What your neighbourhood says about your life, according to new map

A new neighbourhood demographic analysis reveals who lives where in Vancouver and what kind of lifestyles they lead.

The Environics Analytics (EA) Prizm5 classifies Canadians into 68 different lifestyle categories by postal code, with segments for Vancouver based on wealth, ethnicity, age, behaviours and a whole slew of other demographic identifiers.

“By integrating data from nearly a dozen demographic, marketing and media sources, PRIZM5 allows organizations to analyze their customers and markets, revealing what consumers are buying, doing and thinking,” EA says in a news release.

In Metro Vancouver, the most prominent neighbourhood segments are “Asian Avenues”, “Urban Digerati”, “Asian Sophisticates” and “Asian New Wave”. Most of Vancouver is divided into 12 segments, but users can look up their area’s lifestyle but inputting their postal code into EA’s PRIZM5 system.

The below image maps out the ethnic diversity present across Metro Vancouver, highlighting the high South Asian population in Surrey and Asian populations in Vancouver and Burnaby. To no surprise, the “Urban Digerati” – the group of income-earning young professionals – is most centrally located in Dowtown, Kitsilano, False Creek and East Vancouver

Image: 2015 Environics Analytics, PRIZM5

The segments with the highest concentration in Metro Vancouver are pictured in the image below, specifically highlighting the aging population in the Fraser Valley.

Image: 2015 Environics Analytics, PRIZM5

“Aging in Suburbia” are older, upper to middle income-earning couples and families who typically own their own homes and hold service sector or white collar careers. They enjoy summer vacations, camping and have the money to spend on luxury cars and boats.

While the aging crowd tends to live outside of the City of Vancouver, the “Asian Avenues” make up the biggest proportion of city-dwellers. The “Asian Avenues” are successful, middle-aged and older Asian families with a university educations and white collar careers. Half are first- and second-generation Chinese and speak a non-official language at home. They are often found traveling to their native country and other international destinations.

The “Urban Digerati” are the next most populous group in the City. The younger, well-educated city singles are generally tech-savvy apartment-renters who have more discretionary income to spend on social activities and excursions, like bar-hopping, shopping and exercising. In Vancouver, they might commonly be referred to as “hipsters” or “yuppies”.

In Point Grey and North Burnaby, you can find the “Asian New Wave” – a group of younger, well-educated Asian singles and families with lower- to middle-incomes – in our case, likely UBC and SFU students. Most immigrated to Canada in the 1990s or more recently and speak Chinese at home.

Beyond the largest populations, Vancouver is home to a wide-range of lifestyles described by EA. To get a sense of who Vancouverites are, what they do, how much they make and where they live, take a look at EA’s analysis of Vancouver’s biggest segments below.