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Who will be Alberta's largest metro in a decade?

CBBarnett said:
Calgary's numbers look almost as bad as Toronto's but - we had a particularly large one-year spike and our housing starts have more SFHs - around 30 - 50% I think? Toronto would be close to zero. So a unit in Calgary is likely larger and (in theory) accommodates more people on average as a result.
Click to expand...
On the dot. Since 2018 (I didn't go back further) SFHs in Calgary make up about 30% and in Toronto there's almost no such thing as a SFH or Duplex, and even townhomes aren't very abundant Toronto starts are pushing like 85% apartment units. Surprisingly Calgary looks fairly well balanced, with apartments and rowhomes making up 60% of 2022's starts and if the trends continue, it looks to be the same for 2023. Most of us urbanists would probably like to see the percentage of apartments and rowhomes higher, but at least they are the majority right now. Quite a change from what Calgary was 20 years ago, and even more so from 30 years ago, when there was no such thing as an apartment unit!.
I'm going to gather all the numbers from 1990 up to now, it'll be interesting to see the changes.

Calgary
SFHDuplexTownhomeApartmentTotal
2018379112161561440310971
2019353511381853538311909
202034871020142932999235
2021551213601831631415017
2022575215602244775017306
2023 6 months2513806128135068106
2023 extrapolated 1 year502616162562701416212
-
199259823625161747034
199352203288412406629
-
200294137261169303114339
200385267981293302513642

Toronto
SFHDuplexTownhomeApartmentTotal
2018640592641372963941107
2019420945939512184330462
2020584880338732806338587
2021692078639553023741898
2022632951456483261845109
2023 6 months227111620812120025768
2023 extrapolated 1 year454223241624240051536
 
I had some time to kill, and being a numbers nerd........

So here we have the 4 main types of housing and the housing starts over the years from 990 to 2023 (extrapolated over the fill year.) Duplex and townhomes on the rise over the years, but the real story here is SFH vs Apartment units. You can see the definite trend. There's an aberration of the trend in 2009 and I remember it well. Prior to 2009, almost all apartment units built were condominiums, and after the housing finance crash of 2008, condos took a major beating and condo construction really dropped off. Luna was finishing up, but no new towers that I can remember started for a couple of years.
Condo towers came back after with the likes of Guardian, Calla, The Royal, Mark on 10th, Waterfront, Drake, Smith and Park Point, 6th and 10th as well as EV projects like INK, First and Evolution, and as the condo projects started to slow down rental towers came into vogue around 2013 and kept the units coming. Projects like Aura/Arch, 1215, Fifteen15 got things going followed by Yellowstone, 11+11, The HAT EV, Curtis Block (BLVD), West Village Towers, Park Central, Oliver, Versa, Arris 5th and 3rd, SOHO, UpTen, The Hat 14th, and Sunalta towers.
SFHs also took a big drop in 2008 and made a modest comeback, but have never come closer to the peak decade from 1997-2007. Rowhomes seem to be solid, and now that we are seeing rowhome projects number in 6-10 units on corner lots, I won't be surprised to see this number rise some more.

Housing Starts in Calgary by Type .png
 
Patrick.1980 said:
My prediction is the order of Canada’s top six cities today will remain in the same order 20 years from now with the gaps widening or lessoning, but keeping the same order.

Toronto 9.0M
Montreal 5.0M
Vancouver 4.0M
Calgary 2.6M
Edmonton 2.1M
Ottawa 1.9M
Click to expand...
My crystal ball readings. I see Toronto hitting 10M buy 2044 did to the metro borders expanding and hauling another million or two.

Toronto 10.0M
Montreal 5.0M
Vancouver 3.8M
Calgary 2.7M
Edmonton 2.3M
Ottawa 2.0M
 
Surrealplaces said:
I had some time to kill, and being a numbers nerd........

So here we have the 4 main types of housing and the housing starts over the years from 990 to 2023 (extrapolated over the fill year.) Duplex and townhomes on the rise over the years, but the real story here is SFH vs Apartment units. You can see the definite trend. There's an aberration of the trend in 2009 and I remember it well. Prior to 2009, almost all apartment units built were condominiums, and after the housing finance crash of 2008, condos took a major beating and condo construction really dropped off. Luna was finishing up, but no new towers that I can remember started for a couple of years.
Condo towers came back after with the likes of Guardian, Calla, The Royal, Mark on 10th, Waterfront, Drake, Smith and Park Point, 6th and 10th as well as EV projects like INK, First and Evolution, and as the condo projects started to slow down rental towers came into vogue around 2013 and kept the units coming. Projects like Aura/Arch, 1215, Fifteen15 got things going followed by Yellowstone, 11+11, The HAT EV, Curtis Block (BLVD), West Village Towers, Park Central, Oliver, Versa, Arris 5th and 3rd, SOHO, UpTen, The Hat 14th, and Sunalta towers.
SFHs also took a big drop in 2008 and made a modest comeback, but have never come closer to the peak decade from 1997-2007. Rowhomes seem to be solid, and now that we are seeing rowhome projects number in 6-10 units on corner lots, I won't be surprised to see this number rise some more.
Click to expand...
Quick question on these figures, if an old SFH is replaced with a newer SFH (infills), is that considered a housing start? Or does it only count net new units?
 
darwink said:
Calgary getting the Nortel investments while Edmonton lost the Northwest Tel plant was a big one. Again, air connection for spare parts was a big factor and the different mix of engineers in town.
Click to expand...
Don't know what Northwest Tel plant to which you refer. I worked for Nortel in from the early to late 90s. It had a fibre optic research facility in Edmonton, which employed Jozef Straus, who later moved to Ottawa to found JDS Fitel which is now San Jose based Uniphase. Edmonton also had the sales office for western Canada. Calgary had a cable tie plant that subsequently evovled into PCB manufacuring for the North Carolina based digital switching line, which was Nortel's cash cow. The last location of that facitlity was in the Skyline industrial park fronting Deerfoot, south of 64th. It is now occupied by Hunting Technologies. Calgary also had the cellular base station business that was purchased out of the Novatel bankruptcy. It started in another building fronting Deerfoot that become the Shaw Direct building. I have no idea what is in there now. In 1995, Nortel won a multi-billion dollar contract with Sprint PCS, which lead to the manufacturing facility near Barlow and McKnight, that is now Calgary Police Service HQ.

Nortel's other Calgary business went through multiple re-brands, but was focused on enterprise communcations. It started in the early 80s as a Lougheed era industrual strategy that offered subsidies to develop and manufacture telecom equipment. This lead to a product called Vantage, which enjoyed some initial success, but soon incurred large financial losses (a recurring theme in Canadian industrial strategy). An exec from out East was sent to shut down the business but was inspired by a couple of employees who had an idea for a low cost, digital office phone system that would compete against analog key systems (multi-line phone systems where the user had to manually select a line). One of those employees eventually became my boss. The result was the Norstar phone system, which shipped hundreds of millions of handsets and earned billions in profits. With Norstar's success, and the cost cutting culture under CEO Paul Stern, Nortel shut its London, ON facility and moved its product lines (the Millennium payphones and residential phone terminals) to Calgary. This was mostly a union busting move as Nortel shut all of its unionized facilities and moved production to places like Alberta, North Carolina and Texas. For a brief period of time, Calgary manufactured more phone handsets than anywhere else on earth. Suppliers like SPM Precision Molding opening facilities in Calgary. Other companies like RIM, Panasonic and VTech also opened facilies in Calgary to tap the client pool (I was briefly the manager of the RIM team in Calgary), but none survived the dot com bust.
 
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darwink said:
Oh and the source I had remembered had the wrong company name. This is the one I was thinking of:
View attachment 503595
Click to expand...
NovaTel split into 4 companies after the sale:
1) Nortel acquired the wireless base station business. It operated until 2008
2) Japan Radio Canada (JRC) acquired the handset business along with the manufacturing facilities in Calgary and Lethbridge. It briefly reinvented itself as a contract manufacturer, but shut down around 1998
3) The wireless LAN business became NovaTel Wireless and operated in Calgary before moving to San Diego around 2003
4) The GPS business continues to operate in Calgary. It was acquired by Hexagon out of Sweden around 2007

At its peak, NovaTel was number two in global cellular infrastructure and handsets. The original Total Recall movie had a NovaTel product placement. NovaTel is a great example of government making a bet on the right market (cellular communications) and still loosing.
 
DougB said:
It started in another building fronting Deerfoot that become the Shaw Direct building. I have no idea what is in there now. In 1995, Nortel won a multi-billion dollar contract with Sprint PCS, which lead to the manufacturing facility near Barlow and McKnight, that is now Calgary Police Service HQ.
Click to expand...
I recall Nortel also winning a large contract with China and the Prairie Winds facility having a visit from China's chairman Jiang Zemin, receiving the white hat and all.

trtcttc said:
Reading some of these posts as a person that was too young to know about these companies in their hay day, hard to imagine that we used to have industrial companies at a global scale vs a country built on real estate, banking, and energy like we are now.
Click to expand...
Canada was actually in the thick of things when it came to telecom back in the day. Aside from NovaTel and Nortel, there were also Newbridge and Mitel that were selling equipment globally. Newbridge was a hot ticket for a while, selling muxes to telcos everywhere. A couple of other smaller companies from back in the day were Gandalf and Develcon.
 
darwink said:
The hole they cut in the wall for the visit is still there! Or at least was last time I visited the police HQ!
Click to expand...
The contract with China Unicom never really went anywhere. Nortel built a plant in Guangdong to build hardware for Unicom. The plant was planned out of Calgary, with much of the NPI (new product introduction) troubleshot in Calgary and the lines and processes replicated in China. The Calgary facility did the same for the Nortel plant in Campinas, Brazil. That opportunity also went nowhere.

I rememebr the visit from Zemin. Employees had the option for a paid half day off to avoid any controversy over a politician visiting the facility. Very few took the half day off. The same arrangement occurred when Chretien has supposed to visit the plant and more than half of the emoyees took the half day and Chretien cancelled last minute.
 
Surrealplaces said:
I recall Nortel also winning a large contract with China and the Prairie Winds facility having a visit from China's chairman Jiang Zemin, receiving the white hat and all.


Canada was actually in the thick of things when it came to telecom back in the day. Aside from NovaTel and Nortel, there were also Newbridge and Mitel that were selling equipment globally. Newbridge was a hot ticket for a while, selling muxes to telcos everywhere. A couple of other smaller companies from back in the day were Gandalf and Develcon.
Click to expand...
Develcon out of Saskatoon was a leader in data networking (switches and routers) for a brief period of time. Many of its employees later ended up in executive roles at Cisco. I had another boss who worked at Develcon prior to Nortel. Develcon was heavily funded by the Devine government, and is another example of how Canadian industrial policy always fails.

Newbridge was acquired by Alcatel which then acquired Lucent and the merged company was acquired by Nokia which had already acquired Siemens' telecom division. The dot com crash was a blood bath.

Mitel split into two companies with the PBX/enterprise communications division retaining the Mitel name and the semiconductor division taking on the Zarlink brand. Microsemi eventually acquired Zarlink.
 
darwink said:
Oh and the source I had remembered had the wrong company name. This is the one I was thinking of:
View attachment 503595
Click to expand...
NovaTel was a customer of mine back then, and I remember the way money was spent, and wasn't overly surprised by the huge loss. They had some good things going for them when they first started out, but I recall that when it came to spending, money was no object for them.
DougB said:
At its peak, NovaTel was number two in global cellular infrastructure and handsets. The original Total Recall movie had a NovaTel product placement. NovaTel is a great example of government making a bet on the right market (cellular communications) and still loosing.
Click to expand...
NovaTel phones weren't price competitive. I had a car phone installed for work purposes back in 1990, and Cantel (now Rogers) had two options, either a NovaTel phone or a Motorola phone, and iirc the Motorola one was much cheaper and did the same thing so I ended up with a Motorola phone. One of the managers had a Mercedes that came with a NovaTel phone - factory installed iirc.
 
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