A new forecasting tool could help council make tough planning decisions in the future.
The municipal growth forecasting report, released last week, is the result of a collaboration with the University of Alberta management sciences program, which pairs fourth-year students with organizations in need of low-cost data analytics services.
The students, Mark Nassar, Evan Cherniawsky and Yamei Wang, looked at a variety of datasets to determine which macro-economic indicators had strong correlations with the city’s past residential and non-residential growth.
While the overall findings seem to confirm what was said during the city’s state of the economy address this spring – that St. Albert marches to the beat of its own drum – Rhys Chouinard said the forecasting model will be an important decision-making tool for years to come. Chouinard is the senior corporate analyst with the City of St. Albert who oversaw the project.
In the past, the city had to rely on anecdotal information to predict future growth patterns. “Now you can plug it into this equation,” said Chouinard. “I mean it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s better than a guess.”
Having a more accurate picture of growth patterns and market demand three to five years down the line will help better inform economic development on business attraction and retention strategies, as well as guide important planning decisions.
“If council understands that the community could be growing faster in a certain way if it had more land of a certain type, they could use (the model) to maximize the efficiency of their policy decisions to facilitate that growth,” said Chouinard.
For example, the model is currently indicating that there has been a deficit in available industrial lands since 2013. If the model had been available five years ago, it might have been easier to make a case for Project 9. The multi-million dollar sanitary trunk sewer line was approved by city council earlier this year, and is needed to service the southwest part of St. Albert.
According to the report, the city’s industrial growth did not perform as well as it should. Instead of growing at a rate of about 120,000 square-feet per year in 2013 to 2015, due to low vacancy, potential industrial development in those years was cut in half.
“I’m hoping what this says is that in the next two or three years we get really strong absorption of the industrial land that’s coming online in the Anthony Henday Business Park and elsewhere in the community,” said Chouinard.
According to the new predictive model St. Albert will grow by 1,874 housing starts in five years (in 2017) and 100,000 commercial square feet per year between 2017 and 2020.
The students completed the report in late April. Since then two of them, Nassar and Wang, have gone on to found their own consulting firm called Lionheart Consulting Group. It is the first consulting firm in Canada that is completely run by students and recent grads.
