Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelS
Can you provide some census data to back this up? You have made some claims that have been thoroughly debunked recently (percentage of multi-family units in this city for instance) so it really makes you hard to believe when you say something like this. Depending on how you classify senior I bet they would represent a majority of people in this city (if you classify it as 55 and older for instance).
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No, I made a comment that I freely admitted came out of my ass. But thanks for pretending this is a journal-cited research forum instead of a chat board.
No idea if this is from actual census data or just estimates. Yes, if we classify senior as 30, the majority of people here are seniors. However, I'd be inclined to go with the usual definition of 65. While it would seem nice to think we're all going to retire and stop earning income at 55, it just ain't a reality for most people.
From those numbers, 65 and older is about 10% of the city. 55 and older would be 20%. Now, good luck finding numbers on how many people 55-65 work in this city proportionally (who tracks this sort of thing?). Either way, seniors are a small minority here, unless you go with 55 (which makes half of my cow-orkers suddenly "low income").
Anyway, instead of pedantically picking apart a single comment, I'd really like one of you to make a convincing argument that Calgary's demographics somehow completely go against the trend on this continent that more income generally means higher property values, all things being equal. Is Dover full of millionaires that I'm not aware of? Is Mount Royal full of single moms and university students working part time? Again - seriously, someone is going to try to make that argument?
With a few exceptions I've seen demographics generated on this city that show almost a straight-line correspondence between average income in a neighbourhood and property values. No, I do not have official peer-reviewed data from the census bureau on this, but I'm astounded that this is not common sense. People with more money
tend to spend more money, and vice-versa. This is not rocket science.
Fun Wikipedia article. Presuming the numbers have been accurately transcribed from their original sources, and presuming that between 2000 and today these sort of figures haven't radically changed - look at the table near the bottom, and sort by average income. Now look at the far-right column (% renting). Once again, yes there are exceptions - but there's a pretty strong inverse correlation between renting and income. I'm too lazy to graph it but it would be pretty close to a straight line once you exclude the few outliers. Now, unless rental properties on average are worth more than owned properties in this city (which would make little sense if most rental are multi-family and land is in fact the more expensive part of property values)...