People are flocking from Halton and Peel to live in Hamilton — just not in old Hamilton

Dan Douthart grew up in Binbrook and his wife Kathy grew up in Stoney Creek.

After 35 years of raising a family in Oakville, the couple decided to move back to Hamilton.

Then came the mocking from their two sons.

They actually both thought we were insane," Douthart said with a laugh. They grew up in Oakville, that's all they ever knew.

So when we said we were moving to Hamilton they just really thought we were crazy, like, why would we want to move to Hamilton."

Then came the unexpected.

Last November, two months after the Doutharts downsized to a bungalow near Glendale Secondary School in east Hamilton, their younger son Patrick moved from Guelph to Stoney Creek. Then in March, their older son Ryan moved from Etobicoke to a house in Binbrook.

Dan has resisted the urge to say I told you so.'

I love having them close," he said.

They've realized that the city is great," he added. And they're seeing their money go further in the city versus other areas, for sure."

Everyone, it seems, knows someone who knows someone who has moved to Hamilton in recent years.

The common perception is that the influx has been driven by migrants from the City of Toronto who want to trade one inner city urban environment for a less expensive one in the heart of lower Hamilton.

And yes, that has been happening, according to census data.

But a new study shows that the great migration to Hamilton is being driven more by an exodus from the suburban parts of the Greater Toronto Area to the suburban communities of the amalgamated city - Stoney Creek, Glanbrook, Ancaster and Waterdown.

Three times as many people from Halton and Peel regions moved to Hamilton between 2011 and 2016 than from Toronto.

And the trend appears to be growing stronger.

When comparing census data from 2006 to 2016, the number of people moving to Hamilton from the other parts of the 905 area code jumped by 55 per cent.

Migration from Toronto to Hamilton during the same time only increased by 6 per cent.

From 2006 to 2016, the number of migrants from Oakville and Mississauga nearly doubled, and those from Milton nearly tripled.

The report shows Hamilton, particularly its outer suburban ring, is increasingly part of the GTA and the Toronto orbit," said Brian Doucet, the study's lead author and a professor in the University of Waterloo's School of Planning.

This is not a new phenomenon," Doucet said. It's a trend that's been going on for some time."

Using customized data sets from the 2006 and 2016 censuses, Doucet looked at migration trends to Hamilton from across Ontario - the cities and towns people left and the specific census tracts, or neighbourhoods, where they settled in Hamilton.

Census tracts are the divisions used by Statistics Canada to break cities into smaller areas. There are about 140 census tracts in the amalgamated city of Hamilton.

Nearly half of the people who moved to Hamilton from the GTA between 2011 and 2016 settled in the four outer suburban ring communities of Stoney Creek, Glanbrook, Ancaster and Flamborough, according to the study.

Two out of three people who migrated from Halton landed in one of those four communities.

This is a multidimensional story, but one that is increasingly of Hamilton's suburbs becoming more and more connected to the GTA as one of North America's largest urban regions sprawls further outward," the report states.

Part of the phenomenon is being driven by housing costs - ownership and rent - which decrease as one moves further from Toronto.

Mike Moffatt, a professor at Western University's Ivey Business School, has dubbed it drive until you qualify" for a mortgage.

That was pretty much the case for Michele Patterson and her family, who moved to Ancaster in 2020 after 20 years in Oakville.

Patterson went to McMaster and her husband grew up on the west Mountain but when she got a job near the Mississauga-Etobicoke border, she put her foot down - they weren't living any further west than Oakville.

My husband reluctantly agreed even though it was out of our budget," she said.

Twenty years later, their son was accepted to McMaster and they decided they wanted to move from their small Oakville bungalow to a bigger house.

We couldn't really afford to buy a bigger house in Oakville in our area," Patterson said, so Ancaster was the place for us to get a lot more house for our money."

Patterson admits that after living in Oakville, she had developed a little bit of a snobbery toward Hamilton."

Once there though, she got involved in hiking and nature and I have to say it's been quite a pleasant surprise for the most part."

Teri Hunter is another one of the people who headed west down the QEW.

Two years ago, she moved from Mississauga to a condo in the heart of Waterdown to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren.

I quite like living right in the village," said Hunter, a retired teacher. It's quaint and I can walk to absolutely everything, where in Mississauga I had to drive everywhere.

I've found my friends don't mind driving out this way," she said. They like coming to the little village."

Keeping old Hamilton at a distance'

At a neighbourhood level, nine of the top 10 census tracts with the highest number of migrants from elsewhere in Ontario between 2011 and 2016 are located in the suburban communities of Stoney Creek, Glanbrook, Ancaster and Flamborough. The other census tract was located near downtown Hamilton, very close to the GO station on James Street North.

Those nine suburban neighbourhoods all had median household incomes above $100,000 a year, well above the city's median of $87,800, and in each of the nine, more than 90 per cent of people commuted by car.

Outsiders are driving change in the suburbs. Literally," states Richard Harris in one of the study's chapters.

Harris is a professor emeritus in McMaster's School of Earth, Environment and Society.

He wonders if those people migrating to the suburban parts of Hamilton feel any attachment to the old City of Hamilton.

The statistics show a movement from the GTA to Hamilton but, in the suburbs at any rate, it is not in any meaningful sense about Hamilton," Harris states in the study.

New suburban subdivisions in Dundas, Ancaster, or Flamborough are indistinguishable from those in neighbouring Halton region," Harris adds. Indeed, it is likely that new suburban residents prefer to keep the City of Hamilton, as a place and as a symbol, at a distance."

That's certainly the case for Albert Ashton, who moved to Waterdown four years ago after 20 years in Fenwick, near Welland.

When asked if he does much in the former City of Hamilton, he provides a one-word response.

Nothing," Ashton said. We do absolutely nothing in Hamilton except to go get our vaccine shot. There's nothing in Hamilton that we need.

It was Mike Harris who pushed Waterdown into being part of Hamilton," Ashton said. I wish it would have become part of Burlington.

I think many other people do too."

It's much the same for Hunter.

Waterdown is kind of a funny little location," she said. It is part of Hamilton but it just seems you're drawn more to Burlington from here."

Hamilton's net loss in population

One of the things that stood out for Doucet was the low number of people who have migrated to the Hamilton Mountain in recent years.

Hamilton Mountain is home to about a third of the amalgamated city's population but only 17 per cent of the 45,600 people who moved to the city from across Ontario between 2011 and 2016 ended up on the Mountain.

There's not a lot of undeveloped land on the Mountain but there's a lot of underutilized land," Doucet said, if you think of strip malls or big parking lots."

The study also shows that the residential leapfrogging" doesn't just stop at Hamilton's borders.

The city has seen a net loss in population to some other nearby communities, likely because of increases to the cost of housing.

Nearly 8,000 people from Hamilton moved to the St. Catharines-Niagara area between 2016 and 2020 compared to less than 5,000 people from that area who moved to Hamilton. The city had a net loss of 2,750 people to Brantford during that time, and nearly 900 people lost to the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

Hamilton is thus one stage in a multi-stage housing-price-driven population redistribution process across and beyond the GTHA," the report states.

The next step for Doucet is to crunch the numbers from the 2021 census, which will begin to show the impact of the COVID pandemic on migration patterns to and from the city.

The trend lines will likely still be the same," Doucet said.

Steve Buist is a Hamilton-based investigative reporter and feature writer at The Spectator. sbuist@thespec.com