demographic stats
« Previous EntriesApartment living and women’s empowerment
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009Back when North American metropolitan areas were laid out, in suburbs connected by freeways, women typically stayed home to raise the 3.9 children that was typical for a woman to have in 1961.
The entire metro area design evolved interconnected with this dominant idea about womanhood as motherhood. Suburbs detached from work areas; malls and shopping […]
Amenities or work proximity?
Saturday, October 24th, 2009What’s more important when selecting the location of your home, nearby amenities or proximity to work?
As more people are chosing to live in denser, urban areas (whether downtown or another high density part of a metro region), different location choices and dilemmas emerge.
What struck me in a recent (outsourced, scientific) poll I ran through work […]
Blaming fast food outlet proximity for obesity
Monday, May 5th, 2008According to a UCLA study (found via Planetizen):
Higher rates of diabetes and obesity occur in neighborhoods — regardless of the residents’ income, race or ethnicity — where fast-food restaurants and convenience stores greatly outnumber grocery stores and produce vendors, according to a statewide study released today.
But is this correlation the same thing as saying that […]
New playground as community anchor
Sunday, February 24th, 2008Like many public spaces in East Vancouver, the park by our house used to look tired — exhausted, in fact. Some playground equipment became so dilapidated, it posed a hazard and neighbors asked the city to remove it. Other plastic slides had more endurance (does plastic ever break down?), and children belonging to families living […]
Is divorce good for the urban economy?
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007Is divorce good for the urban economy?
A recent article by Kerry Gold in the Globe and Mail suggests that it is.
Divorce generates real estate transactions and housing demand. Quoting real estate agent Brad Lamb:
“But for real estate agents, we do really well because we sell them the apartments they both lived in before they […]
Comparing cities through surnames
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007The last names of individuals in a metro area or a country can be surprising. Until today I never knew the most common last name in Canada is Li. Not Smith, as it is in the USA. Smith is number two in Canada.
The USA-Canada contrast is interesting: Looking down the top […]
Women out-earning men in US hub cities
Monday, August 6th, 2007Young women in their 20s and 30s in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis make more than young men. In New York, they earn 117% of men, in Dallas 120%. Women in these age categories nation wide only make 89% the wages of their male counterparts.
This is according to Andrew […]
Does bottom up work to attract and retain families?
Saturday, April 21st, 2007For core cities in large metropolitan areas “family flight” has long been a concern — especially if housing is expensive. San Francisco, New York, Boston, Vancouver are all examples of cities that have struggled to keep families with children within their boundaries. The suburbs have lured many people raising kids with their cheaper housing and […]
Making sense of the census: Core versus sprawl growth
Thursday, March 15th, 2007Statistics Canada released preliminary results from the June 2006 national census this week. There were many intriguing findings. One that I found interesting was that the major metropolitan areas grew more in the suburbs than in the urban core — although the latter did grow.
The national media has written this up as a […]
Relationship between neighborhood and health
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006A new study by the Canadian Population Health Inititiave reveals that:
health differences between neighbourhoods can bejust as big as - or sometimes bigger than - differences between Canada’s cities or even between countries.
While the methodology has limitations, many of the findings are intriguing.
As might be expected, more affluent neighbourhoods tended to have healthier people […]
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