On the Census: Collected Remarks

Got a lot of calls from the media to comment on the census release. And so I did.

Simon Fraser University urban studies instructor Gordon Price said Vancouver’s housing start figures remain healthy – “and the assumption that Surrey will bypass Vancouver any time soon – it’s not going to happen.”

The former Vancouver city councillor added that “some day, Surrey better pass Vancouver, it’s got the land and the size.”

Surrey, he added, is going through the growth pattern experienced by Vancouver in the early decades of the last century.

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From Coquitlam Now:

Gordon Price, director of SFU’s City Program, noted there is a difference between the rate and mass of change.

“This is a good example of how you have to be careful about rates as opposed to numbers,” Price said.

“Port Moody, being relatively small, doesn’t take a large number to have a big impact on the rate (of growth).”

As population goes up, rates should go down, Price explained.

“If you have 10 people in your community and five people show up, you have a 50-per-cent increase in growth. But now with 15, if you have another six show up, the rates actually drop even though the numbers increase,” he said.

“So that’s a little tricky, that part of it.” …

Population shifts are not always noticeable day by day, Price said.

“The way people judge it is when they see change in their community. That tends to go through a cycle where the change is incremental and then it’s almost like you wake up one day and your fingernails are too long or you need a haircut or my community changed,” he said.

“Then it seems to happen all at once. Or you leave your community and you come back in 10 years and say ‘Oh my gosh, it’s changed,’ but the people who’ve lived there don’t even notice.”

The main external forces are migration, technology and economy, he said. “People follow jobs. They follow money. They follow resources. They follow opportunity and education. But generally, we see Canadians moving from east to west, from rural to urban and of course into the larger cities. And that’s, to some degree, a global phenomenon too.”

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From 24 Hours:

Census figures show staggering growth rates in suburban communities like Surrey, which puts pressure on infrastructure and services — such as transportation and access to education.

And all those things are expensive, leading to the question: Who pays for it?

“In the case of a city like Vancouver, where there isn’t more land, then it does become more politically dicey,” said Gordon Price, director of Simon Fraser University’s The City Program, which explores urban planning and infrastructure.

Price said pushback occurs when cities turn to densification to accommodate growth, which can mean altering the face of a neighbourhood and upsetting residents.

“(Residents) want the jobs and they want the growth but not until they can benefit from it,” he said. “But if you’re a fast growing place, you’ve got to incorporate some mechanism to pay for a lot of that hard infrastructure,” Price said.

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From The Globe and Mail:

The Globe and Mail examined the latest census data and looked into the three areas in the Lower Mainland that had the sharpest declines in population. Leading the way was New Westminster, near the Fraser River, that had a 10.5 per cent drop. The remaining areas in the top five were in Vancouver.

One explanation offered by Gordon Price, director of SFU’s The City Program, is homes that used be to divided into individual suites have been bought and restored to single-family homes. “It’s people buying what look to be single-family houses and then restoring them to single-family status, where previously they would have been, if not boarding houses, probably rental suites,” he told the paper.