Babytown: The Fraser Valley is a magnet for infants

This is the third story in The Changing Valley, an ongoing data-driven series on how housing and migration are changing the Fraser Valley.

Part 1: How growth in the Fraser Valley has accelerated

Part 2: The widening east-west gap between home prices in the Fraser Valley 

Part 3: How home prices are driving eastward migration

MAP: Across the Fraser Valley, babies are booming. But some communities are welcoming more newborns than others.

People move to the Fraser Valley for a lot of reasons. But you’ll never get a straight answer from one of the largest group of new arrivals: newborns.

Previous stories in this series have documented the eastward migration of residents within the Lower Mainland, the widening gap between home prices, and how those two factors have combined to swell the Fraser Valley’s population. But not everyone is equally involved in the great valley migration. Indeed, of all the people moving to the region, no arriving (and remaining) group is as large as newborns, infants, and the soon-to-be-born.

Until comprehensive census data is released later this year, we won’t have a ton of data on exactly who is moving where in the Fraser Valley. But we do already know one thing: their ages.

Statistics Canada has collected and released annual data on net in-province migration. Those figures are broken down for every age between 0 and 80. And especially when aggregated over 20 years, they show that children under one are contributing more to Chilliwack, Abbotsford, and Mission’s growing populations than any other single age. (Those figures don’t count babies actually born here.)

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