Sister Cities?

Over the years, we have become accustomed to seeing signs indicating that a city is twinned with a list of cities around the globe. The above signs are in San Francisco, pointing to the cities around the world which are “twinned”. None are in Canada.

Since these are adopted twins, often they seem to have little in common with each other. But what about in North America? Are there demographic twins in the United States for Canadian cities?

We looked at the new Panorama CanAm system for some answers and pull the data for the twenty-six groups for metropolitan areas in both countries, then correlated the percent of population by group. Of the largest Canadian metros, the two strongest twins are Vancouver-Honolulu, followed closely by Calgary-Denver. The strongest anti-twins in the list are Windsor-Fayetteville and Winnipeg-San Francisco – meaning that they are demographically opposites.

There are some surprises here, at least from the perspective of the perceptions which date back to when manufacturing dominated the urban landscape. Hamilton and Pittsburgh were the steel capitals. Ottawa and Washington the hub of government. Detroit and Windsor the focus of the auto industry. Toronto and New York the financial capitals.

But we find instead that both Toronto and Ottawa are demographically more like Seattle than New York and Washington. This in part is because Toronto and Ottawa are actually more diverse than their American counterparts.

Halifax, Nova Scotia being most similar to Madison, Wisconsin? It actually makes sense. Both are government and university towns. St. Catharines and Akron? Again, these are both very much blue collar towns with a significant manufacturing remnant.

What puzzled us at first was the fact that several of the largest Canadian cities are most similar to Salt Lake City. How can this be? Salt Lake City has actually become one of the more diverse cities over the past decade, and considerably more diverse than similar sized cities such as Buffalo, Hartford, Rochester, and Tucson.

When we look the other direction – New York and Chicago are most similar to Toronto, but Los Angeles is most similar to Montreal (with Toronto a very close second). While this is in part a size effect – after all, the larger the city the greater the expected diversity of segments – it also reflects some significant differences between expectations and reality.

So which city is demographically the most diverse? Panorama CanAm consists of 26 groups and 99 segments. Montreal is the most demographically diverse, which has 94 of the 99 segments represented.  Close behind is Chicago, with 93 and Houston with 90. At the other end of the scale? Perhaps surprisingly, Honolulu is one of the least diverse cities given its size with only 26 segments present.

And San Francisco’s twin? It actually is what you would expect – Vancouver. But it seems a one-sided relationship.