Quote:
Originally Posted by LightingGuy
Hamilton and Burlington are basically out of land. They would need to expand the urban boundary for them to grow at a more significant pace.
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Burlington is out of land, Hamilton isn't. The province just forced a huge urban boundary expansion on them and a decent chunk of the greenbelt removal areas were in Hamilton itself.
Hamilton's issue is that Burlington is hyper-NIMBY, and despite being basically 1/3 of the CMA, is posting effectively 0% growth numbers with absolutely hilariously low housing starts. It's easily the most NIMBY municipality in the GTHA.
This means that the CMAs growth is forced into Hamilton itself, which has long underperformed on population growth. That's slowly changing, but most greenfield areas in Hamilton aren't particularly accessible to the wider GTA, so I'm not sure how much growth it'll manage to accommodate in the near future.
Hamilton's downtown seems set to have an absolutely massive population boom in the coming years though, so that may help.
We'll have to see.
Either way, yea, I would be surprised if Hamilton beats Winnipeg to 1 million, and regardless, Hamilton's CMA population is partly "tainted" by it's GTA influence. Burlington is more of a Toronto suburb than a Hamilton suburb these days..
I suspect Winnipeg, QC, and Hamilton will all pass the 1 million mark relatively close to each other, but with Winnipeg in front. And none of them will get there for another decade or so.
The one wildcard is potential additions to the CMA areas. Hamilton has Caledonia as one prime CMA addition, which would likely already be in the CMA area adding another ~15-20k to population if it weren't located in Haldimand County, a huge single-tier municipality which stretches over half the Niagara Peninsula. Places like Beamsville or Smithville could get pulled into the CMA at some point as well.