent years, the vacation might consist of setting up a tent in a provincial park or other campground, or if perhaps borrowing a trailer from a family friend.

The narratives floating around today are largely laughable, at best. I will say, however, that generally people were happier and more friendly back then. The nastiness that prevails today (much of it online, which we didn't have back then) was far less prevalent, though people still did have squabbles. There also seemed to be unwritten rules of engagement, whereby grabbing a gun and shooting people wasn't the first reaction to a disagreement or difference of philosophies. I'm sure there's data to support that.

[someone123]

I don't think the 1976 argument gets at what most people are observing these days, at least in my social circles of mostly 30-40 somethings. Standards of living have dropped in Canada during the past 4 years. By and large, life was similar in 2021, but a lot of things just cost 20-40% less. It is an argument about recent economic performance and inequality. It is not an "uphill both ways" contest against life 50 years ago.

I'm not convinced the CPI or wage data capture what is going on accurately or fully. The weights change, quality changes (see if new clothes can become "hand-me-downs" like in 1976!), and distribution of wealth and income are extremely unequal. If you track something more objective like the price of an onion, you get a much higher increase than the CPI. I think a lot of people intuitively feel this and do not trust the numbers as the numbers increasingly don't fit with their experience.

[Innsertnamehere]

Inflation hurts the working poor the most - generally the wealthier you are and the more assets you own, the less impact you have from inflation.

Housing for example has been one of the strongest inflation drivers of the last 5 years. But if you own your home outright, you will have experienced basically 0 housing inflation. Meanwhile those renting on the bottom of the rental market have seen housing options essentially disappear.

This is why you see a lot of grumbling about inflation - Stats Canada's inflation numbers are not wrong. They measure average increase in costs across the entire population - it's just that those increases are not equal and tend to have outsized impacts on the people who are already struggling or close to it.

Over time incomes, even in lower income households, should catch up to mitigate the inflationary bout, but that takes a lot longer to occur than the inflation itself.

Our whole "immigration pump" also did a lot of damage to the labour and housing markets, particularly in working class employment markets.. which has just made the impacts of inflation even worse.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Stats Canada's inflation numbers are not wrong. They measure average increase in costs across the entire population - it's just that those increases are not equal and tend to have outsized impacts on the people who are already struggling or close to it.

Well, I would not say it's wrong, but I think CPI (and a lot of economics) is a scientistic construct; it is more like those "alpha cities" lists than say a labour force survey. Most people have an intuitive sense of inflation that doesn't match what is measured. The purchase price of housing is not included for example as that is not consumption.

There's circularity to the whole concept of CPI as the basket of goods must be adjusted over time yet it is itself influenced by pricing. If a good becomes too expensive it will tend to be dropped from the basket. For example, if cars go up to $10M each, they won't become 99% of the basket, they'll drop from the basket.

Measuring quality is also inherently difficult. As another example, the CPI has significantly been adjusting cell plan costs downward, but because of expanded data allowances (that most people probably don't use) more than because of a real drop in price.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

This is not a perfect example, but this 2,000ft2 new house is listed for $975k. This 2,000ft2 house, which looks like it's about 20 years old, is about 1km away, and is built to roughly the same quality, is $799k.

This isn't a car, or even a $300k house. These are million dollar homes behaving like depreciating assets.

There is more to it but one part of it must be that the land tends to go up but improvements go down, so you do better on the $1.5M plot with the $500k house than on the $200k plot with the $800k house.

You often see averages for real estate returns but there are actually very distinct classes, with outsized returns tending to go to what was upper middle class stuff, like a modest inner city Toronto brick house. The low end doesn't tend to do as well. So if you are poorer you're scraping by to purchase and then you're seeing lower returns. And these are special tax-free returns you can't otherwise get. The disparity is large over a household's entire trajectory of wealth accumulation, and I'd guess some lower income households perversely pay more in taxes. For example if you downsize and get $2M for a nice retirement out of your home, you pay $0 on that. If you have to keep working for $100k a year you pay incomes taxes. If you own you get property tax deferral (and maybe a homeowner's grant), but if you rent you are indirectly paying up front as let's be honest, landlords will be passing that cost on given how the market is.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by someone123

Well, I would not say it's wrong, but I think CPI (and a lot of economics) is a scientistic construct; it is more like those "alpha cities" lists than say a labour force survey. Most people have an intuitive sense of inflation that doesn't match what is measured. The purchase price of housing is not included for example as that is not consumption.

There's circularity to the whole concept of CPI as the basket of goods must be adjusted over time yet it is itself influenced by pricing. If a good becomes too expensive it will tend to be dropped from the basket. For example, if cars go up to $10M each, they won't become 99% of the basket, they'll drop from the basket.

Measuring quality is also inherently difficult. As another example, the CPI has significantly been adjusting cell plan costs downward, but because of expanded data allowances (that most people probably don't use) more than because of a real drop in price.

Those are certainly valid concerns but another is simply that the basket of goods, which tries to capture a typical consumer's spending pattern, is not going to apply to each person equally. Some people don't buy as many of those goods or buy them in a lower quantity, while others will purchase from them disproportionately. So if a person happens to buy a lot of a good that increased by far more than the average and little or none of a good that remained stable or decreased then that person's costs will have risen at a much greater rate than the average. So that type of measure is great as a measure of the overall consumer impact of the economy (assuming the basket of goods is well chosen) but poor when it comes to predicting the effect on an individual consumer.

It's like if the average car on the market has become 5% more reliable over a decade, but a person bought a car that hasn't improved or became less reliable, the fact that other cars are pulling up that average is mostly irrelevant to that person. It isn't going to make their car perform any better.

[bartolo]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

I feel there's a subset of the middle class that doesn't care where they live, as long as they get to live in a house - preferably a new house, and a big house - as cheaply as possible. And by "cheap", I don't mean that it's objectively cheap, or that it's affordable to a broad spectrum of the population, just that it's the cheapest option to get the biggest, newest house in a large region.

For that kind of person, Brantford is the place to go right now in the GTHA.

Look, I'm happy that there's a city out there that caters to this market somewhere in the GTHA. Even if they have to do supercommutes or find other jobs more locally, there are people who care so much about owning a big, new house that they'd make all the sacrifices to do this. In the US, where even more people care about things like this, they're willing to move thousands of miles from their friends and families to achieve this - weather aside, this is basically how Arizona and Florida became such populous states.

On the other hand, thinking about the long term financial prospects for the City of Brantford or the people who have moved there, this may not be a great strategy.

We've all read about how the sprawl model is fiscally unsustainable for municipalities, so I won't elaborate on it.

For the individuals who move there, the kind of people that care about moving to a big, new house that's as cheap as possible aren't typically swimming in money. They're usually highly leveraged, and they need to count on their home appreciating to make it work. But if your city attracts other people who are highly leveraged and want the biggest, newest house, then your home may actually depreciate (all else being equal) as it gets older and newer homes get built further out.

This is not a perfect example, but this 2,000ft2 new house is listed for $975k. This 2,000ft2 house, which looks like it's about 20 years old, is about 1km away, and is built to roughly the same quality, is $799k.

This isn't a car, or even a $300k house. These are million dollar homes behaving like depreciating assets.

Is it an Ontario thing only to not include basements in ft2 of a house. I am looking for a house in BC and if they have a finished basement they are including it in the ft2. Coming from Ontario I have never see a basement being included.