Calgary's Downtown Population

[JWhite]

Bumping a bit late, but admin has identified rezoning as responsible for 2420 units between Oct 2023 and 2024. That's about 16% of our overall 'missing middle starts' in 2024.

Rowhomes, stacked towns, and accessory suites together are about 60%, so we could say that rezoning is responsible for somewhere between a third and a half of each?

Remember that R-G and the DP exemption for rows and towns is lifting quite a lot too, which was not counted for the R-CG infrastructure readiness report where I got those figures, but is technically part of the Rezoning Cinematic Universe.

That's a lot of units to come by way of rezoning, especially since most of those units are probably in the inner city neighborhoods.

 

[Cowtown]

Assuming a jump to 65K by 2026, that would mean for the area defined as 'downtown Calgary' will have seen an increase from 38K to at least 65K (likely more) in only 10 years. That's a 71% increase, and an increase from 38K to 67K would be a 76% increase.
That's extremely impressive. I would bet money no other metro over 500K would have seen that kind of increase. Granted, start at 38K is a pretty low bar.

 

[Tarsus]

I strongly doubt it. Statscan methodologies define a downtown as the densest area of employment, plus a 1 km buffer, so the thing that would make our downtown area spatially larger would not be population growth, but more employment near the core (but at densities similar to the very high ones there).

Further, under the Statscan methodology, our downtown would include Lower Mount Royal (at least as far west as 11 St), the north end of Mission/Cliff Bungalow (probably to 21st Ave), the south part of Crescent Heights (probably south of 7th Ave), most if not all of Sunnyside and Hillhurst south of Gladstone Rd and east of 14th St. Roughly 12-15K people.

But the final step in their methodology after producing the downtown area is "check with the municipality and follow their suggestions", and our Statscan downtown matches with the City's definition of the Centre City, so my strong assumption is that Statscan received the feedback that the City would prefer the areas to align. Since we're not changing that policy definition any time soon, the downtown won't change any time soon either.

Okay. Thanks for the explanation. I thought the downtown boundaries were defined by density, but being defined by jobs makes more sense to Calgary‘s weird boundaries, like leaving out Mission, but adding stampede grounds and Victoria Park.