Despite tumbling seven places in the overall rankings, MoneySense magazine still ranks St. Albert as one of the top 15 places in Canada to live, including the third best place to find a job and the fifth best place to raise a family.
The annual Best Places to Live rankings, released earlier this week, showed St. Albert was ranked as the 12th-best place to live, down from fifth-best in 2011. Ottawa took first place nationwide, while other Alberta municipalities such as Edmonton (eighth) and Red Deer (ninth) and Strathcona County (11th) finished ahead of St. Albert. Notably, St. Albert finished higher than Calgary, Lethbridge, Lacombe and Canmore within Alberta, while also topping larger municipalities like Saskatoon, Quebec City and Toronto.
“St. Albert offers its residents the nearby amenities of a big city with a dose of small town charm,” the magazine said in its write-up of St. Albert. “St. Albert has the second-highest discretionary income and third-highest household income.”
With Mayor Nolan Crouse visiting Medicine Hat (which ranked 40th) for a small cities mayors’ caucus, deputy mayor Wes Brodhead remarked even though the city dropped seven rankings, it still beat out other notable, larger municipalities.
“Whenever you’re compared to 190 other communities in the country and you break the top numbers, that’s something to celebrate,” Brodhead said. “You can argue with some of the points but in the end I think the results for St. Albert are very positive.”
MoneySense also broke their statistics out into three other sets of rankings — best places to retire, best places to raise kids and best places to find a job. St. Albert finished 47th, fifth and third respectively.
“I think (best place to find a job) that reflects the economic strength, not only within the city but the Capital region. Sometimes we focus on St. Albert because that’s where we live but we are not an island unto ourselves. We live in the context of Alberta,” Brodhead said.
In ranking the 190 cities in its survey, the magazine ranked each according to 22 separate categories, obtaining information from the Census Metropolitan Areas and other statistics as provided by Statistics Canada. Each city was subsequently ranked in each individual category, such as employment numbers, discretionary income and crime, to name a few, and received points based on their ranking. The maximum number of points allowed was 105, with the highest scoring municipalities ranked respectively.
Brodhead said he found St. Albert’s ranking for culture — 49th — perplexing.
“I thought maybe we were ranked a bit low. You look and Canmore is number four and appreciate that — we don’t have a mountain — but certainly we’ve got history and the Children’s festival and that just highlights to me the commitment of this city to bring in events that engage the community.”
While St. Albert ranked in the middle of the pack in most of its categories, such as doctors per 1,000 people (46th) and violent crime (44th), it ranked near the bottom in two categories — percentage of individuals that walk or bike to work (170th) and average house price (173rd).
Brodhead credited the low score on travel to work to St. Albert’s commuter population.
“A large part of our population commutes so it’s difficult to bike from Edmonton to St. Albert or vice versa.”
He pointed to Monday’s decision to give Habitat for Humanity $257,000 of provincial affordable housing money as a step towards improving affordable housing.
“We need to continue to persevere in our determination to address affordable housing here in St. Albert,” Brodhead said.
The Best Places to Live 2012 rankings can be found at www.moneysense.ca.
Best Places to Live 2012<br />MoneySense Magazine<br />Top 20 Municipalities<br /><br />1) Ottawa<br />2) Burlington, Ont.<br />3) Kingston, Ont.<br />4) Halifax<br />5) Regina<br />6) Brandon, Man.<br />7) Fredericton<br />8) Edmonton<br />9) Red Deer<br />10) Winnipeg<br />11) Strathcona County<br />12) St. Albert<br />13) Newmarket, Ont.<br />14) Calgary<br />15) Saanich, B.C.<br />16) Whitby, Ont.<br />17) Oakville, Ont.<br />18) Moncton<br />19) Repentigny, Que.<br />20) Clarington, Ont.
