Calgary’s census data released Wednesday shows the population essentially held steady with slowed growth, attributed to the “economic downturn” by Mayor Naheed Nenshi.
“What’s interesting about this is that it follows on four years of extraordinary population growth,” he said. “Since I’ve been in this job I believe we’ve had four of our five largest years of population growth in history. What’s really interesting about that is that we are now, after the 2016 numbers, exactly on pace with our action plans.”
In the period from April 2015 to April 2016, the population increased by 0.36 per cent to 1,235,171.
The neighbourhood that saw the biggest influx was Mahogany, with a population increase of 2,040.
The city said six other communities saw growth of more than 1,000 residents each:
- Nolan Hill
- Evanston
- Auburn Bay
- Skyview Ranch
- Copperfield
- Legacy
The mayor said the city needs to be careful of consequences to building communities on the edge of the city when people may not be moving to Calgary in the future.
“If…we’re actually having people who are already in Calgary moving to those neighbourhooods, that has a bunch of negative impacts on infrastructure, on the availability of recreation facilities for example, public transit, as well as for the provincial government, the availability of schools.”
Calgary saw negative net migration over the April-to-April period. The city attributed population growth to the “natural increase of 10,783 (the result of births over deaths) which remained similar to the number from last year.”
READ MORE: What you need to know about Calgary’s new online census
Nenshi said peak population figures are in the 25- to 44-year range, which he said indicated younger workers moving to the city to build careers.
“We’re very slowly closing our gender gap,” he added. “We are starting to have more women and/or fewer men, and moving back to a more normal gender gap, which is different from what we’ve seen in the last decade or so.”
The city said the number of housing units (existing and under construction) continued to rise, as well as the number of vacant dwelling units. Empty units increased by 8,317 to 20,843 compared to 12,526 vacant units in 2015.
“We’re still building infrastructure, we’re still behind the times on many things, but we’re not adding a small city every single year as we have for the last couple of years,” Nenshi said. “So we can use this to revisit our budget projections and expense projections and perhaps allowing us to spend a little bit less as we continue to catch up.”
For more information, visit calgary.ca/census.
Comments