There’s good news and bad news for Northdale

Neighbourhood could be reinvigorated, urban and diverse — or an expensive enclave

In 2012, the City of Waterloo implemented a new plan for Northdale — the neighbourhood between the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University bounded by King Street, Phillip Street, Columbia Street and University Avenue. The Northdale plan seeks to remake the neighbourhood formerly dominated by detached bungalows by allowing higher densities, adding mixed-use spaces, and creating a “re-urbanized” feel. The hope is to make the neighbourhood attractive enough to bring families and young professionals back to the area.

What prompted the plan was a significant increase in university enrolment in the 2000s, leading to a higher concentration of students living in Northdale. It’s a process scholars call ‘studentification.’

Students were concerned about the safety of crowded lodging houses in converted single-family homes. Other residents were concerned about disruptive student parties, declining property values, and the displacement of long-term homeowners. The city initially allowed higherdensity development along the arterial roads bordering Northdale, hoping that this increase in supply would reduce pressure on the housing stock at the interior of the neighbourhood, to no avail.

Research we recently published in the journal Urban Studies may offer both good and bad news for the Northdale plan. Our study looked at the sociodemographic characteristics of neighbourhoods in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver to tease apart the overlapping social processes at play in areas close to major university and college campuses.

In addition to studentification, we were also interested in ‘youthification,’ defined as the concentration of young adults across the income spectrum within particular neighbourhoods (usually dense urban ones), and gentrification — the socioeconomic upscaling of neighbourhoods that can make them inaccessible to a city’s lower-income residents.

Using Statistics Canada data we found that proximity to post-secondary institutions was correlated with youthification. This may not seem surprising, as students are often referred to colloquially as ‘young adults.’ However, our study looked at the population aged 25 to 34, which would exclude most undergraduate or college students. The data suggests that some of these ‘older’ young adults living in youthified areas are graduate students, but these are a minority.

Proximity to universities and colleges was also associated with gentrification. This was true whether gentrification was measured by dwelling values, or by the educational attainment and occupation of residents. West Point Grey near the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, or Outremont near the University of Montreal, might stand out as well-known instances of high-status neighbourhoods near academic institutions. Westmount and parts of Beechwood provide local examples.

Yet youthification and gentrification were not highly correlated with each other, suggesting that when these separate processes do overlap, they tend to do so near universities or colleges.

So, what might the implications be for Northdale? The good news is that the Northdale plan may succeed in its goal of attracting young adults who are no longer students to the near-campus area, including a diverse array of immigrants, young professionals, and families, regardless of occupation or income. From a broader perspective, drawing in these groups keeps Waterloo Region a lively, growing community.

The bad news is that Northdale could end up like other desirable neighbourhoods near universities: an expensive enclave that is increasingly off-limits to certain residents. If this happens, the plan’s objective of creating a diverse urban neighbourhood will be undercut. Only the highest-income young adults — not to mention other age groups — might be able to take advantage of the new urban amenities emerging from the Northdale plan, its higher-order transit service, or its accessibility to Waterloo Park and uptown. In other words, Northdale risks losing the diversity commonly associated with youthified neighbourhoods that the plan seeks to achieve.

Of course, the Northdale plan is only a few years old, so it would hardly be fair to expect it to have already achieved everything it sets out to do. But we can’t just wait and see how it plays out, either. It is not too late to make sure Northdale is a great neighbourhood — not just for students or young, highly paid tech workers, but one that is welcoming to anyone.