Calgary Data: Office, Residential, Visitation, Building Permits, Sales

Are we monitoring the wrong thing when it comes to measuring downtown Calgary’s health and wellbeing? Calgarian Peter Schryvers, literally wrote the book on “Bad Data.” Yes, that is the title of his book, published in 2020. The subtitle of the book is “Why we measure the wrong things and often miss the metrics that matter.”  For anyone who is a numbers nerd, it is a fascinating read. 

While I definitely don’t have the knowledge Schryvers has re: “bad data,” I thought I would apply some of this thinking to how Calgary collects and shares information on the health and well-being of our downtown and city in general.  

Collecting and sharing the right data is complicated, but it is critical to understanding and planning our city’s future.

While there are no new office buildings being built in downtown, there are dozens of new residential towers recently completed and under construction, with more in the works.

Simple Data

For years the bell weather measurement of downtown and Calgary’s economic prosperity, by the media and City bureaucrats was simply adding up the number of cranes building new downtown office towers. The more cranes, the better the economy. Simple data!  

Ironically, there are cranes in the downtown today, but they are all constructing residential towers.  And, that is good thing, as downtown needs more people living there! 

The other key measurement is downtown office vacancy numbers however, they can be misleading.  In the late ‘90s, the number of people working in downtown offices increased without any new office construction or any change in the office vacancy rate. Why? Because corporations moved from individual offices to an open concept cubical design.  The average space per employee declined from 225 to about 150 square feet.  So a 100,000 square foot space that once was home to 444 employees, was now occupied by 666 employees an increase of 50% in the number of workers without any new office space being added. No cranes and no decline in office vacancy rates either.

Calgary has always been downtown centric when it comes to measuring the health and wellbeing of the city.  

Residential Data

When it comes to the overall health of the city, the city doesn’t quote the vacancy of residential space as a key economic indicator - we report population growth.  In 2020, Calgary grew by 1.9%, a rate higher than Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Anything over a 2% annual population growth is considered healthy.

What you rarely see in the media of City documents is the fact there are currently 20,000+ vacant homes in Calgary.  If they average 1,000 square feet, then we have 20 million square feet of empty residential space - almost twice the current total downtown office space. However, if you report it as a percentage of total Calgary’s total residential space it would be about 4%, which doesn’t sound as bad as the 25+% office vacancy rate downtown.  

This is the population growth over the past 10 years for Calgary’s Greater Downtown communities.

Strangely, while the number of people WORKING in Calgary’s greater downtown has declined since 2014 (the beginning of the downturn), the number of people LIVING in the downtown has INCREASED over the same period.

Using the broadest definition of the “Greater Downtown” (communities within 2 km of downtown) the number of people living in and around the downtown office core has increased from 75,019 in 2014, to 89,702 in 2019 i.e. a 19.5% increase or about 2% per year, which is close the overall city average over that period.  

Obviously the health of our greater downtown depends on if you look at the DECLINE in workers or INCREASE in residents.  

Another way to measure the health and well-being of the downtown is to look at the number of children living there. Over the past 10 years there has been a healthy 29% overall increase in the City Centre’s population of children.

Montoring city-wide population growth is critical to measuring the well-being of the city. Note Net international growth has remained strong over past 5 years even with the decline in the city’s economy.

Diverse Data

When it comes to downtown’s wellbeing, the number of people visiting the downtown is also  key indicator. This will become even more important post-COVID as fewer workers will be coming downtown daily, perhaps only a couple of days a week. 

We should also be monitoring the diversity of workers in the downtown. That means not just the office workers, but those in the retail shops, restaurants, other small businesses and public buildings. It could be significant, given a small take-out restaurant in a food court employees several people in a space equivalent to one executive office. 

And let’s not forget the employees in the hotels, government offices buildings and the teachers administrators and students at downtown schools – Bow Valley College, University of Calgary and various other private schools.  They often get left out of the discussion. 

Thirdly, we need to measure the number of downtown visitors for shopping, dining, attractions, medical, legal and financial appointments.  How many people come downtown in the evening to enjoy, concert, performance or dining experience?  

We also need to know the number of construction workers in the downtown.  When two or three new towers (office or residential) are being built, it can add hundreds of workers to the downtown. 

I have heard some people quote the increase in cycling and scooter trips in the downtown as a measure of vitality. Is that a good indicator? What about the number of transit trips to downtown - not just commuters, but those mid-day, evening and weekends? 

Does the City monitor the sales per square foot for The Core retail stores, Hudson’s Bay or Holt Renfrew? Simons? Or just the vacancy rates of retail space? Sales per square foot would surely be a good indicator of the health of downtown retail.  What about restaurant sales? 

What about the attendance at Arts Commons theatres, the Glenbow or visitors to Calgary Tower? Do we know if it is declining or rising? We know 1.6 million people visited the new Central Library in 2019 which was impressive. 

I have never seen a comprehensive report that collects all of this data to measure downtown’ economic well-being.  

City Well-being

Perhaps one of the best indicators of the health and well-being of a city is the value of its building permits.  While the value of city-wide building permits peaked at $9 billion in 2013, 2019 saw a healthy $5 billion in new development which exceeded that of six of the past 10 years. 

In 2020, Calgary’s total building permits dropped below $4 billion for the first time since 2010. Was that mostly due to COVID, or should that be a red flag? What is interesting is that even though Calgary has seen a downturn in its economy over the past 5 years, the overall value of building permits has remained relatively healthy.   

What does this mean?  Are we too focused on what is happening downtown, to realize that good things are happening elsewhere in the City? Are we too focused on the big corporations and forgetting about the contribution that is being made by tens of thousands of small businesses? Are we too focused on helping the tech start-ups and forgetting to help start-ups or existing small businesses in other sectors?

Measuring and monitoring the health and well-being of our downtown got even more complicated with COVID with more people working from home, restaurants, museums, theatres closed, more online shopping and travel restrictions.  Downtown’s well-being is totally dependent on people from across the city, province and country visiting to for work, events and various forms of entertainment. 

Last Word 

If the City of Calgary, Calgary Economic Development, commercial and residential developers want to really understand the complex dynamics of our downtown and city, we need to be measuring, monitoring, sharing and focusing the right data. 

What is happening east of the Deerfoot  (Airport, warehouse, distribution centers and multi-modal inland ports) where more Calgarians work than downtown is just as important.  As is what is happening in the NW post-secondary and medical centres – University of Calgary, SAIT, Foothills Medical Centre and Alberta Children’s Hospital.  

 Over the past 25+years Calgary’s economy has become more than just what is happening downtown.