From the County Foundation’s Vital Signs report 2024
The trends are clear: the County is attracting more residents; a population that held steady at about 25,000 for most of the century has been climbing for a decade. In 2023, 27,000 people lived in the County. Combined with 8500 seasonal residents, the total population is 35,500.
While ours is an aging population — many new residents are close to or recently retired — the pandemic brought an influx of new families.Once more affordable housing is available — and it is on the way — many more people will be able to live here.
Careful planning is required to ease the strain on the infrastructures of community: childcare, education, health care, and traffic are already experiencing pressure.
4200 new homes are expected by 2032. “That’s just half the number that the planners have in the works,” notes Anne Van Vlack, the Foundation’s chief data miner.
“That’s just the number already approved by the County. And by 2032 — that’s not even very far away.”
“There are only about 11,000 homes in the County right now. It’s an incredible change in a relatively short period of time,” she said.
“The increase in population has implications for everything contained in the report.”
Traffic, for example. The County can reasonably expect 2000 more cars on the roads by 2032. Schools shuttered a decade ago could be re-opened. A massive expansion of the County’s water and wastewater systems is underway. Picton’s new hospital, expected to open its doors in 2027, is coming in the nick of time.
Luckily, the kinds of housing being planned are the more affordable varieties: apartment buildings are on the way, and stacked townhouses, at price points designed to attract younger families.
Another pressure point is loss of farmland. “Somehow, that needs to be balanced with the demand for housing,” says Ms. Van Vlack. The County has lost one quarter of its farmland since 2006, or 35,000 acres. Some of the land zoned future development in and around Picton is prime agricultural land. “That’s a real loss.”
A worrying sign is rates of food insecurity. Fully one quarter of households across Hastings-Prince Edward worry about getting enough to eat.
“That’s the highest rate since it has been tracked,” said Ms. Van Vlack. “One in four families doesn’t have enough to eat every month. They are relying on food banks, which are experiencing demand like never before. That’s not a solution. They are supposed to be for emergency situations, not a way of life.”
The culprit is in part the cost of housing. Housing prices have tripled since 2010 — in just 13 years, the median house price rose from $225,000 to $687,500. Over the same time period, the median wage rose about $22,000.
Rents have doubled since 2020. “The County has typically never had a lot of rentals,” notes Ms. Van Vlack. “That means the pressure on rents and house prices we see across Ontario is even more intense here. And there are added pressures from gentrification.”
One notable statistic among many in the report: the pandemic years contributed to an increase in self-employed residents: 2,592, or a quarter of the workforce. The County already had a higher-than-average proportion of self-employed workers: 25.5% here are self-employed, compared to 14.6% in Ontario.
Remote work and the numbers of people working from home has almost tripled, from 11% in 2011 to 28% in 2021. Bolstered by immigration, our visible minority population is up ten-fold, to about 10%.
A $200,000 funding stream directed at community service organizations whose work addresses County Foundation/Vital Signs identified priorities launches this year. Those priorities are: Community, Economy, Education, Environment, Food Security, Health, Housing, Safety, and Transportation.
“Since we began the Vital Signs reports in 2013, data has guided much of our work,” said Executive Director Dominique Jones. “The trends and needs highlighted in these reports make clear the time is right to create a fund directly linked to the community’s most pressing issues.
“Thanks to the generosity of the Wynne Thomas estate, the Katherine and Douglas MacPherson estate, and contributions from the County Foundation’s discretionary funds, we are proud to launch the Vital Impact Fund — an initiative dedicated to supporting our community in a meaningful way.”
The County Foundation is accepting applications for the Vital Impact Fund until November 21.
The full document can be found at the County Foundation.
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