My friend Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun — new dad, computer geek and great researcher — recently took a look at where children live in Vancouver. There are some stats in a recent City of Vancouver report but, as he noted, only with absolute numbers, not with any stats that give you a sense of what percentage of the total population of that neighbourhood that kids represent.
So he took the numbers and crunched them to come up with this, which tells you where the kids are and aren’t in this city.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Carlos // Aug 19, 2009 at 11:41 am
I highly recommend everyone have a look at the Human Early Learning Partnership’s mapping project (UBC):
http://www.earlylearning.ubc.ca/EDI/maps_local.html
Here’s the socioeconomic maps for Vancouver (by neighbourhoods), using the 2001 & 2006 Census. The SES maps for all of BC are grouped into School Districts and sub areas info is arranged into neighbourhoods. One factor they’ve mapped out is Population Under 5 (% of total population). There’s lots of other SES factors in there as well.
http://www.earlylearning.ubc.ca/EDI/documents/SESindex/SD39_Van_SES_T1T2.pdf
All “neighbourhoods” in BC are compared against one another.
2 Which Vancouver neighbourhood has the most elementary school kids? - Parenting: Curious Dad // Aug 19, 2009 at 2:53 pm
[...] I got a big spike in traffic to this series of posts after my good friend — and fantastic civic affairs reporter — Frances Bula mentioned it in her blog this week. [...]
3 echman // Aug 19, 2009 at 4:50 pm
When I worked at the HELP - UBC we did some great maps of where 6 year old children live in Vancouver and every school district in the province. I recall that year after year the number of kids on the westside declined. http://www.earlylearning.ubc.ca/EDI/maps_local.html
4 Joseph Jones // Aug 20, 2009 at 10:01 am
Let’s massage those Skelton statistics into rank orders for the first four Neighbourhood Centre targets of Vancouver City Planning (every scheduled area lies in or at the east side of Vancouver …). Then let’s speculate on how gentrification and elimination of back yards will affect the desirability and affordability of those neighborhoods for children.
[Lowest rank = 22nd]
First, Kensington Cedar Cottage: age 0-2 ranks 4th at 3.2%, age 3-5 ranks 3rd at 3.2%, age 6-12 ranks 4th at 7.7%
Second, Renfrew Collingwood: age 0-2 ranks 7th at 2.9%, age 3-5 ranks 7th at 3.0%, age 6-12 ranks 8th at 7.4%
Third, Riley Park: age 0-2 ranks 3rd at 3.7%, age 3-5 ranks 4th at 3.2%, age 6-12 ranks 12th at 6.8%
Fourth, Hastings Sunrise: age 0-2 ranks 5th at 3.2%, age 3-5 ranks 6th at 3.1%, age 6-12 ranks 7th at 7.5%
The land-grab that tries to pass for a Neighbourhood Centre planning (now much expanded from its decent CityPlan origins) takes no account of present neighborhood social composition.
5 Not Running for Mayor // Aug 20, 2009 at 10:58 am
All fish live in water. A whale lives in water, hence a whale must be a fish.
See the faulty logic Joseph?
The reason those areas have high children rates can’t be directly linked to them having backyards, if anything it’s because they are the cheapest units parents can afford.
So if we continue using faulty logic I can state that by increasing the number of units in the cheapest part of town it would greatly help out parents.
The numbers provided show where kids live by precentages and nothing else. He did a great job and I appreaciate the data. Lets not read into stuff that isn’t there though.
6 Bill Lee // Aug 20, 2009 at 10:45 pm
And the census is one day in May 2006.
StatCan is having trouble getting full reports from the populace of BC. 2006 was getting of for 20% non-filers.
Not like the old days, when nosy neighbours as census clerks would come into your home and ask the questions with clipboard.
Don’t forget BC Stats
http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/DATA/dd/income.asp
and your ‘friendly’ Canada Revenue agency for yearly stats showing a trend, or not.
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/gncy/stts/gb06/pst/lcsts/lsdwn_by_prv-eng.html
The City might have paid for crosstabulations of greater granulariaty. You can get city block data, “anonymized” into 0,5,10, etc. numbers, if you want to pay for it.
Households with children? Apartment block FSA (postal forward citation area codes) and children?
But why can’t the Vancouver Sun show an interest in Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, Coquitlam, the Langleys as people move out of Vancouver with their families?
Other cities have paid for similar Census data.
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