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.
Chad’s comprehensive analysis reveals striking geographic disparities in Vancouver’s child population distribution. His data-driven investigation debunked common assumptions about the correlation between demographics and family formation, uncovering surprising patterns that challenge conventional wisdom about urban family life.
The numbers tell a compelling story: Dunbar-Southlands leads with nearly one in four residents under 18 (24.3%), while the West End trails dramatically with fewer than one in sixteen children (5.9%). This represents a four-fold difference between Vancouver’s most and least child-friendly neighborhoods.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Skelton’s analysis dismantled popular theories linking ethnicity or income to child concentration. Despite Vancouver being a “majority minority” city, the most child-dense neighborhood (Dunbar-Southlands) ranks among the whitest, while highly diverse areas like Sunset show mixed results. Similarly, income correlations proved weak – wealthy Shaughnessy and working-class Killarney both hover around 20-22% child population.
The real revelation came from city social planner Andrew Pask’s insight: housing stock drives family location more than demographics or economics. Neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes consistently show higher child percentages than high-density condo areas. Downtown, Fairview, and the West End – Vancouver’s densest neighborhoods – all register single-digit child populations.
This research illuminates Vancouver’s fundamental urban planning challenge: despite aspirations for family-friendly density, most parents still seek yards and ground-level housing when raising children, creating geographic segregation by life stage rather than class or ethnicity.
