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Calgary's Growth Slows

Wednesday, July 28

Calgary's growth slows to 26-year low - Calgary Herald - News Byline: Jason Markusoff Publication: Calgary Herald - News Date: Friday July 23rd, 2010 Source: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Calgary+growth+slows+year/3312948/story.html Summary Vacancy rates are on the rise throughout the city. In some older inner-city neighbourhoods, more than 10 per cent of dwellings sit empty, including Sunalta and Bankview, which both lost several hundred residents between this April and last April, the census says. Notes For a while, enough people to fill Airdrie were moving to Calgary annually. But with the boom a mere memory, this year the city's population growth has nearly trickled to a Stettler. The 2010 civic census, released Thursday, reports that it took a baby boom to offset an exodus of migrants and give the city an annual increase of 6,060 people. That's actually a few hundred more than the population of central Alberta's town of Stettler. But it's a sluggish growth pace not seen since 1984, when Calgary was mired in recessionary murk. And it's the first time since 1992 that more people moved out of the city than arrived here -- a decline of 4,154 people. Steven Belaire returned to Atlantic Canada this week, after his Calgary limousine company fizzled and he waited a year for other opportunities to come up. In the last decade of explosive growth, Calgary grew by 20 per cent -- what urban sociologist Harry Hiller calls "explosive growth." "You can only handle that for so long," said the director of the Alberta In-Migration Study. "From that point of view, I'd say this is really a good thing. What we're aiming for is steady growth." Calgary's natural increase (births minus deaths) was 10,214, the second-largest in the past two decades. This more than offset the 4,154 more people that moved away from Calgary compared to those that moved in. A bust this isn't, Hiller said. Twenty-thousand people migrating out, perhaps, would be a bust. Federal statistics have shown people are still moving here in droves, even if the droves headed the other way outnumber them.