With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1050020
added three new ones: average commute time, average value of primary real estate and housing starts per 10,000 residents. In the process, we've ne-tuned our meth- odoloy, resulting in a shift of weighting from so-called lagging economic indicators, such as income growth, to more forward-looking or lead- ing indicators like housing starts. This has also struck a better balance between income-related indicators, expense-related indicators and those that signal a city's broader economic health. Squamish takes the top spot for the second time in three years, showcasing its economic staying power. Neighbouring Whistler makes a strong debut at No. 2, and the nearby District of North Vancouver rounds out the top three. The Sea-to-Sky Corridor owes its strength to several factors, including fast-rising incomes, generous spending on recreation and booming population growth. Squamish edges out Whistler thanks to one of the province's busiest home con- struction markets. For this year's ranking, we've taken home- building activity into account to provide a more forward-looking view of a community's economic tness. As a leading economic indicator, housing starts re‡ect investor condence in a local mar- ket and imply anticipated population growth, job growth in construction and development-related industries, and increased retail sales—you have to ll those homes with something. U P S A N D D O W N S After two years in the top three, the 2018 lead- ers, Fort St. John and Dawson Creek, experienced 30 BCBUSINESS DECEMBER/JANUARY 2019 2019 RANK 2018 RANK COMMUNITY AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD INCOME (10% WEIGHT) AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD INCOME UNDER 35 (10%) SQUAMISH $116,171 $77,294 WHISTLER $125,677 $75,518 DISTRICT OF NORTH VANCOUVER $147,433 $124,403 TOWNSHIP OF LANGLEY $122,162 $101,784 KELOWNA $99,664 $69,901 PRINCE RUPERT $98,108 $64,151 CITY OF LANGLEY $82,466 $75,094 CITY OF NORTH VANCOUVER $90,999 $69,501 FORT ST. JOHN $122,534 $103,214 MAPLE RIDGE $107,319 $89,552 COQUITLAM $107,029 $80,988 SECHELT $81,085 $81,176 PARKSVILLE $73,396 $90,332 SURREY $108,207 $79,834 NANAIMO $85,005 $61,169 DELTA $122,321 $97,776 TERRACE $96,248 $59,423 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 12 3 8 11 6 5 11 8 1 16 19 23 17 18 10 4 • Our ranking only includes cities of 10,000 or more permanent residents. • We excluded bedroom com- munities such as Lake Country, Sooke and West Vancouver, which may offer a high quality of life but have relatively small job markets. • For the first time, Langley and North Vancouver are represented on the ranking by both their city and district governments. • We work with research partner Environics Analytics because we believe it has the best data available–but even the best data has its limitations. To produce its income numbers, for example, Environics Ana- lytics uses data from Statistics Canada and the Canada Rev- enue Agency projected to 2018. The unemployment rates come from Statscan's September 2018 Labour Force Survey, a three-month moving average that only calculates rates for B.C.'s eight economic regions and four census metropolitan areas. Similarly, housing starts figures are provided by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.'s monthly Starts and Completion Survey, and only reflect the year-to-date figures collected to the end of September 2018. Therefore, the latter two indi- cators won't reflect economic trends for the rest of the year. Just so you know: