How tracking town centre growth in Kelowna predicts the city’s future

Kelowna has hotspots where more development and population growth is happening, and the city thinks that even though Rutland is the underdog at the moment it’s going to catch up in the future.

Kelowna has five neighbourhoods that the city calls urban centres; downtown, Pandosy, Capri Landmark, Midtown and Rutland. Comparing each of these neighbourhoods on things like population, housing, employment, roads and parks helps take a peak at what the city might look like in the future. 

Robert Mills is the manager of the city’s long range planning department and he said four out of five urban centres are exploding. 

“They’ve been growing faster than the city as a whole, with the exception of Rutland,” he said. “Downtown’s population increased by 42 per cent between 2019 and 2024. Pandosy was 23 per cent. Midtown, that’s the area around Orchard Park, was 25 per cent. Capri Landmark was 26 per cent. Now citywide, across the entire city, we grew by about 15 per cent… Rutland only grew by seven per cent.”

Even though Rutland is falling behind it’s still considered an urban centre since planners anticipate that’s where the growth is going to move in a few years. 

“Rutland has been seeing a lot of apartment development more recently. And as those apartments reach completion and people start moving into those units, we could see, over the next five-year period, a very different trend for Rutland,” he said. 

Rutland might have seen slower growth but it still has the most residents out of all the urban centres.

Rutland has a bigger population than downtown with around 5,560 residents, and downtown only has 4,060. 

As far as housing growth goes, Rutland and Pandosy have a similar number of existing building permits for housing and the city is anticipating that by 2041 Rutland is going to outpace Pandosy by roughly 1,000 units. 

The city has a publicly available tool where folks can go see a huge range of data on each urban centre.

For example, in Rutland 41 per cent of the streets have sidewalks on both sides while in Pandosy it’s 65 per cent and downtown it’s 95 per cent.

Midtown, which has Orchard Park Mall, has almost the same amount of retail space as the rest of the urban centres combined with 380,000 square metres compared to the combined total of 397,000 square metres for the rest of the urban centres.

Midtown and Capri Landmark have the fewest parks with just two per cent and one per cent of the area dedicated to park space. Downtown has the most park space with 22 per cent of the area dedicated to parks and amenities. 

Pandosy has the most daycare capacity with 267 spots across eight daycares and Rutland only has 95 daycare spots across four daycares. 

The city has even counted how many trees there are on the streets and in parks. There are 2,335 trees in downtown Kelowna and only 285 in Capri Landmark.