Quote:
Originally Posted by Colin May
I looked at the peninsula because I have a chart showing the data from 1871. Off peninsula the 2021 population was 368,938. The peninsula and downtown Dartmouth is becoming more expensive and I expect greater growth of families in the suburbs. Exploring the commuting from outside HRM would be interesting as the urban core is becoming causing families to move to cheaper locations and nice new schools.
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A couple of things:
1. As Someone123 said, a 13% population increase in ten years is comparable to or a little higher than the growth rate for the whole metro.
2. Regardless, almost all of that growth comes from the 2016-21 period, which points to exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting. Between 2016 and 2021, the HRM's overall growth was 9 percent; the peninsula's growth, however, was 14 percent (as visually illustrated
here).
And if we look at demographic data at the census tract level, we can see that plenty of census tracts in the inner city and the inner suburbs have filled up increasingly with kids and young adults—families, in other words. The data is totally at odds with this idea that families are fleeing from the core for “nice new schools” or whatever (which are being built centrally as well in any case; my kid fill go to a brand-new SJAM in a few years).
I do agree that as the affordability situation worsens, growing families will in many cases be forced to look further afield. This is bad. But clearly enough families can afford to live centrally, and desire to, that we still have very healthy growth of young families on the peninsula and in the surrounding older suburbs.
Forgetting about families specifically, overall population growth in central areas (downtown, peninsula “urban fringe” neighbourhoods, and old central suburbs) is also dramatically outpacing growth in distant suburbs and rural areas. We can see that here.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220209/t005b-eng.htm
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