Central Halifax Census Tracts

[someone123]

Since I was kind of bored tonight I created the following image:



Each coloured area corresponds to a 2006 census tract from the StatsCan website.

It's not terribly surprising, although it is a bit out of date already.

It is kind of unfortunate that the Quinpool Road area and North End are still losing population.

[Wishblade]

Originally Posted by someone123

Since I was kind of bored tonight I created the following image:



Each coloured area corresponds to a 2006 census tract from the StatsCan website.

It's not terribly surprising, although it is a bit out of date already.

It is kind of unfortunate that the Quinpool Road area and North End are still losing population.

wow, according to that, the downtown/waterfront area is booming.

[skyscraper_1]

Most of the growth areas are tracts with resent highrise developments!

[someone123]

Because the census tracts are so small, individual developments can make a big difference.

Without any development at all, tracts seem to lose about 4% over 5 years. Most of this would be declining household sizes. Often, population loss is actually a sign of gentrification in densely built up areas. To some degree this is what's happening in tract 10, but partly it's just the lack of development.

A few tracts that declined from 2001-2006 are going to gain population because of developments that are in progress or were completed shortly after the census. The biggest example of this is Gladstone Street for 19, which by itself could add about 500 people to the area. 10 has Armoury Square and Spice and 004.02 has the South Street developments.

Three major developments were built in tract 8 (Bishop's Landing, Paramount, Martello), which explains the increase. The United Gulf towers, Centennial development, brewery, and infirmary lands are all in this census tract.

From 2001-2006 the population of the core remained pretty constant. I believe that for HRM by Design they want to substantially increase the population of the core, so they will definitely have to increase the amount of infill that is happening. I think they should leave stable residential neighbourhoods alone but a lot of the commercial areas should be more built up.

[Halifax Hillbilly]

Do you have the densities for those census tracts?

Interesting yes, suprising not really. It seems like the peninsula market is holding out ok so hopefully we should see more people downtown with the number of project under construction or approved.

[someone123]

They do give densities but they are not particularly meaningful because of how the census tracts are defined. 003, for example, includes railyards and Point Pleasant. 007 originally included the Public Gardens, cemetery, Citadel Hill, and Commons.

[Halifax Hillbilly]

Originally Posted by someone123

They do give densities but they are not particularly meaningful because of how the census tracts are defined. 003, for example, includes railyards and Point Pleasant. 007 originally included the Public Gardens, cemetery, Citadel Hill, and Commons.

There's not really much density no matter how you slice up the census tracts. Regardless it's not very helpful to include such large greenspaces.

IMO the real promising tracts aren't the "downtown" proper but 010, 019 and 020. Plenty of redevelopment potential in those neighbourhoods. Gladstone Ridge is just the tip of the iceberg.