Numbers can be deceiving.

That was the news at the unveiling of the County Foundation’s annual Vital Signs report last week, which offered a vivid demonstration of the powers of data analysis.

Take the number for the population of the County. Generally it’s almost 26,000. It’s been that way for a while. The numbers here seem pretty fixed. In 2001, the county was home to 24,901. Twenty years later, in 2021, 25,704.

The Vital Signs report tells us something interesting about this apparently static number, though. In the past five years, from 2016-2021, 5200 people left the county, and 6200 arrived. That’s a net intake of about 1000 people. Not a huge deal, on the surface. Population still 25,000, plus or minus.

The same phenomenon is apparent in the five years before that, when 3500 left and 4000 came.

That means that in the last five years, the population increase of the county was twice that of the previous five years. But we are talking about 500 people becoming 1000 people, so not a big deal. Right?

But as Anne VanVlack, the Foundation’s chief data miner, explained, these numbers are very significant. While she relies in part on anecdotal evidence to determine why people leave, there have been a lot of anecdotes. People are leaving the County because they cannot afford it, and the people arriving are coming, at least in part, because they can.

In the past ten years, over a third of the permanent population of the county has been replaced.

This is something you would never know just by looking at that unchanging 25k population total. The number of people who live here hasn’t budged in decades. Yet the place has been utterly transformed.

The evidence is not just anecdotal. It’s there in house prices, which are obviously both forcing people out, in some cases, and supplying an incentive to sell up and leave in others. It’s there in the lack of available rental housing. And it’s there in demographics. The largest part of the influx of people is over age 65. People in this demographic make up about 20% of the provincial population. A fifth. As they did in PEC in 2006. But now they make up a third of the population here. 33.5 per cent. Over just fifteen years. That’s an incredible shift.

Nonetheless, one can understand why many among us have trouble with the population projections floating around, which do seem nuts when you look at the historical data. That magic 25,000 has not budged in decades. Why would it suddenly start to increase exponentially, to at least 32,000 people over the next ten years — in the most conservative estimates?

Personally, I think 32,000 residents is closer to a five-year horizon than the ten-year. We are living through a period of dramatic social change. According to StatsCan, in 2021 the County’s population was 25,704. In 2022, it expects the dial to move to 26,816. These numbers would be ticking up even faster if there were affordable places to live.

Those coming are coming because they can afford it. Those leaving are leaving because they cannot. What if we kept attracting those who want to come, and retained those who are having to leave? Or put it another way: what if affordable housing actually materialized?

Over the past 10 years in Ontario, house prices have tripled – leading to huge equity gains for the very demographic coming here to live. Incomes, however, have barely kept pace with inflation, creating the severe affordability crisis that disproportionately affects younger people.

Thousands of new homes are in the works for both Picton and Wellington, at Base31 and at Cork and Vine. And some of them, at least, should be “affordable.” What does that mean, exactly? In a striking move last week, the Ford government tabled legislation to redefine that way it uses the term. It jettisons its ridiculous, developer-friendly “80 per cent of market value” benchmark in favour of a definition based on income. That is only right. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation insists that banks evaluate mortgage applications based on income, not the market. Mortgage applicants are only eligible for as much mortgage as 1/3 of their total gross household income can pay for.

Bill 134, the Affordable Homes, Good Jobs Act, defines “affordable” as a carrying cost of no more than 30 per cent of the 60^th percentile of income for households in a given municipality. In the County, where incomes lag those of the rest of the province, the stress on local salaries is important. Median household income here in 2021, according to the Vital Signs report, was about $72,000. 30 per cent of that means an average rent, or mortgage payment, of about $1800 a month. That means a home that costs about $275,000.

Developers who build housing that meets this definition of affordability would be exempt from paying the development charges for those units. For a county anticipating thousands of units of new housing that developers have a vested interest in making affordable, this legislation could not have come at a more opportune moment.